Biography

John R. Willis was born three years after the end of the Civil War to parents who were likely formerly enslaved.[1] He thus came of age in the Reconstruction South in an era when Black people enjoyed some of the rights guaranteed them in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. Those amendments respectively outlawed slavery, granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people, and established Black male voting rights. Those rights, however, were systematically stripped from Black people as federal troops were withdrawn from the South and former Confederate men and women reasserted white supremacy. Willis thus grew to adulthood with his social, cultural, and economic possibilities bounded by both the promise of freedom and its limitations.[2]

The details regarding Willis’s life and that of his family are limited. As with many Black people in the post-Civil War South records are sparce or do not exist. Black enslaved families were torn apart by slavery and millions of Black people had only recently gained their freedom. Many newly freed people lacked the ability to read or write due to laws that had prevented enslaved people from gaining an education.[3]

Willis’s Latter-day Saint baptismal record indicates that he was born in March 1868 in Smith County, Mississippi to Susanna Thompson and Sanza Willis.[4] His parents were likely newly freed people as a result of the Thirteenth Amendment which was adopted three years prior. He grew up in a multigenerational home consisting of himself, his parents, and his grandparents. There is no indication that he had any siblings.[5] He may have thus enjoyed the undivided attention of his parents and grandparents as a child, but may have also lacked playmates and the blessings and challenges that growing up with siblings entails.

By the time he was fourteen, Willis worked alongside members of his family as a domestic servant.[6] Following the Civil War, formerly enslaved people lacked employment opportunities and sometimes struggled to establish themselves independent of their former enslavers. Some were forced into jobs on their former plantations where they worked as sharecroppers, live-in nannies, or as maids or servants. Willis and his family seem to fit this profile.[7]

As a teenager Willis had not yet learned to read or write, nor was he enrolled in school. Despite the lack of education in his youth, he did learn to read and write by the time he reached his mid-thirties. There is no indication as to how he became literate but he likely did not learn from members of his immediate family as many of them were uneducated themselves.[8]

On 25 September 1884, at the age of seventeen, Willis joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His decision was no doubt influenced by his mother who had been baptized a year-and-a-half prior. William Hurst Crandall, a missionary from Pleasant View, Utah baptized Willis into the George’s Camp Branch in Smith County, Mississippi. Thomas Davies from Fillmore, Utah, confirmed him on the same day.[9] Branch records do not survive to indicate if Willis continued to participate beyond his baptism or what level of involvement he may have maintained for the rest of his life. There is no indication that his children were baptized after he married and raised a family of his own. However, there is also no indication that he changed faith or officially left the Latter-day Saint community. In either case, his subsequent move from Smith County Mississippi and proximity to the George’s Camp Branch no doubt made it difficult for him to maintain contact with his mother and members of his faith community.[10]

On 27 March 1892, Willis married Georgiana Flowers.[11] The 1900 census describes this as a second marriage for Willis although no record of a first marriage or a divorce has yet been found. Whatever the circumstances, the census taker indicated that Georgiana had been married for eight years and had given birth to four children, all of whom were then living in the couple’s home.[12] By the turn of the century the couple and their four children had relocated from their home in Monroe County, on the northeastern edge of the state to the opposite side of Mississippi on its western border with Louisiana. There, they owned a home on Plantation Road in Warren County, and began to expand their family; that home would welcome five additional children over the span of two decades but only seven would survive to adulthood.[13]

In order to support his growing family, Willis worked as a farmer and cultivated land that he rented, likely under sharecropping circumstances. By 1910, his wife and oldest children worked as farm laborers and helped to tend the crops on that land.[14] Evidence suggests that Willis and his family worked hard to raise cotton and support themselves and that the children became farm laborers when they were old enough to help in the fields.[15]

By 1920 the family relocated to Issaquena County, Mississippi immediately north of Warren County, also on the Mississippi River. There, Willis rented a home and described himself as a cotton farmer.[16] John and Georgiana likely spent their final years in their home in Issaquena County. Although no death record has yet been found, it is likely that John and Georgiana died between the 1920 and 1930 censuses. By 1930 the children who would have been too young to live on their own now lived with their older brother Nickly in Bolivar County, two counties north of Issaquena.[17] It is not clear if John and Georgianna also moved in with Nickly before they passed away or if their passing precipitated the younger children’s relocation. There is no indication where John R. Willis was laid to rest.

By Wesley Acastre

With research assistance from Karen Ricks

[1] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Record of Members Collection, George’s Camp Branch, CR 375 8, box 4256, folder 1, image 24, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[2] Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).

[3] Kiana Cox and Christine Tamir, “Family history, slavery and knowledge of Black history,” Pew Research Center, 14 April 2022.

[4] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Record of Members Collection, George’s Camp Branch, CR 375 8, box 4256, folder 1, image 24, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[5] United States, 1880 Census, Mississippi, Monroe County, Beat 3.

[6] United States, 1880 Census, Mississippi, Monroe County, Beat 3.

[7] W. Caleb McDaniel, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[8] United States, 1880 Census, Mississippi, Monroe County, Beat 3; United States, 1900 Census, Mississippi, Warren County, Beat 5.

[9] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Record of Members Collection, George’s Camp Branch, CR 375 8, box 4256, folder 1, image 24, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[10] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Record of Members Collection, George’s Camp Branch, CR 375 8, box 4256, folder 1, image 24, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah; George’s Camp Branch General Minutes, 1880-1888, LR 11279 11, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[11] Mississippi, Warren County, Marriages, 1858-1979, John Willis and Georgianna Flowers, 27 March 1892.

[12] United States, 1900 Census, Mississippi, Warren County, Beat 5.

[13] United States, 1910 Census, Mississippi, Warren County, Beat 5.

[14] United States, 1910 Census, Mississippi, Warren County, Beat 5.

[15] United States, 1900 and 1910 Censuses, Mississippi, Warren County, Beat 5; United States, 1920 Census, Mississippi, Issaquena County, Beat 2.

[16] United States, 1920 Census, Mississippi, Issaquena County, Beat 2.

[17] United States, 1930 Census, Mississippi, Bolivar County, Beat 3.

Documents

Click the index tab in the viewer above to view all primary source documents available for this person.