Prohibition and the Murder of Wales Land in Lowndes County, MS

Wales Land embodied the archetypal small farmer - hardworking, unassuming, and deeply rooted in the agricultural traditions of the American South. He farmed with his father and the sharecroppers who worked the land beside them. The Great Depression and the Prohibition era had transformed quiet rural communities into complex battlegrounds of legal enforcement, social tension, and economic survival. This is the setting of how three federal Prohibition agents gunned down an innocent, hard-working 27-year-old farmer in front of his father's house.