David Higgins (Oktibbeha County)
State House: 1870-1871
Born: c. 1823 in South Carolina
In 1867, Higgins and other freedmen signed a sharecropping contract with C. P. Montgomery in Sand Creek; click here to view a number of documents relating to Higgins’ account with Montgomery. In 1868, Higgins and Nelson Yeates were named as trustees when W. F. Yeager sold a strip of land for $50 “for the use of the colored people of said county for a burial ground.” Across the street from the town’s Odd Fellows Cemetery, it was known as Starkville Colored Cemetery. Today, it is also called Brush Arbor and is being researched and preserved as a historic site.
Higgins is listed on the 1880 census in Oktibbeha County with wife Maria and several sons. In his Historical Sketches of Oktibbeha County, Thomas Battle Carroll mentions that Higgins was a preacher.
“In this palmy time of the negro and carpetbagger in old Oktibbeha an old negro named Dave Higgins made a speech to his fellow Ethiops in the course of which he admonished them after this fashion ‘You n*****s quit ‘busing the white folks, for some white folks is as good as n*****s.'”
(F. Z. Browne, “Reconstruction in Oktibbeha County,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Volume 13, 1913)
This page was last updated on February 9, 2026.