Nelson Gill

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Nelson Green Gill was a white Republican from Illinois who moved to Mississippi after the Civil War. He served in the Union Army during the war and later held several local government roles in Mississippi, including president of the Marshall County Board of Supervisors (1869–1871) and sheriff, as well as a member of the board of supervisors.

Gill also worked with the Freedmen's Bureau and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives for Marshall County in 1874–1875, where he was the sergeant-at-arms. He organized a school for African American students in Holly Springs and later helped organize Black Mississippians in Oxford into a Loyal League. He spoke out against abusive apprenticeship laws that kept a teenager with her former slaveowner instead of living with her mother.

Because of his political activities and his association with African Americans, he faced hostility. A Democratic Party spokesman delivered a death threat from the Ku Klux Klan, though an assassination attempt against him failed.