Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (10 page)

The lynching of Laura Nelson, 1911

Like Mary Turner, Jane Daniel must have carried an almost unbearable burden of grief, rage, and fear once she learned—hardly a day after her cousin Ernest had been taken prisoner—that her husband, Rob, had been hanged on the Cumming square, his body gawked at by whites, and torn apart by hundreds of bullets. But if Jane was tempted to go to county officials seeking justice, or to raise her voice in lament, she knew that to do so could have deadly consequences. It had happened many
times and would happen again in Georgia: after lynching a black victim, mobs often turned their attention to surviving family members—for crying out in grief, or calling for arrests, or for simply knowing who it was who had pulled a trigger or lobbed a rope over a tree limb. Like thousands of other widows of lynched black men, Jane Daniel knew that her only chance at safety was silence.

Not even that was enough in the end, for on Wednesday, September 11th, newspapers reported that Jane Daniel, her brother Oscar, and their neighbor Ed Collins had been arrested in connection with the Crow assault. According to the
Constitution
, “Another lynching at Cumming [was] narrowly averted” when “a mob formed to take . . . these negroes . . . and swing them up to the same telephone pole on which their partner in crime swung yesterday.” This time, though, Mayor Charlie Harris was ready, and before the mob could organize a second siege of the county jail, he had Reid and his deputies “slip [the prisoners] out of the jail and [make] a run . . . in automobiles for Atlanta.”

HAVING SAFELY DELIVERED
Jane, Oscar, and Ed Collins to the Fulton Tower and added them to a group of prisoners that now included eleven black residents of Forsyth, Bill Reid took time Wednesday morning to speak with Atlanta reporters. Under the headline “Graphic Story of Terror Reign,” the
Georgian
gave Reid center stage, introducing him to readers as “the picturesque sheriff of Forsyth county” who came to Atlanta with a carload of black prisoners and tales of a mob run wild in the Georgia foothills. Squinting down at a crowd of reporters with their pencils poised, Reid quickly warmed to his role: as the mustachioed, six-shooter-carrying country lawman fighting a “race war” on the north Georgia frontier. “The people of Cumming have been sleeping with one eye open,” Reid began.

The fall of night has brought fear and dread to the town and surrounding county, for there [is] no telling what might happen—it’s the dread of treachery, the torch, and the knife stab in the back. We could easily handle any emergency in the day time. The white people are armed and would promptly crush any uprising on the part of the blacks. Excitement has been high, and an uneasy feeling pervade[s] the community.

Given that raids on black churches and homes were already driving many families across the county line, Reid’s account of the situation in Forsyth now seems not just distorted but downright delusional. He describes a white population in terror of an impending “uprising on the part of the blacks” and fearful that they might wake to “the knife stab in the back”—when in truth the only real “uprising” was being carried out by white vigilantes and arsonists. Yet even as black families stood guard over their homes, listening for the sound of approaching hoofbeats or the ominous snap of a twig, whites were the ones in a state of constant paranoia, unable to shake their deepest, oldest fear: that the sins of their forefathers would finally be avenged by the children and grandchildren of slaves.

When reporters turned to the subject of Rob Edwards’s lynching, Reid hit his stride as a star in the tabloid drama. On the day of the lynching, the sheriff had gone to great lengths to extricate himself from the thorny problem of opposing a mob that included many of his own relatives, friends, and political supporters. But once he got to Atlanta, he didn’t miss an opportunity to recast himself as the hero who had tried in vain to save Rob Edwards.

“I was at my home when the mob began to form,” Reid said, “and feeling against the negro burst forth in all its fury.” Though newspaper reports all agreed that it was Lummus who was left to “lock the doors of the jail and put the heavy bars in place,” Reid now claimed it was he who had bravely tried to thwart the lynchers:

I realized it was too late to attempt to get [Edwards] out of the jail and spirit him away. There was but one thing to do—I hid the jail keys. I did this as I knew that even though I should be overpowered, the mob would still be handicapped.

At a single stroke, Reid’s revision of the story solved two problems. He erased the genuine bravery with which Deputy Lummus had stood his ground, and claimed that it was actually he, Forsyth’s crafty old sheriff, who had slowed the rioters. Such quick thinking had not ultimately saved Rob Edwards, Reid implied, but that was not because he hadn’t done his darnedest. “A few minutes” after he hid the keys to the jail, he told reporters,

a crowd of fully 100 men called at my home and demanded the keys. I told them they could not get the keys and begged them not to attempt violence . . . then at a signal the crowd went [back] to the jail. There was no jailer on duty there, as I have to look after the jail and care of the prisoners myself.

By whitewashing Lummus out of the scene, and skipping over the fact that he himself had abandoned his post, Reid implied that he was the last line of defense. “The mob poured wildly into the jail, smashing locks as they came to them,” he said, adding just enough detail to help readers forget that he had not, in fact, been present at the time:

Breaking down Rob Edwards’ cell door, the infuriated men yanked the cringing negro into the corridor . . . someone struck him on the head with a sledge hammer, fracturing his skull. Then someone else shot him.

As a final flourish, Reid said that “several friends kept [me] in [my] home” while the jail was under attack. Then he reminded
readers that even had he been there, “the big sheriff” would have been unable to save Edwards:

Of course, it would have been all the same if I
had
been there . . . Even though I do carry about a lot of flesh and muscle, I would have been like a straw in the whirlwind against that crowd.

The sheriff had hardly finished his tale when a reporter for the
Georgian
, recognizing a scoop when he heard one, ran off to file his story. Reid had managed, in one rambling, Falstaffian interview, to claim that he’d ingeniously hidden the jail keys; that he had been held prisoner by the mob; and that he would have been unable, despite his great strength and muscular physique, to have stopped the lynchers even if, by some superhuman effort, he had managed to escape his captors. With that, the future Ku Klux Klansman and self-proclaimed “straw in the whirlwind” of the lynching climbed into a car and drove off. He was anxious, he said out the window, “to be on the scene when darkness came.”

THE STORY OF
the “race riot” in Forsyth disappeared from Georgia’s newspapers almost as quickly as it had appeared. In a single week, Cumming had witnessed the near lynching of Grant Smith; the arrival of the Marietta Rifles to quell an imagined race war; the discovery of Mae Crow’s bloody body; the killing of Rob Edwards; and the imprisonment of nearly a dozen young black suspects, who were now awaiting trial in the Fulton Tower. As Reid drove back north on the afternoon of September 12th, editors in Atlanta were proofing the last of the stories they would run about Forsyth for almost a month. “Quiet reigns in Cumming,” they assured readers. “No disorder of any kind.”

When Reid went to work the next morning, he found the town
square humming with activity for the first time in days. Wealthy wives of the county were finally willing to brave the streets, and visions of a black revolution were fading into the background as Cumming returned, for the most part, to business as usual.

Everyone knew that the prisoners would be brought back from Atlanta to stand trial, and that their return would whip “the violent element” of the county into another fury, particularly if witnesses were called—as they surely would be—to testify about Mae Crow’s injuries. But all of that lay in the future, and in an effort to defuse the situation, Judge Newt Morris announced that both the Grice and Crow cases would be postponed until the next regular session of the Blue Ridge Circuit court, scheduled for late October. This left white residents in a state of uncertainty, particularly since Bud and Azzie Crow’s daughter was still unconscious out in Oscarville, in critical condition from her head wounds. Mayor Harris and Deputy Lummus wouldn’t have been the only Cumming residents who looked warily toward the future, wondering just what sort of mayhem news of her death might unleash.

BUT FOR HUNDREDS
of black people in the county, the worst kind of trouble had already begun. Though it would take weeks before reports reached Atlanta, in the days after the attack on Crow a nighttime ritual began to unfold, as each evening at dusk groups of white men gathered at the crossroads of the county. They came with satchels of brass bullets, shotgun shells, and stoppered glass bottles of kerosene, and sticks of “Red Cross” dynamite poked out through the tops of their saddlebags. When darkness fell, the night riders set out with one goal: to stoke the terror created by the lynching of Edwards and use it to drive black people out of Forsyth County for good.

In 1907, W. E. B. Du Bois had put into words what every “colored” person in Georgia knew from experience, which was that
“the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. . . . And tacitly assumed that every white man was
ipso facto
a member of that police.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, the days when all white men had been legally empowered to pursue and arrest fugitive slaves were only fifty years in the past, and the fathers and grandfathers of many locals would have been part of such posses in the days of slavery.

So it must have seemed natural to many whites when, each night around sundown, a knock came at the door and the adult men of the family were summoned to join a group heading out toward the clusters of black cabins scattered around Forsyth—along the Chattahoochee out in Oscarville, in the shadow of Sawnee Mountain north of Cumming, and south, toward Shakerag and Big Creek. It would take months—and, in a handful of cases, years—before the in-town blacks of Cumming were finally forced out, since many lived under the protection of rich white men, in whose kitchens and dining rooms they served. Instead, it was to the homes of cotton pickers, sharecroppers, and small landowners that the night riders went first, and it was these most vulnerable families who fled in the first waves of the exodus.

Written traces of the raids are few and far between and consist mostly of vague reports of “lawlessness” after dark. Since journalists only started writing about the expulsions once the wagon trains of refugees grew too large and too numerous to ignore, it is hard to say precisely what took place on those first nights of the terror. Some of the attacks later made headlines in Atlanta (“Negroes Flee from Forsyth,” “Enraged White People Are Driving Blacks from County”), and it’s likely that similar raids had been happening since the discovery of Mae Crow’s body in early September. The night riders fired shots into front doors, threw rocks through windows, and hollered warnings that it was time for black families to “get.” But of all their methods, torches and kerosene worked best,
since a fire created a blazing sign for all to see and left the victims no place to ever come back to. In mid-October, the
Augusta Chronicle
reported that “a score or more of homes have been burned during the past few weeks . . . and five negro churches.”

The arsonists must have been terrifying wherever they struck, but for Forsyth’s poor black farmers, the burning of churches was a true catastrophe, striking not just at the community’s spiritual home but at what Du Bois called “the social centre of Negro life.” In 1903, sitting in his Atlanta University office, just forty miles south, he had described Georgia’s rural black congregations as “the most characteristic expression of African character” in the entire community. “Take a typical church,” Du Bois wrote.

[It is] finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small organ, and benches. This building is the central club-house of a community of Negroes. Various organizations meet here—the church proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held. . . . Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by.

The erasure of such places from the map of Forsyth was complete. Today, all that’s left are a few scant details about the dates on which churches were founded, lot numbers for the land on which they stood, and the names of a handful of ministers and worshippers who once gathered there. Backband Church, out
near Oscarville, was where Buck and Catie Daniel sat on Sunday mornings—surrounded by their sons Cicero and Harley, their daughter Jane, and their youngest boy, Oscar—listening to the sermons of a local farmer and preacher named Byrd Oliver. Stoney Point, down in Big Creek, was where on some Sunday in August of 1912 Harriet and Morgan Strickland took their visiting nephew, Toney Howell, to meet the congregation and be welcomed into his aunt and uncle’s church. Shiloh Baptist, founded by Reverend Levi Greenlee Sr., lay just outside of town on Kelly Mill Road and was home to many of Cumming’s maids, cooks, servants, and butlers.

Faint traces of other black churches are tucked away in handwritten ledgers at the state archives at Morrow; in the collections at the University of Georgia in Athens; even in the basement of the Forsyth courthouse, where a cardboard box atop a metal filing cabinet still holds deeds for the land on which black residents once founded Mt. Fair, Shakerag, and Stoney Point—about which nothing is known but names and approximate locations. All that can be said for certain is that, again and again in the fall of 1912, white men sloshed gasoline and kerosene onto the benches and wooden floors of such rooms, then backed out into the dark, tossing lit matches as they went. All over the county, beneath the ground on which black churches stood, the soil is rich with ashes.