Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (16 page)

WHEN COURT WAS
adjourned, at ten-thirty a.m., the soldiers broke camp, formed up ranks around the prisoners, and began the long, soggy march back to Buford, where they would catch the train to Atlanta. On their way out of town, they passed through what Angus Perkerson of the
Journal
described as “a crowd of several hundred men [who] neither expressed nor attempted violence.” This new calm may have reflected whites’ satisfaction with the trials and the two death sentences. Or perhaps it was a product of exhaustion, which seems to have been the prevailing mood, even among the militiamen. “Every man of the whole detachment,” Perkerson wrote, “was wet through and they began to march . . . worn and bedraggled.”

Asa Candler, a captain of the regiment, later told reporters that as they walked the muddy roads between Cumming and Buford and crossed the swollen creeks and branches of the Chattahoochee, at one point Ernest Knox surprised everyone by speaking up. When Candler asked what the trouble was, Knox glanced at the soldiers around him, then asked for permission to “make a run for it.” The captain couldn’t help but laugh and pointed out that there were “a score of men in the battalion who could pick off a man running at 1,000 yards.” Knox nodded and said he understood what he was asking:
for a chance “to be killed right then.” Candler refused, and Knox walked the rest of the way to Buford handcuffed to Oscar Daniel.

When the train arrived back in Atlanta, the officers in charge did something surprising. Having deposited Knox and Daniel safely in their cells, they led Jane Daniel, Ed Collins, and Isaiah Pirkle to the front of the Fulton Tower, unlocked their handcuffs, and said that they were free to go. All three disappeared into the city and vanished from the pages of the Atlanta papers—eager, no doubt, to begin the search for their families, who were scattered among the hundreds of refugees who had fled Forsyth.

The one prisoner not released was Toney Howell, who Judge Morris had hoped to try for the attempted rape of Ellen Grice. But on the day Knox and Daniel were sentenced, with no other business before the court, Sheriff Reid had informed the judge that none of the black witnesses summoned to testify in the Grice case had appeared. Neither, apparently, had Ellen Grice herself. Morris was left with no choice but to “pass [Howell’s] case to the next term of court in February . . . because of the absence of witnesses,” and he ordered that Howell be held in the Tower along with Knox and Daniel. Reporters noted that when he gathered his things and prepared to leave the courtroom, Morris looked openly annoyed with Bill Reid. How was it was possible, he must have wondered, that in all of Forsyth County, not a single black witness could be found?

9

WE CONDEMN THIS CONDUCT

B
yrd and Delia Oliver lived two doors down from Ed Collins and his wife, Julia, and not far from the cluster of houses where Rob Edwards, Oscar Daniel, and Ernest Knox had lived before the “race troubles” began. Having seen three of his neighbors arrested and one of them lynched on the Cumming square, Oliver must have realized, in October of 1912, that his days in Forsyth County were numbered. In the weeks after the trials, he watched the black community grow smaller and smaller, as one family after another decided it was better to risk the uncertainties of the road than to take their chances with the armed and increasingly dangerous white people of the county.

Forsyth’s vigilantes eventually caught the attention of the national press, and papers as far away as New York told readers of a mass exodus and a black population “In Terror of Night Riders.” “The anti-negro movement began in Forsyth,” a correspondent wrote in the
New York Times
. Unchecked by local law enforcement, he said,

the crusade against the negroes is being conducted by bands of mounted men, who ride through the country at night and leave notices at the homes of the negroes warning them to leave at once. . . . In many instances respectable, hard-working negroes have been frightened into sacrificing their property and fleeing.

As a renter in the overwhelmingly white community of Oscarville, Byrd Oliver was just such a “respectable, hard-working negro” when he, his wife, Delia, and their seven children, ages three to fourteen, set out on foot, heading east toward the Chattahoochee River. They were bound, like so many of their fellow refugees, for the railroad town of Gainesville, in Hall County.

The Oliver family’s flight from Forsyth was similar to what hundreds of their neighbors endured, but unlike those who left no trace of the journey, Byrd Oliver used to tell his daughter Dorothy all about it. “Every so often, he would sit on the doorstep and talk. . . . He could talk about it 15 or 20 years later,” she said. “He would always sit with his chin in the palm of his hand and the tears would run down his sleeve. He has cried about it many a day.” When Forsyth once again made national headlines in 1987,
seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy Rucker Oliver recounted her father’s memories for the
Gainesville Times
.

Byrd Oliver, date unknown

“My Dad saw everything” in 1912, she said, referring to the arrests of Knox, Daniel, and Collins, the burning of black homes and churches, and the ultimatums delivered in the night. “They knew everything that was going to happen . . . it doesn’t take bad news long to spread.” Byrd Oliver told his daughter that many black families were forced to leave behind “drums of syrups, canned goods, family keepsakes, and most important, farmland.” And when, as a child, Dorothy asked her father if he had
really
grown up in “all white” Forsyth, Oliver told how his family banded together with other groups of refugees for safety, then set out across a landscape teeming with white mobs:

[He] traveled with a group of about 75 people . . . they would walk so far and then count [everyone in the group]. Just before they got to the river, three of his relatives were missing. But you couldn’t turn back to look for them.

According to family lore, Byrd and his wife, Delia, got separated somewhere along the road, with the three oldest daughters following their mother, and the four youngest making the eleven-mile journey to Gainesville with their father. Byrd and these four children reappear in the census of 1920, living with Oliver’s second wife, Beulah Rucker, who he met once they had resettled in Hall County.

It’s not clear whether Byrd and Delia chose to part ways when they fled Forsyth, or she and the older children never made it to a planned reunion, or they suffered some violent attack along the road. But the records confirm Byrd Oliver’s story of losing half of his family on the journey out of Forsyth, never to be seen again. While he and his second wife, Beulah, would go on to become leaders in the black community of Gainesville—and founders of one of the
most successful African American schools in the state—according to Dorothy, her father never forgot about all he’d left behind in Forsyth. And like so many others, his life was divided between what happened before and what came after the fall of 1912.

AS MORE AND MORE
hardworking, law-abiding people like Byrd and Delia Oliver abandoned their homes, the county’s white landowners began to feel deeply concerned about the future. A report in the
New York Time
s makes it clear that as the violence spread, the night riders began threatening not just black residents but many of their white employers:

Recently warnings have been sent to white planters who employ many negroes and who have announced that they intend to protect their employees. To these planters the night riders have sent notices stating that unless they cease to protect the negroes their barns and homes will be burned.

Everyone knew that arson was no idle threat among the white people of north Georgia, and as the terror escalated, Cherokee County, which borders Forsyth to the west, saw a sudden influx of refugees. “Three wagon loads stopped here last week,” a witness said, “and we are informed that several more are in and around Canton.” Residents of Hall County saw long lines of displaced families walking along the roads leading out of Forsyth, and the
Savannah Tribune
ran an article with the headline “Gainesville Invaded,” describing the arrival of “hordes of Negroes from Forsyth and neighboring counties, who have been driven from their homes by indignant whites.” The story went on to tell how

anonymous letters have been sent [to] almost every planter in the hill country. . . . These missives threaten arson and dynamiting of the houses in which the Negroes live as penalty for disobeyance. In many instances, mobs of whites appeared at the Negro homes on farms and openly demanded evacuation.

A. J. Julian, a longtime resident of Forsyth, was an old friend of Joseph Mackey Brown’s, and after hearing reports of such “lawlessness,” he wrote directly to the governor, to make sure Brown understood that the convictions of Knox and Daniel had not brought an end to mob violence, and that the situation was growing worse by the day. “My Dear Gov,” Julian began,

A very important matter I desire to call your attention [to] is the protection of the citizens of Ga. & especially of Forsyth. . . . There is a gang of night marauders . . . that have run off about all of the negroes . . . & they are bold in their operations. It seems that the Sheriffs are cowards and fearful.

Julian told of one raid on a group of young black women and their infant children, who were visited by night riders only after whites made sure that all the adult men were away and the women unarmed:

Last Sunday week five men went to [a] Negro House. . . . They sent a young man up to see if the Negro men were gone & ask the women if they had any guns. When they found the men gone & no pistols, they went up [and] ordered the women to leave, one with right young baby & it pouring rain. After they left they shot the dogs, taken all their furniture, clothes, & bedding, piled it out in the yard [then] set fire & burned it, dogs & all.

Julian clearly meant to shock the governor with the image of a young mother, babe in arms, being driven out into a storm, as her
family’s whole household was burned “dogs & all.” He also knew Brown would be troubled by news that rich farmland lay abandoned and unplanted due to the violence:

Hundreds of acres of land . . . will not be cultivated [this year], which will be a loss in taxes to both state & counties. Labor now can not be found to hire or rent. Is this state of affairs to go on? It will end in race war if some check is not put on these outrages.

The “check” Julian proposed was simple: pursue and arrest the offenders, and prosecute them vigorously in the courts.

When Brown wrote back, he offered a fifty-dollar reward to anyone who could identify the perpetrators of violence against black citizens and said he, too, “deplore[d] the action on the part of the lawless element who are committing so many outrageous crimes on the people of that section.” But while Brown shared Julian’s anxiety about the financial consequences, he was steadfast in his view that this was a problem to be solved by local people themselves whenever possible, not state or federal authorities. “The law-abiding element,” Brown’s reply to Julian concluded, “will have to by concerted efforts run down these people and bring them to justice.”

In mid-October, a group of Forsyth whites tried to do just that, when they announced that a mass meeting would be held at the Cumming courthouse, to address the “lawlessness” that was driving black residents out of the county. The problem was clearly not going away on its own, and on the evening of Wednesday, October 16th—a little more than three weeks after “all hell broke loose” on the night of Mae Crow’s funeral—concerned citizens gathered to discuss actions “the law-abiding element” might take to stop, and hopefully reverse, the exodus. Many surely felt a moral, Christian duty to speak out against the violence and in defense of black families who had lived in their homes, cooked their meals, and nursed
their children for generations—in some cases going all the way back to the days of slavery. As one local man put it, “They drove out a cook who raised seventeen children out of my kitchen!”