Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (18 page)

THE ATTACK ON
Bill Hurse provides some clues. Hurse was a black sharecropper who lived and worked in Hall County, on the property of a wealthy white planter named Raymond Carlile, whose farm was not far from the railroad siding where W. A. Flake had narrowly escaped a lynching. The
Gainesville News
reported that on Monday, October 14th—just two days after the train was ambushed—“five nightriders went to a negro house on Mr. Raymond Carlile’s place” and tried to force Hurse and his family to flee. But unlike in Forsyth County, the paper noted,

the nightriders met with such opposition as all like marauders ought to meet with—a shot gun at the hands of the property-owner. The shooting occurred at about 10 o’clock . . . at the house of Bill Hurse, coloured. Mr. Carlile lost no time. . . . He made up his mind that his croppers should not be run off. . . . When he heard the shooting at his tenant’s house, [Carlile] grabbed his shotgun and went to the place to protect his negroes and his property. He returned the fire and followed the marauders, winding up with the capture of Tobe Tullus, and securing information enough to identify [other] participants in the outlawry.

When the shooting was over and Carlile knew that Hurse and his family were safe, he delivered his prisoner, Tobe Tullus, to Hall County sheriff William Crow, and gave a full report. The next morning, Crow and a posse of deputies rode out in pursuit of the other night riders who had attacked Carlile’s black tenants.

The men alleged to be in the party [of night riders] are Will Jenkins, Bud and Jess Martin, Tobe Tullus and Wash Phagan, warrants for each of whom are in the hands of officers.

Tobe Tullus was the only one captured [on the night of the attack] and he is languishing behind the bars of Hall County jail, while officers are looking for the other men, all of whom will be captured if they do not get out of the county.

Just before the
Gainesville News
went to press, the editors added a last-minute update. “Bud Martin, Will Jenkins, and Wash Phagan were arrested,” readers learned,

by Messers. Lon Spencer and John Tanner . . . and brought to Gainesville on train No. 12 and lodged in jail. Mr. Spencer was sworn in as a Deputy by Sheriff Crow . . . and returned to Flowery Branch to take active charge of the situation. He will apprehend any others who may engage in night-riding or the commission of other unlawful acts. The officers and the people are going to put an immediate stop to the depredations . . . the night-riding and warning of good negroes to leave must stop—and stop at once.

Though Sheriff Crow was himself a distant cousin to the white girl who had been murdered just across the river, he told reporters that he had every intention of finding and arresting whites who engaged in violence against black families. “We don’t need any military,” he later said, “because we’re going to break this thing up ourselves.” Tobe Tullus, Bud Martin, Will Jenkins, and Wash Phagan were tried and convicted for the attack on Hurse, and soon thereafter five more white men went to jail for driving bricklayers off W. A. Gaines’s jobsite in downtown Gainesville. Once again, the names of the perpetrators appeared on the front page of the
Gainesville Times
: “Horace Smith, Tom Hall, Newt Strickland, John Strickland, and Tolman Strickland” were convicted “for interfering with persons engaged in lawful pursuits.”

These prosecutions stand out, against the backdrop of Jim Crow Georgia, as rare instances in which white offenders were punished for violence against blacks. One witness to the raids in Forsyth later said, “If we could have gotten a few detectives in here right at the start . . . and convict[ed] one or two of [the night riders], the rest would have been frightened.” By pursuing and jailing the first, boldest offenders in Hall, legal officials sent a message that whites in Forsyth never had to consider: that the power of the locally elected government would be brought to bear on “lawless” white men, even when their victims were black. As Royal Freeman Nash put it in
The Crisis
,

When the crackers in Hall County started to . . . make a sweep of their own county, at the same time, the word went out, according to local gossip, to spend ten thousand dollars if necessary to crush the thing in its infancy. . . . Eleven arrests were made within twenty-four hours after the terrorization started, and it was subsided in just a few days.

Georgia was still Georgia, and in 1912, emancipation’s guarantee of freedom was still in many ways an empty promise. But when hundreds of Forsyth refugees crossed Browns Bridge and stepped onto the eastern bank of the Chattahoochee River, they were right to feel some small measure of relief. In Hall County, at least, it was still a crime to kill a black man.

11

THE SCAFFOLD

T
he most prominent spokesman for the Forsyth expulsions was a wealthy Cumming doctor named Ansel Strickland, who was descended from Hardy Strickland, the largest slave owner in antebellum Forsyth. In the weeks after Rob Edwards was lynched, Dr. Strickland wrote an angry letter to the
North Georgian
, full of indignation at Atlanta editors who suggested that “lawlessness” had run rampant in Forsyth County. “Now what
is
the law?” Dr. Strickland asked readers. “The law is the will of the people. . . . [If] the citizens of the county are satisfied,” he said, “that ends it. The people make the law.” Not surprisingly, as the date of the Knox and Daniel executions approached, Dr. Strickland volunteered to host the double hanging on his own property.

Judge Morris had been clear in his directive from the bench: the death sentences were to be carried out “within one mile of the county courthouse . . . in private and witnessed only by the executing officer, a sufficient guard, the relatives of the defendant[s] and such clergymen as [they] may desire.” Morris knew just how easily a public hanging could become a “temptation to mob violence,” and so he ordered a stately, discreet affair—then turned plans for the hanging over to Bill Reid.

When the sheriff first walked down a grassy slope behind Strickland’s house and stared out across the doctor’s lower pasture, he must have recognized the possibilities right away. With its proximity to the courthouse, the site technically complied with the judge’s order, and could be reached on foot with just a short stroll down Maple Street. At the same time, as Reid squinted up at the ridges rising on three sides, he could see that they formed a kind of natural amphitheater, with a horseshoe of hills surrounding the wide, level field. Thousands of people could gather on those hillsides, with their quilts, their children, and their picnic baskets, and every last one of them would have a clear view of the proceedings. Once the hanging proper began, Reid knew they would cheer for him as he sent two convicted black rapists to their doom.

When Morris learned that the gallows was to be erected in such a public place, he ordered that the site at least be concealed behind some kind of blind. The wooden fence Reid’s men built in response rose fifteen feet in the air and formed a thirty-foot-square enclosure in the middle of Dr. Strickland’s pasture—the whole thing designed to comply with the judge’s demand that the scaffold, and the dying men, be shielded from view.

But in the days leading up to the hanging, people came from miles around to watch the carpenters work, and as they sat on the grassy hillsides, it was easy to see the flaw in Newt Morris’s plan. If anything were to happen to that fifteen-foot fence—if, say, it were to somehow catch fire—the hanging would become not the dignified, private affair Judge Morris had envisioned, but a gruesome bit of theater in the round.

On Thursday, October 24th, as the little town filled with people eager to witness the county’s first legal execution in fifty years, Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel were just beginning their final trip north. If the two cousins held out any last hope as they lay on their cots inside the Fulton Tower, the appearance of a deputy, handcuffs
at the ready, brought home their situation: they were going home to die, surrounded by the same whites who had whipped Grant Smith, lynched Rob Edwards, and driven almost everyone they knew out of Forsyth County. At an order from the deputy, they rose, held their wrists out to be manacled, and shuffled out through a gauntlet of photographers, emerging one last time into the glare of Butler Street.

Having been convinced by Mayor Harris that Bill Reid was not the sort of man to oppose a lynch mob, Brown signed an executive order declaring Forsyth to be once more—for the third time in six weeks—“in a state of insurrection” and directed the Fifth Regiment to escort the prisoners on the now-familiar trip to Cumming. Knox and Daniel again found themselves at the center of a military parade, as they marched along Hunter Street to Terminal Station. Along the way, a reporter who had struggled to get close to the prisoners darted into an office building, climbed the stairs to a high floor, and aimed his camera out a window. The result is a god’s-eye view of the scene, and the last known photograph of sixteen-year-old Ernest, and his eighteen-year-old cousin, Oscar.

The Fifth Regiment boarded a four-thirty Southern Railway train and arrived at Buford at six o’clock that evening. After a pause for supper, they began the march toward Forsyth. According to the unit’s chief medical officer, Dr. Arnold Lindorme, “The weather was ideal, cool and bright moonlight, [and] we made good time. At 1:30 a.m., the command reached the courthouse, in Cumming.”

Sheriff Reid was waiting on the square, and after arranging for the prisoners and their guards to spend the night inside the courthouse, Reid and Catron spoke about plans for the next day’s executions. Unfortunately, the sheriff told Catron, there had been an accident involving the court-ordered fence.

A reporter for the
Keowee Courier
told the story of how, just a
few hours before the militiamen arrived, a mob had gone “to the scene of the scaffold, tore down the high fence and made a monster bonfire of the lumber and timbers.” The pasture lay almost within sight of Ansel Strickland’s house, and certainly within earshot, so it is likely that as he settled into bed that night, the Cumming doctor could hear the sound of the revelers celebrating their triumph. Defying Judge Morris’s order of privacy was clearly the point, since vandals dismantled the fence and set it ablaze but were careful not to lay a finger on the gallows where Knox and Daniel would hang. “This morning only a heap of charred embers was left” where the fence stood, said the
Courier
, but “the scaffold itself was not molested.”

The Fifth Regiment en route from Fulton Tower to Terminal Station, Atlanta; the arrow indicates the prisoners Knox and Daniel
.

When he learned that no guards had been stationed to protect the fence, Major Catron began to sense that Bill Reid was a large part of the problem in Forsyth County. In his report, Catron expanded on his worries about the county sheriff:

I ask[ed] him if he did not intend to have [the fence] rebuilt, but he said he could not get lumber for that purpose. I had noticed a stack of lumber on our way into town and I told him I would have [it] put on the ground and furnish him any number of men from my command to put it up, but he declined this offer without comment.

When Judge Morris got wind of the fire the next morning and ordered county ordinary Herschel Jones to have the fence rebuilt, one Cumming merchant after another refused to sell the lumber. A story even circulated—no doubt told with a wink and a nod—that it was illegal for the sound of a hammer to be heard on the day of a hanging.

Catron suspected that Reid had openly colluded with the men who’d burned the fence and had plotted to make the execution into a public spectacle:

I had every reason to believe that the Sheriff was entirely in sympathy with the would-be mob, [and] that he selected the place for the gallows solely that the fence might be torn away, and that the spectators might have a good view of the execution. I believe [Reid] connived with the mob in tearing away the wall and that his own henchmen actually did the work.

He promised that the execution should take place early in order that the crowd would not have time to gather and possibly get boisterous and unruly. [But] at the same time he advised the doctors who were to be witnesses to the execution not to come until 12 o’clock . . . I believe that he was playing with the law for political advantages and would have welcomed an opportunity to openly espouse the side of the mob.

What Catron had discovered, it seems, is that Bill Reid’s conduct during the hangings was no less calculated than when he gave Deputy Lummus the politically toxic job of guarding Rob Edwards. Now that his role as county sheriff was not to control the mobs of
Forsyth but to treat them to a public hanging, Bill Reid seized his moment and took center stage.