Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (25 page)

will not permit me to remain silent over a liability which thrust itself upon us in the beautiful county of Forsyth . . . where we were confronted with a spirit on the part of many of the citizens of that county which [is] the antithesis of all the virtues we have discovered elsewhere. And this because every negro man, woman, and child has been exiled from their homes and because a few of our tourists had negro drivers . . . culminating in an effort at Cumming on the part of Forsyth county citizens to take one of the negro drivers from the car and to do with him the Lord knows what.

Had one white passenger not “reached for his revolver,” Willingham said, there might have been another lynching on the Cumming square—in full sight of the mayor, the “Seeing Georgia” tourists cowering in their cars, and the schoolchildren standing with songbooks tucked under their arms. “Conditions like this,” Willingham went on,

can no longer be regarded with calm satisfaction but must commend themselves to the patriotic men of our state. The Governor of Georgia, the men who represent this state in the legislature, the judges of the superior courts cannot pass in silence over this state of anarchy which is being bred in this commonwealth. . . . Ultimately, unless checked, [it] will bury its fangs in the body politic.

As he sat in his office at the Cumming courthouse, scanning the headlines on the morning of October 5th, 1915, Charlie Harris must have been despondent. Only a day earlier, reporters visiting
north Georgia for the first time had described how “the wonders of this section fill one with an inexpressible sense of having been through a land of resources [and] . . . a profound respect for the possibilities of the country.” Businessmen all over the South read about the mineral riches of Dahlonega, “the enchanted country of the Nacoochee Valley,” and the network of paved roads that was being built in Hall County. But on that Tuesday morning, after Harris had worked for months to ensure that the tour passed through Cumming, journalists told a very different story about Forsyth. All over the state, people read about wives who held off the mobs with drawn pistols. Newspapers as far away as Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and New York spoke not of the resources and business opportunities in Harris’s home county but of its widespread bigotry. “Georgia Crackers Rock Negro Chauffeurs,” one headline read. “Stoned by Georgia Mob,” said another.

The message to his investors in Atlanta was unmistakable. Harris had tried since 1912 to reassure them that Forsyth was the ideal terminus for a rail spur linking the state capitol to the foothills. But the very first delegation of business leaders who’d gone there, at the invitation of the mayor and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, had been stoned and cursed by furious white men who’d tried to lynch their black chauffeurs.

Soon thereafter, Charlie Harris finally gave up on his troubled railroad plan. In 1916, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a new charter, granting a competing group the right to build “an interurban line . . . from Atlanta, Ga., north to Roswell, thence northeast via Alpharetta to Cumming.” This was the same route Harris had been struggling to open since 1908. And just like Harris’s Atlanta Northeastern Railroad, it would never be completed.

Instead, the mayor quietly turned his gaze southward, to new opportunities far from the “lawlessness” that had plagued his every effort in Forsyth. The boll weevil had been introduced into Georgia
in 1915, and it had quickly devastated the cotton economy of south Georgia. This meant that just as Harris began scouting for some new venture, abandoned farms all over the region were being sold off at bargain prices. In 1919, Harris decided to take the plunge, and he relocated from Cumming to the little town of Cordele, in Crisp County, two hundred miles south of Forsyth. Once there, he formed the South Georgia Land and Auction Company and, with local partners at the Cordele Bank and Trust Company, began buying and selling large parcels of farmland in south Georgia. In Cordele, Charlie Harris would make his fortune in the 1920s, investing all the energy, talent, and drive that had made him a leader in Forsyth.

Harris’s departure was in many ways the beginning of the end of resistance to the purge, as moderate figures left one by one or simply learned to hold their peace, as John and Laura Hockenhull had done. The future of Cumming was left in the hands of men like Ansel Strickland, who believed that Forsyth was, and should remain, “a white man’s county.”

Deputy Mitchell Gay Lummus had made a valiant attempt to stop the lynching of Rob Edwards back in 1912, and twice he tried to unseat Bill Reid as county sheriff. But not long after his second defeat, in 1914, it seems that Lummus, too, had had enough of his troubled home place. If the railways of the new century would not be coming to Forsyth, Lummus decided, he would go to them.

When he filled out his World War I draft card in 1917, Lummus was living in Atlanta and on the payroll of the Georgia Railway and Power Company, where he worked as a motorman on the city’s streetcar lines. The former deputy seems to have adapted quickly to life in the city, and he left his second wife and children back in Cumming. He would never again live in Forsyth County.

The room Lummus rented at James Travis’s boardinghouse on Piedmont Avenue was so close to the Butler Street railyard that it
was a popular address for streetcar drivers and train conductors. But the neighborhood was also teeming with workers and tradespeople of all types, including shoemakers, mechanics, barbers, plasterers, booksellers, upholsterers, and grocers. In the census records of Atlanta’s Sixth Ward, where Lummus lived in 1920, one finds blacks and whites living side by side—as well as Christians and Jews, “native-born” Americans and recently arrived immigrants from all over the world. As he walked down Piedmont each morning, heading to the Butler Street yard, Lummus would have passed people chattering in Russian, German, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, and Italian. And even among his American neighbors, there were people who had come to Atlanta from all over the country. Travis’s flophouse may have been only an afternoon’s drive south of the “white county” Lummus left behind, but it was, in almost every way, the polar opposite of Forsyth.

Lummus and Harris were once the most visible white allies of the county’s black residents, but only a few years after the expulsions, they were gone. And with their exit, the last open opposition to the racial cleansing fell silent. They left behind a place that—unlike other counties that endured episodes of night riding and attempts at racial cleansing—had actually succeeded in closing its borders to African Americans. With no one left to speak out against the bigotry and intimidation, the county went into a kind of Rip Van Winkle sleep, as residents resumed lives that on the surface looked no different from any other rural place in Georgia. White Forsyth’s communal crime had been fiery and explosive in 1912, but its erasure would happen slowly, quietly, and one fence post at a time.

15

ERASURE, 1920–1970

I
n a detailed survey of land transactions, journalist Elliot Jaspin has shown that while a small minority of Forsyth’s black property owners got out early and received something close to fair market value for their land, the vast majority either sold at artificially low prices or simply walked away—knowing that their white neighbors would eventually take over their property. Each transaction is “carefully recorded in oversized books . . . in the basement of the Forsyth County Courthouse,” Jaspin writes,

and each sale tells a tale of black people who struggled to build a life [in Forsyth] and were crushed by the terror. . . . In all, twenty-four African-American landowners and seven churches . . . sold their property [and] the timing of these sales gives a sense of the panic people felt. The worst case was Alex Hunter, who, just three months before the expulsions, bought a farm for $1,500. Faced with death or leaving, he sold it in December 1912 for $550.

Jaspin found that even after selling for a third of his land’s value, Alex Hunter was still luckier than many others, who simply walked
away and lost everything. “For thirty-four of the black landowners,” Jaspin writes,

there is no record that they ever sold their land. It made no difference. Whites, money in hand, would pay the tax on land they did not own and the clerk would note the transaction . . . simply ignor[ing] the gap in ownership. . . . In the three years after the expulsion, nearly two-thirds of the black-owned farmland that had not been sold was appropriated in this way.

With the racial ban still violently enforced, whites could feel confident that black owners would never appear and try to reclaim the land they had left behind. Even if someone was reckless enough to try, word spread that whites could defend land seizures not just with shotguns and pistols but under a common-law principle known as “adverse possession.” If a man went down to the county courthouse, signed an affidavit swearing he had occupied the land “continuously, openly, and notoriously” and had been paying taxes on the lots, then according to state law, the original “adverse possession” would “ripen into title” after seven years, since the owner had taken no steps to repossess his property. In Georgia, this legal right—meant to encourage productive use of abandoned land—included the stipulation that any new claim “must not have originated in fraud [and] must be public, continuous, exclusive, uninterrupted, and peaceable.”

Black owners abandoned land in Forsyth for many reasons—from armed invasion, to arson, to dynamite—but everyone in Georgia knew that none of them were remotely “peaceable.” Nonetheless, when white residents walked down to the courthouse to register deeds on land they had long ago fenced in as their own, the county clerk rarely even raised an eyebrow. In 1912, the expulsion of Forsyth’s black population had made news all over the
country, but the thefts that followed were given a legal stamp of approval by the state, and they went unnoticed by anyone but the expelled black property owners themselves. “There was land for the taking,” as Jaspin put it, “and in this free-for-all, the [county] tax clerk kept score.”

BY THE EARLY 1920S
, the elementary schools of Cumming were filled with a generation of white children who had no memory of the black people who once occupied those stolen lots. Most had never seen a black resident of Forsyth, and never would. As the
Macon Telegraph
put it in 1921, “in Forsyth more or less pride is taken that they have run out all the negroes.” With the violent raids of 1912 receding into the past, it became possible for civic leaders to boast that while other north Georgia communities continued to suffer episodes of “race trouble,” there were no such embarrassments in Forsyth.

The signs that African Americans once lived there had already begun to fade, and the remnants of that old world were visible only to those who knew where to look. A reporter driving north from Atlanta in January of 1921 wrote that “soon after the Chattahoochee has been crossed . . . a lone brick chimney stands amid blackened ruins . . . [and] a mile further on an old stove rises above a pile of stones which once formed the foundations of a little church and school.” Many readers must have recalled the year when mobs drove more than a thousand black residents out of Forsyth County, yet the article made no mention of how that abandoned house first turned into “blackened ruins” or who had once occupied that “little church and school” now turning into a pile of mossy stones.

Night riders continued to make headlines in other Georgia counties in the early 1920s, but having once been synonymous with lawlessness, Forsyth found that its “race troubles” were quickly forgotten by many whites, and its reputation was already
being rehabilitated. When, in 1923, the
Atlanta Constitution
asked a north Georgia man named Arnold B. Hall to write a profile of the county, he made no mention of the expulsions and called Forsyth “a far-famed county of grand old Georgia where rich lands, rotation of crops and marked advancement in animal industry and horticultural activity are awakening the people with a new purpose, a dynamic zest, and a vigorous vision!”

Forsyth County’s white defenders are quick to point out that the racial purge of 1912 was not, as is often believed, absolute. And records confirm that while nearly all of the 1,098 people listed as black or “mulatto” in 1910 were gone from Forsyth by 1920, when a census taker named Vester Buice made his rounds in February of that year, he did eventually come upon a small group of black families living in the Big Creek section, along Forsyth’s southern border with Milton County.

The families of Ed and Bertha Moon, Will and Corrie Strickland, and Marvin and Rubie Rocks were all clustered together at the bottom edge of the county, as far as one could get from Oscarville and still be in Forsyth. The most prosperous of the group was Will Strickland, whose father James had been born a slave on the Strickland plantation in 1850. The Strickland farms were so notorious for their harsh treatment of slaves that Hardy, the family patriarch, had become known far and wide as “Devil Hard” Strickland. But James Strickland stayed in Forsyth even after emancipation, and he was among the young, newly freed black men of the county when in 1867 he signed his oath of allegiance at the Cumming courthouse. Just like Joseph Kellogg, he seems to have been both industrious and patient, for by 1900, after decades of sharecropping and saving, he and his wife Rosanna owned the property they worked in Big Creek. By 1910, James’s son Will was farming their land and doing well enough, at least, to support a family with ten children.

Apologists for Forsyth have often pointed to the 1920 census roll, and those twenty-three black residents living around Will Strickland’s farm, in an attempt to deny that African Americans were forced out. But it seems clear that twenty-three people returning to the county after more than a thousand have been banished does not mean the purge was any less violent or widespread than was reported in the papers. Instead, it suggests that a kind of exemption, or at least protection, was granted to these employees of the white Strickland family, whose power in the county was unmatched.