Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (8 page)

While he had made a name for himself as a star of the Cumming baseball team, Marvin Bell was also widely known as a cousin to Hiram Parks Bell, one of Forsyth’s founding fathers and its most revered statesman. Hiram Parks Bell had been toughened
by a childhood spent helping to clear and fence his family’s homestead in the 1830s; he went on to become a leading politician of his day, and an embodiment of the ideals of many white southerners. Elected to the Georgia senate in 1861, he resigned to enlist in the Confederate army, where he rose through the ranks from private to colonel of the Forty-third Georgia Regiment. “Colonel Bell,” as he was known ever after, was a delegate to the Confederate Congress in 1864 and 1865, and in 1873–75 and 1877–79 he represented Georgia’s Ninth District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

U.S. Representative Hiram Parks Bell

Bell was also an unrepentant white supremacist, and while serving in Washington he railed against the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which gave African Americans citizenship, calling it a “legislative folly . . . intended to harass and humiliate the white people.” Bell considered himself one of the “able and patriotic” men who, after forcing black leaders from office in the 1870s, “established a Constitution that secured white over black domination.”

When Marvin Bell—cousin to the famed Hiram Parks Bell—arrived in Oscarville, he would have trailed behind him an unmistakable air of power, money, and authority. And in that moment when Bell coiled the bucket-rope into a makeshift noose around Knox’s neck, the two extremes of Forsyth’s social castes were momentarily locked in a terrible embrace: Bell at the very highest reaches of the white power structure, Knox at the very bottom of the black underclass. No surprise, then, that when Marvin Bell put his mouth to Ernest Knox’s ear and demanded a confession, a confession was precisely what he got.

That Bell was from one of Cumming’s most powerful families may also help explain why, having come close to lynching Knox himself, he did not hand his prisoner over to a mob of Oscarville farmers. These were men whom Bell saw as far beneath him, and as they stoked a bonfire and pleaded for a chance to burn Ernest Knox at the stake, Marvin Bell quickly turned from Knox’s tormentor to his rescuer.

“If the prisoner had not been spirited away,” said a reporter for the
Constitution
, “nothing short of troops would have prevented a burning.” The
Gainesville News
emphasized that it was not just the attack on Crow that fueled this new lynching fever but also the men’s frustration at having been run out of town by government troops just two days before, and prevented from lynching Grant Smith and Toney Howell. “On account of the intense feeling . . . in Forsyth County last Thursday,” one witness said, “it was almost certain that the negro [Knox] would have been lynched had he been carried to Cumming.” But having held Knox’s life in his hands just a few minutes before, Marvin Bell now cranked his Model T and shoved the terrified boy inside.

Bell headed east out of Forsyth, across the Chattahoochee River at Browns Bridge, and into the neighboring town of Gainesville, the seat of Hall County. There, he delivered Knox into the custody
of Sheriff William Crow. According to the
Gainesville News
, “when it became known that the negro was in jail [in Hall County] and had confessed, there became wild rumors of lynching.” Soon the Gainesville jail was surrounded by Hall County men who had heard that a black rapist was locked inside, as well as people from Forsyth County who had pursued Knox and Bell in buggies and on horseback, arriving just as darkness fell. A reporter for the
Constitution
described how “rumor was passing freely that a lynching would result” when Judge J. B. Jones ordered that the prisoner be moved for his own safety—this time all the way to Atlanta.

At seven-fifteen p.m. on what was surely the longest day of his short life, Ernest Knox found his wrist once again in the iron grip of a white man. When he heard the clatter of Deputy Henry Ward’s key in the lock, he must have feared that he was about to be thrust out the front door, into the hands of a lynch mob. Instead, Deputy Ward snuck the prisoner out through the back, and Knox, who before that day had in all likelihood never ridden in an automobile in his life, was once more pushed into the back seat of a car with its engine racing. Knox heard the crunch of gravel, the roar of the engine, and fading shouts shrinking behind him in the dark. The next day’s paper told readers that Deputy Ward, fearful that he was being pursued, covered “the distance from Gainesville to Atlanta in [the] almost record time of three hours,” at moments reaching the jaw-dropping speed of forty miles per hour.

Knox slept that night in the Fulton County Jail, which was known all over Georgia as “the Tower”—an imposing stone fortress that had been designed to keep Atlanta’s worst offenders in and its most determined lynch mobs out. When groups returning from Gainesville reported that Knox had been transferred to the Tower, men in Forsyth realized they’d been outmaneuvered. But that didn’t mean they’d given up. After midnight, a reporter at the
Constitution
was busy tapping away, recounting the day’s events. “The white people
of the mountain section around Gainesville and Forsyth county are incensed,” he wrote. “And even though the guilty negro is imprisoned 53 miles away . . . more race trouble is feared.” As sixteen-year-old Ernest Knox struggled to sleep with the sounds of the city humming all around him, many people in Forsyth stayed up late, too—venting their shock at the week’s second attack on a white woman, and their disgust at the slow machinations of the law.

4

AND THE MOB CAME ON

B
ill Reid was in a foul mood when he got to work on Tuesday morning. Upstaged by Marvin Bell, and humiliated by the fact that the “confessed rapist” had been delivered not to Cumming but to the Gainesville city police, Reid was under pressure to make more arrests, particularly after a rumor circulated that Ernest Knox was not alone when he attacked Mae Crow. Overnight, the initial reports of Crow’s injuries had been elaborated into a kind of horror story. “Those men had raped [Mae] many times,” Ruth Jordan said years later. “They bit her on the legs . . . and cut her and chewed the nipples off her bristes. In an hour all the people in the county had armed ther selves and was just waiting.”

Reid and Lummus rode out to Oscarville first thing Tuesday and found that a group of white men had already surrounded Marcus Waldrip’s property and taken prisoner one of Waldrip’s field hands—the young black man known as “Big Rob” Edwards, who had been seen with Knox on the day of the attack. Knox may have been the “confessed rapist” whose name was in all the Atlanta papers, but he was also far out of reach in the Fulton Tower and under the protection of the Atlanta city police. Unable to lay a finger on him, whites in Oscarville now directed their wrath at Rob
Edwards, who, just like Toney Howell, was conspicuous as an outsider in the small, isolated community of Oscarville, having been raised in South Carolina.

When Reid and Lummus arrived on the scene, the
Georgian
said, they “went immediately and took the negro from his captors,” who were planning to lynch and burn him right there on Waldrip’s place. After placing Edwards under arrest on suspicion of rape, Reid and his deputy hurried back toward town, trailing behind them a growing crowd of white men with shotguns and pistols in their hands. Having watched Grant Smith, Toney Howell, and Ernest Knox escape the noose in the past few days, many in the crowd had lost all patience with the law and now saw it as their duty to defend the white women of the county from further attacks. A reporter described the atmosphere as they followed Edwards all the way into Cumming:

The country roads were dotted with mounted and armed men all hurrying toward the county seat . . . as though some wireless telegraphy had spread the news of [Edwards’s] capture. The men of Forsyth . . . had been gathering all day, bearing rifles and shotguns under their arms, others with coats bulging where a heavy revolver filled a hip pocket. They were silent for the most part, but they gathered in little knots at the corners of the streets . . . and waited.

The
Journal
agreed that “mob spirit [was] at fever heat” when Reid and Lummus finally brought Edwards to the Cumming square, forced their way through the throng, and managed to lock him inside an iron-barred cell. When they peered out through a window, a mob of more than two thousand men swarmed around the little brick jail.

When the lawyers, merchants, and gentlemen farmers of Cumming looked up from their desks and shop counters to see what
was causing all the commotion, they found the same chaotic scene with which the “race troubles” had begun the previous Saturday. Now, as then, hundreds of whites were screaming themselves hoarse in the public square, demanding that officials hand over an accused black man. Like Smith, Howell, and Knox before him, Rob Edwards would have been able to pick out individual voices in that crowd—men whose names and faces he knew well from having worked shoulder to shoulder with them in the orchards, cotton fields, and corn rows of the county. When these men threatened to slit his throat, castrate him, and roast him like a hog, Edwards knew they meant every word. A big, lumbering man of twenty-four, Edwards could only watch silently as Lummus came and went with his ring of jangling keys.

IT IS AT
this point in the story that Bill Reid committed the most incriminating act of his entire tenure as Forsyth County sheriff—which was to simply disappear. A reporter noted his absence as if it were a minor detail, writing that the sheriff “left the jail as soon as he had lodged his prisoner there, and Deputy M. G. Lummus was left in charge.”

But given the ongoing political rivalry between the Forsyth County sheriff and his deputy—Reid defeated Lummus in the 1912 election, and would face him again in 1914—it is almost certain that Reid’s disappearing act was the result of a careful calculation. The governor had ordered local lawmen to stop the spread of mob violence in Forsyth, but as a future Klansman himself (whose name appears on a list of local KKK members in the 1920s), Reid was no doubt sympathetic with the crowd chanting for Edwards to be handed over, and as eager as they were to see a black man punished for the attack on Mae Crow. To help them get what they wanted, all Reid had to do was nothing. And so, as the mob swelled, and as the threat of a lynching grew more and more serious, Reid called Lummus
over and told him to take command of the little jail. Then he rose from his desk, adjusted his hat, and walked out through the packed square, with no explanation but for the occasional nod to friends and relatives as he passed.

By leaving Lummus in charge at the moment of greatest crisis, Reid neatly sidestepped what was, for him, a political train wreck—and thrust his rival directly into its path. If the young deputy failed to hold off the lynchers, it was now his head that would roll when the governor called from Atlanta. And if Lummus somehow succeeded in repelling the lynch party, it was he who would be remembered, come election time, as a “nigger lover” who’d stopped the white men of Forsyth from avenging a dying girl.

AS HE AMBLED
home down Castleberry Road, Reid couldn’t have failed to understand the dire situation in which he’d left Gay Lummus and Rob Edwards. In 1912, in Georgia, mobs regularly stormed county jails and abducted black prisoners—and it had happened many times before in Cumming. Fifty years earlier, in 1862, the
Daily Constitutionalist
had reported that a “negro boy belonging to Judge E. Lewis, of Forsyth County, was taken out of the Cumming jail and hung on last Saturday night by four men, for improper advances toward a lady. The men were relatives of the lady, and at home on furlough at the time the deed was committed.” The matter-of-fact tone of the report suggests just how unremarkable it was for a black man to be taken from police custody and lynched in the public square: “[There has been] no excitement among the people on the subject.”

In 1870, the
Chicago Tribune
reported that three other black residents of Forsyth were “summarily hung one morning by the roadside, in front of their own dwelling . . . old man Hutchins suspended to the limb of a tree by an old ox chain . . . and his two sons by green withes cut from the bushes.” Sixteen years later, in
1886, a Forsyth man named Pete Holmes was accused of raping a ten-year-old white girl and was locked up in the Cumming jail. The
Atlanta Constitution
called Holmes “a jet black, greasy negro, just fifteen years of age,” and reported that “when intelligence of the crime began to spread, the friends of the [girl’s] family became terribly stirred up, and before night a strong mob had been organized to lynch Holmes.” Even when, the next day, he was sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary, “people did not think the sentence sufficient,” and Holmes was only saved from a lynch mob when the county sheriff spirited him out the back of the jail and rushed him to safety in the Fulton Tower.