Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (13 page)

In such an environment, the old southern power dynamics between rich and poor whites were radically, if invisibly, altered. Desperate to join the economic boom just forty miles south in Atlanta, men like Harris now had an incentive to protect the black labor supply and to dispel any worries that Forsyth was the kind of “lawless settlement” feared by the businessmen of the new South. Two dirt-poor, illiterate black defendants like Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel were almost certain to “swing for their crime” in Jim Crow Georgia, but it mattered deeply to Harris that they swing not from a tree limb but from a legally constructed, legally sanctioned gallows. To reassure shareholders in the Atlanta Northeastern Railroad, Cumming’s young mayor needed to stage a trial that maintained at least the outward appearance of justice.

7

THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW

W
hen news of Mae Crow’s death reached Atlanta, murder was added to the “true bill” against Ernest Knox. The trials—of Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel for the rape and murder of Mae Crow; of Jane Daniel as accomplice to rape and murder; and of Toney Howell for the rape of Ellen Grice—were set to begin on Thursday, October 3rd, at the Forsyth County Courthouse. The U.S. Supreme Court would eventually decide that it was unconstitutional to try African Americans in any place where they were systematically excluded from juries—which violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But that decision, in 1935, was still more than two decades in the future. And so in 1912, the fate of the Grice and Crow prisoners would be decided by all-white juries in Cumming, on the same town square where Rob Edwards’s bullet-riddled corpse had been left on public display, as a silent warning to local blacks.

With the accused rapists headed back into the heart of the “race troubles,” Judge Newt Morris drove to Atlanta on Friday, September 27th, to personally communicate his concerns to the governor. His request: that Joseph Mackey Brown impose martial law for the duration of the trials and once again send state troops to
prevent a lynching. Brown responded by declaring Forsyth to be in “a state of insurrection” for the second time in a month, and ordered three companies of the Georgia National Guard to escort the prisoners north.

With military protection in place, Morris turned his attention to a second vexing problem: finding men bold enough—or fool enough—to mount a legal defense. It was, Morris understood, a difficult thing to ask of any white man. Most attorneys in the state knew from experience that defending black clients could lead at best to a quick defeat, and at worst to a visit from the same kind of men who had stalked and killed Rob Edwards.

According to the
Atlanta Georgian
, on October 1st—just two days before the trails were to begin—Morris called eight lawyers before the bench, looked each man sternly in the eye, and asked him to do his public duty. In response, “each one offered an excuse for not defending the negroes.” Four of them had a ready answer to the judge’s request: they could not serve because they had already been “retained to assist the prosecution.”

These four were experienced litigators from Marietta, eager to claim a share of the attention and gratitude that would come to whoever won a conviction. They were led by Solicitor General J. P. Brooke, a friend of Charlie Harris’s and a partner in the Atlanta Northeastern Railroad. Also on the prosecution team was Eugene Herbert Clay, the mayor of Marietta, son of U.S. Senator Alexander Clay, and, at thirty-one, a rising political star. After a glance at the list of prosecuting attorneys, many people in Cumming must have nodded and chuckled; seeing his reputation and his railroad threatened by all the negative attention, Charlie Harris had called in an army of powerful friends, and nearly all his political favors.

By contrast, the defense team was made up of small-town lawyers from Cumming and nearby Canton, who were appointed by Morris despite their own objections. Amaziah Fisher, Isaac Grant,
and John Collins were far more experienced with land deeds, contract disputes, and rental agreements than they were with a sensational rape and murder trial, which was now being covered by newspapers all over the South. Leading the defense was another Marietta man, Fred Morris (no relation to Newt Morris), who was known to be a close confidant of many of his opponents on the prosecution. Two of the attorneys opposing one another, J. P. and Howell Brooke, were father and son. The latter, at twenty-one, was barely older than the two teenagers he was assigned to defend.

HAVING DIVIDED THE
lawyers into two camps—one stocked with talent, power, and experience, the other with law students and overmatched small-town attorneys—Judge Morris prepared to open the fall session of the Blue Ridge Circuit court. With the ambitious Eugene Herbert Clay preening for all the photographers and journalists in town, and with the five defenders reluctantly accepting their no-win assignment, everything was now in place—except for the defendants themselves.

And so at eleven a.m. on Wednesday, October 2nd, Lieutenant Rucker McCarty of the Georgia National Guard appeared at the Fulton Tower and signed forms acknowledging receipt of six prisoners: the four defendants (Ernest Knox, Oscar Daniel, and Jane Daniel in the Crow case; and Toney Howell in the Grice case), as well as two material witnesses, Ed Collins and Isaiah Pirkle. Collins was an Oscarville farmer said to have been with Rob Edwards and Oscar Daniel on the day of Mae Crow’s murder, and Pirkle had been swept up in the earliest wave of arrests back in September, along with his friend Toney Howell. It is likely that the other five black men arrested during the hysteria were simply released from the Tower, but the papers make no mention of their fates.

A photo taken that morning shows McCarty’s troops marching through the streets of Atlanta toward Terminal Station, with Jane
Daniel and her brother Oscar walking at the center of the military formation. For the past month, papers had described Oscar Daniel as “the barefooted, fiendish-looking type,” but what readers saw in the photograph was a teenage boy, dwarfed by the armed militiamen marching all around him. As hundreds of Atlantans gawked at the procession, Jane clutched the long folds of her dress with one hand and walked beside her brother, their wrists handcuffed together. Over Oscar’s shoulder, in his porkpie hat and white shirt, was the slim figure of Toney Howell, who had not been outside the Atlanta jail for nearly a month.

Jane Daniel, Oscar Daniel, and Toney Howell (center, left to right) being led toward the Atlanta train terminal, October 2nd, 1912

AT TERMINAL STATION
, the prisoners boarded a special train, rode a little more than an hour north into the foothills, then got off thirteen miles east of Cumming, in the little whistle-stop town
of Buford. The group that disembarked numbered more than two hundred, counting 167 military escorts, the prisoners themselves, members of the press, and lawyers participating in the trial. The military commander, Major I. T. Catron, had appointed “a personal guard of six men” who were to surround the prisoners at all times and defend them from potential lynchers and assassins. With a Southern Railway locomotive steaming and hissing in the background, and troops spilling out onto the tiny platform all around him, Catron raised his arm and ordered a brief stop for lunch.

As the midday sun beat down, and as the soldiers were fed by the kitchen staff of a local hotel, the prisoners got a brief moment of rest, as they too ate a hot meal, then waited on a stack of railroad ties at the very center of the traveling circus. Just before Catron ordered them to rise and begin the day’s long march, a photographer extended the black leather bellows of a camera and squinted into the viewfinder. When the shutter clicked, he captured the most indelible image of the Forsyth expulsions, and it was soon churning off the presses of the
Atlanta Constitution
.

The Forsyth prisoners at Buford, Georgia, October 2nd, 1912 (left to right): Jane Daniel, Oscar Daniel, Toney Howell, Ed Collins, Isaiah Pirkle, and Ernest Knox

That afternoon the troops walked through miles of pine forest and river bottom, watched by hundreds of curious locals who came out of their houses, eager to get a look at the troops and their notorious prisoners. Having crossed the Chattahoochee and entered Forsyth, the regiment reached the outskirts of town just as the sun was going down. Catron called the march to a halt, and as his command echoed down the line, the militiamen shrugged off their knapsacks and bedrolls, pitched their white canvas pup tents, and established a camp perimeter on land that had been volunteered, Catron was told, by the local sheriff.

IT WAS WIDELY
reported that “the mountaineers of north Georgia” were once again flooding into Cumming for the trials, many of them “armed and prepared to make trouble.” So when a group of civilians appeared out of the darkness at the edge of the camp, a nervous sentry called, “Who goes there?” and was surprised to find before him, with their hands raised, not overall-clad farmers but a group of gentlemen wearing the spectacles and fine wool suits of attorneys-at-law. “Tonight,” a reporter wrote, “Judge Morris, Sheriff Reid, Fred Morris of Marietta, John Collins, and Howell Brooke of Canton came to the camp” from Cumming. As soon as they were recognized, the men asked to speak privately with the six prisoners.

There are no reports of exactly why such a visit was made, what was discussed, or how long it lasted, but the appearance of Judge Morris and defense attorney Fred Morris at that campfire meeting raises a number of questions. There was nothing unusual, of course, about a judge and an attorney meeting with defendants on the eve of a trial. But this particular judge and this particular attorney are now known to have participated in one of the most brazen acts of mob violence in American history: the 1915 kidnapping and murder of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was convicted of the rape and murder of a young white girl named Mary Phagan.

Judge Newton Morris, former governor Joseph Mackey Brown, prosecutor Eugene Herbert Clay, and defense attorney Fred Morris were all involved. Newt Morris was, in fact, the mastermind of Frank’s abduction from the state penitentiary, but he pretended to have arrived just minutes after the lynching and persuaded journalists, including a reporter for the
New York Times
, that it was he who had prevented the crowd from burning Frank’s body. Thus, just three years after the trials in Forsyth, Morris would manage to both lynch a man
and
become famous for having stood up to a mob. Harold Willingham, a local lawyer who knew him well, said that Morris was powerful and widely respected during his lifetime, but in private many people in Marietta knew a very different man. “He was,” said Willingham, “a fourteen-karat son of a bitch with spare parts.”

Jane, Oscar, and Ernest could not have known that the judge hearing their cases would soon preside over a lynching in the woods outside Marietta, but they must have realized just how unlikely it was that they would ever receive justice from the all-white juries of Forsyth. Even if their lives were spared when Judge Morris handed down sentences, everyone knew that the farmers flooding into town brought with them an unspoken threat: that any outcome other than the death penalty would be remedied by “the will of the people,” as one Cumming man put it. In the lead-up to the trials, the editors of the
Gainesville Times
expressed the view of most whites—which was that the Knox and Daniel trials could, and should, lead to only one verdict. “Little time will be required,” a reporter wrote, “and, of course, the brutes will be found guilty.”

Given the near impossibility of acquittal, the only hope left for the prisoners was to cooperate with Morris and hope that at least some of them might still escape alive. Jane Daniel, Ed Collins, Isaiah Pirkle, and Toney Howell were all in grave danger the minute they crossed back over the county line. But what, they must have
wondered, if the convictions of Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel could be made to satisfy the white people of Forsyth? What if, somehow, two hangings could be enough?