Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (17 page)

The children of Jeremiah and Nancy Brown, who were expelled from Forsyth in 1912. Left to right: Harrison, Rosalee, Bertie, Fred, Naomi, and Minor Brown, c. 1896

Present at the mass meeting were planters, mill operators, and mine owners, as well as members of rich white families who could hardly imagine life without their black “help.” All these people had in common an urgent goal, and that was to stop the intimidation as soon as possible, lest they wake to find that every black field hand, overseer, driver, cook, and washerwoman in the county had vanished into the night. Cumming mayor Charlie Harris presided over the gathering, and its secretary was John F. Echols, a twenty-four-year-old who had grown up in Cumming, gone to school in Atlanta, and recently returned to serve as a clerk in Harris’s law office.

The official resolution that Echols recorded in his stenography pad shows that many whites in Cumming were deeply troubled by what
was happening after dark. Their resolution informed the governor that the violence was not a series of unrelated attacks but part of a coordinated “effort on the part of some unknown persons to drive the colored people from the county, which is evidenced by letters written and dropped at the door of this class of our people, and in their mail boxes, notifying them that they must leave, and containing threats against them as well as letters to some of the white people—all of which is unlawful and detrimental to the interest of the common people.” In a cover letter to the governor, Harris added that “Quite a number of black churches have been burned and inhabited houses shot into by persons unknown and letters of intimidation sent through the mails . . . contrary, we believe to the laws.”

This last detail, about threats being delivered through the U.S. Postal Service, was no small matter, for it meant that these “persons unknown” were violating not just county and state criminal codes but federal law. The implicit argument was that this was no longer a problem for a part-time mayor and a small county police force but a matter worthy of the attention of the governor and the federal judiciary. As part of their appeal for help, those present affirmed their commitment to peace and order. “We condemn this conduct,” they said, “and pledge ourselves to give to the innocent and law abiding colored people in the County the reasonable and lawful protection in our power, and our aid in ferreting out the real perpetrators and bringing them to justice.”

The resolution called on Judge William T. Newman of Georgia’s Northern District federal court to open an investigation, and reminded state officials that Knox and Daniel were soon to be brought back and hung near the Cumming square. Citizens of Forsyth asked the governor to send the Georgia National Guard to help “in maintaining order and preserving the peace as well as suppressing evils already existing.” Finally, the resolution called for “immediate action” from Governor Brown and Judge Newman and
stressed the key role Bill Reid would have to play in stopping the violence. “We pledge ourselves to stand by Sheriff Reid,” the document concluded, “and give him our support in protecting the innocent citizens of our county.” Given Reid’s complicity with the mob that had already killed Rob Edwards, this now sounds like a case of tragically wishful thinking.

THE PROCLAMATION OF
the October mass meeting was a clear and unequivocal call to end the violence, and it provides evidence that only three weeks into the expulsions many white residents understood what was happening around them and tried to stop it. Rather than sitting idly by, they called upon those with state and federal power to “investigate these depredations and bring the guilty parties to justice.”

The answer Governor Brown sent back to Cumming, five days later, was just as clear and unequivocal as Mayor Harris had been in his plea for help. “I am in receipt of your letter . . . asking my aid in restoring peace and order in your county,” the governor wrote.

In reply [I] will state that this is a matter for the judge, sheriff and other local authorities to handle; the Governor has no authority to take any steps to give protection until the local authorities advise that they are unable to enforce the laws and properly protect life and property. I sincerely hope that the good people of Forsyth County will cooperate in giving protection to all who peaceably pursue their avocations and obey all the laws.

Judge Newman also failed to act, even though the Cumming resolution implored him to launch a federal investigation and to use his office to arrest those making terrorist threats. Instead, Newman was busy playing his part in America’s original “war on drugs”: prosecuting thousands of poor, small-time moonshiners,
who were arrested in large numbers after Georgia passed one of the earliest Prohibition laws in the nation, in 1908. With corn prices depressed for much of the first decade of the century, and with much of north Georgia unserved by railroad lines, thousands of upland farmers had realized that it was far easier to transport a wooden crate of mason jars than it was to move heaping bushels of corn over the rocky roads out of the hills. Once those jars of “white lightning” reached places like Gainesville and Atlanta, they fetched far more on the black market than any wagonload of produce ever could. Pound for pound, ears of corn were no match for white corn liquor, no matter the risk of arrest by federal “revenuers.”

The massive leather minute book of Judge Newman’s Northern District court is filled with convictions of one poor white distiller after another in the fall of 1912, usually on charges of federal tax evasion. What it doesn’t contain is a single case brought against the night riders who, during those same months, were using the U.S. mail to make terrorist threats against African Americans. It was a federal offense for a man to stand in some shady hollow of Forsyth and quietly fill a jar with liquor, and the government sent a virtual army of revenue agents into north Georgia to arrest moonshiners and break up their stills. But when those same white men spent their nights shooting, bombing, and burning black residents out of their homes, the federal government, like Governor Joseph Mackey Brown, turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.

IN THE SUMMER
of 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP’s magazine,
The Crisis
, sent a journalist named Royal Freeman Nash to Cumming, to investigate reports of a wholesale exodus of blacks from Forsyth County. The resulting article, which appeared in November of 1915, gives us one of the only written accounts of these events that comes from outside the southern point of view. Nash was a social worker and secretary of the NAACP, but as a
white man, he could walk through places like Forsyth in relative anonymity, and years of investigating racial crimes had honed Nash’s gift for getting people to talk.

After interviewing whites all over Forsyth, as well as members of the black community who had fled to neighboring counties, Nash described how whites had exploited the desperate situation of their black neighbors in 1912 and had swooped in with offers to buy livestock and farm implements at a fraction of their real value. “A negro would receive an anonymous letter giving him twenty-four, thirty-six hours, occasionally ten days to quit the county,” Nash wrote,

and that meant precipitate flight and abandonment of everything owned in the world. In other cases it meant a sale at a few days’ notice, during which a cow worth $25 would bring $8–9, and hogs worth $15–20 sold for $4–6. House and land brought nothing. If the Negro owned a mule he moved out his furniture, otherwise it burned after his departure.

Nash went on to tell of the dire consequences if black residents tried to hold out, and he spoke with one family who’d received their ultimatum not from grown men but two white children:

Failure to vacate on the date set meant a stealthy visit in the night and either dynamite or the torch. The result was a state of terror which caused one Negro family to accept a twenty-four hour notice [delivered by] two children aged five and six respectively, who had learned the game from their elders.

As Forsyth’s white children learned “the game” of terrorizing black neighbors and driving them from their homes, a small group of African Americans tried to continue living peacefully in town, hoping they might be protected by their close connections to rich
whites. Nash spoke with one black employee at a Cumming boardinghouse and told how even “after repeated notices . . . the owner kept her on until January, but let her go then for fear he could no longer protect the servant’s life.” Nash heard similar stories about longtime employees on the farms of the county, whose white bosses only dismissed them, often with regret and apologies, after repeated threats from the mobs. Asked if he knew of any cases where blacks were defended by whites, a Forsyth farmer told Nash that

Old Man Roper yonder had a nigger he well nigh couldn’t live without, knew every stone and stump on the farm. The boys warned him time and again to get shet of him, but Roper would keep him on. So one night they jest had to put a stick of dynamite under the nigger’s house. . . . No, it didn’t kill him, but it started him for Hall County right smart. . . . I reckon they won’t be back. You see, the young fellers are growing up sort of with the idea that this is a white man’s county.

Farm by farm, cabin by cabin, the last black residents who dared to remain in Forsyth after the death of Mae Crow were rooted out, and those who defended them were taught, with dynamite and torches, the cost of resisting the new “whites only” rule. Whatever Sheriff Reid knew about the men behind such terrorism, and whatever role he played in the violent performances that took place after dark, there is no record of a single warrant or arrest for any of the crimes committed against the property and people of black Forsyth in 1912. By mid-October, the editor of the
Dahlonega Nugget
could claim that “A gentleman of Forsyth County, who was here last week, said every Negro who lived in it was gone. Not a single one is left to tell the tale.”

10

CRUSH THE THING IN ITS INFANCY

J
ust a few miles east of Oscarville, across the Chattahoochee, there was another predominantly white county, with its own poor and exploited black population and its own white underclass. In Hall County, too, race hysteria spread in the fall of 1912, and residents there witnessed a similar spate of attacks on black workers and black homes. But what happened as a result could hardly have been more different.

Whatever racial tensions existed in Hall prior to the Forsyth exodus, they were aggravated by the arrival of hundreds of displaced families, who camped along the roads leading into Gainesville, and crowded into the homes of friends and relatives in the African American sections of town. The “influx of negroes,” the
Constitution
said, “has created a wave of resentment throughout the hot-tempered and lawless element.”

The
Gainesville Times
told of a morning that October when “a crowd variously estimated at from a dozen to one hundred went to Mr. M. A. Gaines’ building near the city hall and ordered the negro brickmasons to quit work. . . . The negroes left the job as soon as they could get away and have not returned, [so] the building remains in an unfinished state.” Soon local farmers were getting
similar visits from men who demanded that black workers be fired and leave Hall County for good. The
Constitution
reported that on October 14th,

a mob of whites appeared at the home of Joe Hood, a negro, living about three miles north of Gainesville. A spokesman demanded Hood’s removal from the vicinity [but] the negro slammed the door in the white man’s face. A fusillade of shots was fired by the crowd into the house. Hood, his wife, and family barricaded themselves behind mattresses and bedding, and escaped unhurt, although their home was riddled with bullets. Large holes were rent in the sides of the building, showing the effect of shotgun shells, and the entire side was peppered with pistol and Winchester bullets.

Just as in Forsyth, such attacks were part of a sustained effort to drive out the black population and, especially, black labor competition. “Not only has the entire section suffered from the abandonment of farms and loss of labor from the fleeing negroes,” a journalist wrote,

prominent businessmen of Gainesville have received . . . attacks by hostile whites. Many black chauffeurs of the city have been ordered to give up their jobs, and anonymous letters demanding the dismissal of negro employees have been sent.

While “cooler-headed” residents hoped that the violence would remain a local matter and not damage Gainesville’s reputation as a center of trade, on Saturday, October 12th, the mobs of Hall County made headlines all over the state when the Southern Railway’s flagship New York & New Orleans Limited stopped to take on water at Flowery Branch, at the southern edge of the county. As the train
idled, passengers en route to Atlanta looked out their windows and were startled to see a mob dragging a black man down off the train. The man, named W. A. Flake, worked in the mail car, and it seems that the mere sight of him in his uniform was enough to enrage local whites. “Cursing the negro and surging dangerously around the car,” one witness said, “the crowd frightened Flake until he cowered in a corner of the coach. D. P. White, chief clerk on the train, stepped to the doorway, and ordered the mob away, threatening to shoot the first [person] who attempted to mount the car.”

Such an ambush makes it clear that Hall County was not immune to the waves of white terrorism that were transforming Forsyth in 1912. But while that October saw numerous attacks against blacks in Hall, by the time winter arrived things had calmed down, and the bands of night riders gave up their efforts to create another “white man’s county” on the eastern bank of the Chattahoochee. Given that the racial cleansing succeeded on one side of the river but failed on the other, it is natural to wonder what made the difference. Why was the expulsion of African Americans part of Forsyth County’s identity for nearly a hundred years, but only a brief episode in the history of Hall?