Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (22 page)

While no one in Forsyth dared to say it publicly, there were obvious parallels between what had happened to Elliot and the attack on Mae Crow two months earlier. Whoever appeared out of the darkness had waylaid his buggy “7 miles north of Cumming” and soon after he reentered the county from Gainesville—which is to say, somewhere near the sleepy little crossroads village of Oscarville. And Elliot’s attacker had left him in the same condition as Crow: dragged into the woods beside the road, unconscious, and suffering from grave head injuries.

When doctors announced that Elliot had died from his wounds, few whites were willing to even consider the possibility that someone other than a vengeful black assailant had killed Dabner Elliot, presumably in retaliation for the deaths of Edwards, Knox, and Daniel. But privately, some people must have shaken their heads at the fact that Elliot had died in the exact same fashion as Mae Crow and in almost the exact same place—despite the fact that Crow’s alleged murderers were now dead and the entire black population of Oscarville had been banished across the county line. Cumming’s leaders were eager to put the season of death and violence behind them, and they clearly hoped that the double hanging had brought an end to Forsyth’s “troubles.” The only problem: there was still a murderer lurking somewhere in the woods of Oscarville.

STILL GRIEVING FOR
Oscar, Ernest, and Jane’s husband, Rob—and no doubt haunted by the fact that Jane’s testimony had helped send her brother and cousin to their graves—Buck Daniel’s family spent their first days on the road in one of the shantytowns that had sprung up on the western outskirts of Gainesville, the seat of Hall County. As a station on the rail line that ran south to Atlanta and north all the way to Boston, Gainesville had long been a magnet for rural blacks, who steadily migrated from farmland to cities after emancipation. In the previous forty years, Gainesville’s African American population had grown from sixty black residents in 1870 to more than sixteen hundred in 1910. People of color made up almost a third of the city’s population in the fall of 1912, before hundreds of Forsyth refugees began appearing on the streets of Gainesville. Even the more tolerant whites raised an eyebrow at the sheer volume of the migration, and the
Atlanta Constitution
sounded a note of alarm, declaring that “Gainesville is being invaded as a haven of refuge. . . . The Negro sections have been flooded with safety-seeking Negroes, and scores of shanties and dwelling houses shelter as many as six or more families.”

Whenever the Daniel family finally made it to town, they entered a world radically different from the sleepy farms and sharecroppers’ shacks out in Oscarville. In 1912, Gainesville was a frequent holiday destination for affluent tourists seeking to escape to the cool mountain air of north Georgia. With its grand hotels, bustling railway station, and tourists in gleaming automobiles, the city employed a whole class of African American nannies, cooks, drivers, and butlers, who lived relatively stable lives compared to the dirt-poor laborers of Forsyth. With the completion of the Dunlap Hydroelectric Dam in 1908, Gainesville had become the first city south of Baltimore whose sidewalks were lined with electric streetlamps.

As they walked those glowing city blocks, Buck and Catie must have recognized, in the blur of unknown faces, at least a few familiar ones, from other families who had “come out of Forsyth,” as the refugees put it. It was not just the poor and landless who had been forced out but people from all walks of life: field hands and sharecroppers like the Daniel clan, as well as ministers, land-owning black planters, and educated black schoolteachers. Not long after their arrival, many of these families began to make their mark on Hall County.

Among them were the sons and daughters of Levi and Elizabeth Greenlee, who would go on to found the Greenlee Funeral Home, a landmark in Gainesville for decades, and one of the most successful black-owned businesses in north Georgia. There was Byrd Oliver, who met and married young Beulah Rucker shortly after he settled in Hall and helped her found a Tuskegee-style school for African Americans called the State Industrial and High School, which educated blacks in north Georgia for more than forty years. And there were children like the fourteen-year-old Willie Bryant, who was old enough to remember the attacks of the mobs but young enough to quickly adapt to his new life in the city. By 1920, Bryant was working a union job for the Southern Railway and was well on his way to joining Gainesville’s black middle class. Census records show that, like Bryant, many other Forsyth refugees started over in Hall—still struggling to bear the crushing burdens of segregation, but with at least a taste of the electrified, industrialized twentieth century that Charlie Harris had worked so hard to bring to Cumming.

Even Jane Daniel seems to have found some happiness across the river. After she was freed from the Fulton Tower, Jane made her way back north and eventually rejoined her family in Gainesville. By 1913 she had found work as a laundress for one of the rich families in town and had met a young man named William Butler, who,
with his panel truck, his uniform, and his job as a driver for the Gainesville Ice Company, must have struck her as a real city boy. Within months, Will Butler proposed to the girl he called Janie. On February 5th, 1914, the two were married, and they set up house in the heart of Gainesville’s black community, at 9 Atlanta Street.

Of other families, who fled in other directions, the written traces are faint, and in many cases old stories are all that’s left of their journeys down the dusty red roads leading out of Forsyth. Olin Collins was eight years old the night his father and mother, George and Katie, loaded him and his brother Clarence into the back of a wagon, covered the boys with an old quilt, and drove out of Forsyth as fast as their mule could go. With no destination other than the county line, they headed first toward Canton, in neighboring Cherokee County, and eventually to the little town of Tate, twenty miles northwest.

Once there, George Collins was either determined or lucky enough to get an appointment with Mr. Samuel Tate, owner of the town’s sole industry, the Georgia Marble Company. Just as the rich men of Gainesville protected blacks who worked in their mills, washed their clothes, and cooked their meals, Sam Tate quickly became both an employer and a guardian of the Collins family. By all accounts, “the Colonel” brought his power to bear quickly and fiercely on anyone who dared to threaten the black workers who were vital to the operation of his pink marble quarries.

Poor blacks like the Collins family left with only what they could carry, but more affluent families refused to simply abandon their property, holding out hope that they might return, or at the very least sell for something close to fair market value. As the largest black landowners in the county, Joseph and Eliza Kellogg were reluctant to sell the two hundred acres they had accumulated near Sawnee Mountain, or even the small lot they owned on the town square in Cumming. While they had no choice but to flee
the mobs, before he headed south to Marietta, Kellogg borrowed money from some of his white neighbors, using the deeds to his land as collateral. The benefits were twofold: first, the loans gave Kellogg enough money to support his extended family during their exile, which he still hoped would be temporary. And second, those who lent money to Kellogg now had good reason to look after his property, farm equipment, and outbuildings while he was gone—since they would take possession if the debts went unpaid. This also meant, of course, that Joseph and Eliza Kellogg’s white neighbors had a vested interest in keeping them away.

WHETHER THEY JOINED
, opposed, or were indifferent to the raids of Forsyth’s night riders, for many whites the misfortune of black property owners became a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The early years of the new century had seen a sharp rise in the value of real estate in the foothills, as the introduction of chemical fertilizers and mechanized agriculture turned what had always been a marginal region into more productive and more valuable farmland. Spikes in land values and crop yields meant that as the new century entered its second decade, Joseph Kellogg’s large spread near Sawnee Mountain came to seem both highly attractive to landless whites and terribly far out of reach.

In a market that was making landowners richer and richer, poor whites in Forsyth must have realized that if they were ever going to climb up from the bottom of the economic ladder, something would have to give. And in the last quarter of 1912, something finally did, when one black family after another was forced at gunpoint to pack up their belongings and leave. As even the proudest, most prosperous black men, like Joseph Kellogg, gave in to the threats, Forsyth County suddenly became—for the first time in living memory—a buyer’s market.

Even peaceful whites understood that as the violence escalated,
and as more and more of the black community scattered, black owners might be tempted by lowball offers. One owner in Forsyth placed an ad in the
Atlanta Constitution
, offering for sale “200 Acres [in] Forsyth County . . . and [a] business corner lot in Cumming, 100 x 175, on public square.” This description matches the two hundred acres and town lot on which Joseph Kellogg paid taxes in 1912, and it seems likely that this anonymous listing was part of Kellogg’s last-ditch effort to cut his losses and get something approaching fair value for land he had acquired through forty years of sweat, determination, and keen business sense. By advertising the property in an Atlanta paper, Kellogg may have hoped to find a buyer who wouldn’t fully understand, and therefore fully exploit, his desperate situation.

In the last sentence of the listing, the seller added that in the absence of a cash transaction, he would let go of his Forsyth County farm in “exchange for negro property.” Implicit in such an offer was the seller’s hope of relocating to some new place far from the night riders and arsonists of Forsyth, and free from the inherent risks that came with white neighbors. With this offer to trade his land for “negro property,” whoever placed that ad seemed to acknowledge what was fast becoming clear to everyone: regardless of how prosperous and productive he might be, Forsyth County was no place for a black man.

MEANWHILE, UPPER-CLASS WHITES
continued to speak out against the violence—and to protest not just the injustice of the purge but its economic cost. While there was nothing all that unusual about poor whites intimidating their black neighbors, it was another thing altogether when violent “crackers” started threatening rich white employers and landowners. In early December, one such planter drove all the way to Atlanta to meet with Joseph Mackey Brown. He warned the governor, “If something is not done to check this
movement the labor situation . . . will become quite acute. . . . Our wives and daughters will soon be put to the necessity of doing the cooking, washing, and performing menial labor. In addition the farmers will suffer greatly, for they will be deprived of field hands.”

The battle lines were clearly drawn when 1912 came to a close, and in early 1913, in a speech before the General Assembly, Governor Brown acknowledged the larger threat the night riders posed. “I am reliably informed,” he said,

that quite a number of farms in Forsyth County have been practically abandoned this year for lack of labor, which has fled before these threats. . . . There is no reason why farms should lose their productive power and why the white women of this State should be driven to the cook stoves and wash pots.

Brown’s call for law and order was above all pragmatic: for white-owned farms to produce a profit, and for upper-class white families to function as they always had—with black men working in their fields and black women tending “the cook stoves and wash pots” of their homes—it was vital that the “outrages” be checked.

But in Forsyth, there were landowners who disagreed with the governor’s argument that black workers were a vital part of the state’s economy. They argued that farming was fast becoming “a white man’s job,” as the banker Benjamin Hunt put it in the
Atlanta Constitution
. Citing statistics from “The ‘Big Cotton’ Counties” in the 1910 census—a category that in his analysis included Forsyth—Hunt declared that the most productive Georgia counties were invariably those that “show an excess of white farmers,” while the least productive “show an excess of negro.”

There were many explanations for this disparity in the productivity of “white” and “black” counties, including the barriers to credit faced by African Americans, their inability to purchase the best
parcels of land, and the myriad ways in which the culture and legal system of the Jim Crow South was stacked against them. Nonetheless, Hunt made a case for viewing Georgia’s cotton empire as a product of Caucasian ingenuity and “Caucasian living,” as he put it. “We are indebted to the white race for the American success in cotton culture,” Hunt wrote, “not to negro slavery nor black labor.”

This was a revisionist history that denied what everyone in Georgia could see with their own eyes: that most cotton fields in the state were planted, tended, and harvested by black hands, and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Hunt’s argument that cotton was a “Caucasian crop” erased two centuries of toil by enslaved people and ignored the success of black farmers like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg. It also allowed whites to claim exclusive rights in a cotton empire that—at least in Hunt’s view—they and they alone had built.

But this still left the question of how landowners were ever going to make their crops in a place where African Americans had been banished, and banned from ever returning. From the earliest days of British colonialism, many whites had argued that forced labor was essential to farming in Georgia’s searingly hot, humid, and malarial climate, and that without the institution of slavery, whites would never make it on their own. As colonist Thomas Stephens put it in 1742,

The extraordinary Heats here, the extraordinary Difficulty and Danger there is in clearing the Lands . . . [and] the poor Returns . . . make it indisputably impossible for White Men alone to carry on Planting to any good Purpose. . . . The poor People of Georgia, may as well think of becoming Negroes themselves . . . as of hoping to be ever able to live without them.