Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (23 page)

But after two hundred years of dependence on black workers, Benjamin Hunt argued that white farmers could now prosper without
them—thanks to technological advances in the early twentieth century. “I desire the world to realize . . . that the economic changes wrought by machinery [have] revolutionized all labor conditions,” Hunt said. “To think correctly we must think in terms of this era of free white labor, and not in terms of the black labor of the past.”

FACED WITH COMPLAINTS
from the women in his own household, Ansel Strickland, the Cumming doctor who had hosted the executions of Knox and Daniel, started thinking along the same lines as Benjamin Hunt in early 1913. As the upper-class families of Cumming struggled to adapt to Forsyth’s new “whites only” era, Strickland wrote a letter to the
North Georgian
, offering suggestions for how people unaccustomed to domestic labor could solve basic problems, such as washing clothes. “Well, old man,” Strickland began,

the negro is gone from Forsyth county and you had as well roll up your sleeves and follow me. For the last 33 years I have always hired my wife’s washing done by negroes, at a heavy expense, but on the morning of October 22nd, 1912, my negro washwoman informed me that she was going to leave my washing for my wife to do, [saying] that the people did not give the negro proper protection. I told her in so many words that if I had to sell my daughter’s virtue to negro boys in order to retain her as a wash woman, she could
get
.

Having fired his servant for daring to protest Forsyth’s waves of mob violence, Strickland told readers that he

at once ordered improved wash pots, tubs, wringers, etc., and prepared to take the hard part of the washing onto my and the boys’ shoulders. [This new] wash tub is no play thing. . . . When I saw northern women washing with improved machinery they made the wash-tub day a picnic [compared to] the old Georgia way of washing.

Armed with his modern equipment, and reconciled to the fact that his black servants were gone and would never be coming back, Strickland proudly declared that his family had “adopted the cooperative plan of washing at my house, and we are independent of the negro. . . . I endeavor to make wash day a day of pleasure to the ladies.”

Strickland was clearly proud to be “independent of the negro,” and he wanted to convince others in Forsyth that new machines could more than make up for the sudden loss of black workers—who represented one-tenth of the county’s population in the census of 1910 but a much larger percentage of its labor supply. Just as Benjamin Hunt imagined new machinery and chemical fertilizers making up for the loss of black field hands, Strickland presented to the wives of Forsyth a vision of home life in which the modern washtub and wringer would more than compensate for the loss of maids and butlers and laundresses, and make domestic chores “a pleasure to the ladies.”

Rich planters like Strickland and Hunt had reason to feel optimistic in the second decade of the twentieth century, as life on the American farm was just beginning to be revolutionized by new technologies. As early as the 1870s, inventors had experimented with steam-powered farm equipment, but because of their massive weight and high cost, steam engines had never competed seriously with the horse and the mule, particularly in regions like the Georgia hill country, which was dominated by small-scale farmers, working plots that rarely yielded enough profit for such a major investment. There were still twenty-one million horses and mules in the United States in 1900, averaging four per farm, and they pulled plows, threshing machines, harrows, and reapers and served
as the primary means of transportation for rich and poor alike. Refinements in internal combustion had led to the widespread adoption of stationary gas engines around the turn of the century; these didn’t replace the horse, but they were increasingly used for tasks like pumping water, churning butter, and—yes—washing clothes.

Then in 1902, a truly revolutionary invention was introduced: the first prototypes of self-propelled, gasoline-powered traction engines, which quickly became known simply as “tractors.” These smaller, more reliable, cheaper machines allowed farmers to increase production not only by supplanting the horse and mule at plowing time but also by mechanizing much of the labor-intensive work of harvesting. When, in 1913, Ansel Strickland described the Forsyth County farm of the future, he imagined whites solving their labor problem by replacing the vanished “negro farmhand” not with the equivalent class of white workers but with tireless, gleaming new machines. That is precisely what happened when, just four years later, Henry Ford introduced the first truly practical small tractor, the Fordson, which sold for less than $1,000 in 1917 and soon became the Model T of the agricultural world.

Even today, Forsyth is known all over Georgia for its annual parade of early-twentieth-century tractors, which blow their whistles and spout billowing clouds of smoke on the Cumming square every Fourth of July. For longtime residents, the brightly colored, painstakingly restored tractors are a symbol of the “good ol’ days,” back when farming was still the main business of a county that has now become an affluent suburb of Atlanta.

Never mentioned at the annual tractor parade is the fact that such machines first rolled into Forsyth in the years immediately after the racial cleansing, when farmers looked out across their stubbled fields and realized that for the first time in the history of the county, every acre of arable land would have to be plowed
and planted by white hands. “Machinery directed by white workers” was the future, at least according to men like Benjamin Hunt. When the first gas-powered tractors sank their disks into the red soil of Forsyth, whites must have hoped that these new machines would transform the county into a much more prosperous place—as, indeed, they did. Bands of armed white men had cleared the land of black homes, black churches, and black bodies, and now the tractor would release it from the competition, and complications, of free black labor.

DURING THE SAME
years that Forsyth planters were struggling to make do with their new whites-only labor force, President Woodrow Wilson was engaged in another form of racial cleansing, at the very highest levels of the United States government. A Virginia Democrat who had spent his formative years in Augusta, Georgia, as the son of a pro-slavery minister, Wilson came to prominence as president of Princeton University, then governor of New Jersey. In 1912, he defeated Progressive nominee Theodore Roosevelt in the presidential election, having campaigned as a reformer and a friend to the working class. His vow to help “the man on the make” garnered a great deal of support from black voters—who hoped for the best despite Wilson’s southern roots and his outspoken defense of segregation at Princeton, where, in 1909, he had deemed it “altogether inadvisable” for black students to enroll. Wilson had tried to reassure black voters at the height of the 1912 campaign, issuing a statement that they could count on him for “absolute fair dealing.”

In the March 1913 issue of
The Crisis
, W. E. B Du Bois wrote an open letter to the newly inaugurated president, making it clear that support from African American voters came with an expectation: that Wilson would be true to his word and use the power of the presidency to work for racial equality. “Sir,” Du Bois began,

Your inauguration . . . is to the colored people a momentous occasion. . . . We black men by our votes helped put into power a man who [can] become the greatest benefactor of his country since Abraham Lincoln. . . . The fight is on, and you, sir, are this month stepping into its arena.

We want to be treated as men. We want to vote. We want our children educated. We want lynching stopped. We want no longer to be herded as cattle on street cars and railroads. We want the right to earn a living, to own our own property and to spend our income unhindered and uncursed. . . . In the name then of that common country for which your fathers and ours have bled and toiled, be not untrue, President Wilson, to the highest ideals of American Democracy.

By forsaking Republican William Howard Taft and endorsing Wilson, Du Bois had helped the new president win more African American votes than any previous Democratic presidential candidate, and the
Crisis
editor clearly wanted to remind Wilson of the debt he owed black America.

It didn’t take long for Wilson to reward Du Bois’s faith with a stinging rebuke: he soon empowered cabinet members to racially segregate the bathrooms and cafeterias in government buildings and to segregate a civil service that had been integrated since the days of Reconstruction. Wilson ignored African American candidates when making new political appointments, and when, in 1914, the black newspaper editor Monroe Trotter went to Washington to demand that the president “undo this race segregation in accord with your duty as President and with your pre-election pledges to colored American voters,” Wilson was unrepentant. Segregation of the federal government “is not humiliating,” the president told Trotter and his delegation of black leaders. It was, he said, “a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” Wilson then
had the delegation removed from the White House, saying that if black leaders ever wanted another audience with the president, they would need “another spokesman.” He scolded Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, saying, “Your manner offends me. . . . Your tone, with its background of passion.”

Wilson held office from 1913 to 1921, and throughout his two terms he continued to implement Jim Crow codes in Washington, with African American applicants deemed ineligible for most government jobs and both the Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Postal Service segregated by order of senior cabinet members. Wilson documented his own bigotry in 1918 when, in his
History of the American People
, he wrote that “a great Ku Klux Klan” had risen up after the Civil War and helped rid the South of “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes.”

Having such a man in the White House emboldened white supremacists across the nation and particularly in the South, which Wilson had once called home. Black postal workers and government employees were fired all over the region and were barred from state jobs that had been one of the few paths to the middle class open to people of color. In 1913, the director of the Internal Revenue Services’ office in Atlanta left little doubt that Wilson’s support of segregation was a devastating blow to all African Americans, and particularly in places like Georgia. “There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South,” he said. “A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.”

YET EVEN AS
Wilson reversed the gears of racial progress in Washington, and as Forsyth County men like Ansel Strickland touted the benefits of a racially cleansed labor force, many of the wives of Cumming were growing weary of life without their black “help,” and exhausted from replacing all that domestic labor themselves. With the racial purge of 1912 still just a few months old, Laura
Hockenhull had had enough, and she urged her husband, Cumming doctor John Hockenhull, to reach out to his former employees wherever they had fled and somehow lure them back. No doubt enticed by the wages Hockenhull offered, and assured by him that they would be safe, three families—the Blakes, the Smiths, and the Grahams—moved back into their cabins on the Hockenhull property in early February of 1913 and tried to quietly resume their former lives.

Ophelia Blake, a fifty-three-year-old widow, had been the Hockenhulls’ maid and cook for many years before the night riders forced her to flee with the two youngest of her eight children, sons Louie and Adkinson, eighteen and sixteen. Before they were forced out, Alex and Flora Graham had also rented on Hockenhull’s property, where they were raising sons Leonard, four, and Henry, two. Frank Smith, a farmhand, had lived there with his wife, Annie, and their four children: Byel, twelve, Eddie, eight, Roosevelt, six, and Lula, three.

That Laura Hockenhull’s servants agreed to come back at all is a testament to just how bleak the outlook was for the Forsyth refugees, particularly as fall turned to winter, and as the steady work of the harvest came to an end. While they must have taken some comfort in returning as a group, they also lived a precarious existence, completely cut off from the black community they’d once known, and shielded from the white mobs and lynchers only as long as they stayed within the confines of Hockenhull land.

If the quiet that greeted their return gave Ophelia Blake hope that Forsyth might once again be safe, those hopes were soon shattered. The
Atlanta Constitution
reported that on the night of Wednesday, February 19th, 1913, “persons unknown” crept onto the Hockenhull place. They slid bundled sticks of dynamite into the crawl spaces under the “negro cabins” where the Blakes, the Grahams, and the Smiths were sleeping with their children, then
unspooled a long coil of fuse and crouched in the dark, where the only visible sign of their presence was the brief flare of a match. According to one witness, the explosion at Dr. Hockenhull’s place “aroused practically the entire town . . . [and] the concussion shook many buildings. The negroes . . . who had recently returned to Cumming were terror stricken. The dynamiters made their escape before the townspeople had ascertained what had taken place.”

The newspapers make no mention of whether the three families lived or died, and at this point they disappear entirely from written records of the county. Ophelia Blake, Frank Smith, and Alex Graham had tried, however cautiously and however quietly, to come home. The response, delivered in the dead of night, left no room for doubt. Forsyth was now a place for whites only, and even black people born and raised there were forced to heed the warnings of the night riders. Defying them, as the Hockenhulls and their tenants had done, was nothing short of suicidal.

The “negro cabins” at the edge of the Hockenhull property were left in a splintered heap, but the big house in which Hockenhull lived with his wife, Laura, was unscathed. Chastened by a visit from the nameless, faceless night riders, the doctor and his wife seem to have reconciled themselves to living in a racially cleansed world they didn’t support but were now too frightened to publicly oppose. There was an outpouring of affection from Forsyth residents when “Dr. John” died in 1922, and a notice in the paper said he had been “gentle, kind, and considerate to even the most humble who chanced to come in contact with him.”