Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (6 page)

Only then did it become clear that the militia’s orders were not just to prevent a lynching but to escort the prisoners safely out of the county. A witness described how “the soldiers formed a double column at the jail and marched the six negroes out between them to waiting autos.” At the end of one of the most dramatic days in Cumming’s history, the last of the would-be lynchers “followed the soldiers to the jail and watched the prisoners” as they passed through a gauntlet of militiamen. “Jeers, muttering, swearing, and hissing were heard” as the black men shuffled awkwardly in their chains. When they made it to a waiting car, they rode out of the county in silence, crouched in the floorboards all the way to the northern outskirts of Atlanta, where they were locked inside the Marietta jail.

Dawn found the Cumming square deserted but for a detachment of thirteen soldiers who had patrolled the streets all night, and the whole place eerily quiet. After breakfast, church bells rang all over the county, and men who the day before had begged Charlie Harris to give them “nigger for dinner” now sat in starched white shirts, hair combed neatly, prayer books and hymnals open in their laps. The last of the Candler Horse Guards returned to Gainesville around noon, and editors in Atlanta were quick to congratulate the governor on having stopped a lynching and prevented the outbreak of another “race war” in the Georgia hills. “Serious Race Riot Averted,” declared the
Atlanta Constitution
. “No more trouble in Cumming.”

Joseph Brooks and John Grice, the father and husband of Ellen Grice, came to town that Sunday afternoon for a special closed-door meeting with Mayor Harris and Blue Ridge Circuit Judge Newton A. Morris. There is no record of how long they talked or what was discussed, but the meeting raises some provocative questions. One
possibility is that Brooks and his son-in-law wanted assurances that there would be a speedy trial, and that Ellen Grice’s accused attackers, having escaped a lynch mob, would still be brought to justice.

But it’s also possible that there were details about Grice’s encounter with Toney Howell that her family wanted to keep out of the public eye. In 1912, few people dared to even speak of consensual liaisons between white women and black men, but that doesn’t mean everyone was blind to them. As early as 1892 the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells had denounced what she called “the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” Instead, Wells said, it was often white women who were filled with longing for young black men, and in many cases they claimed to have been raped only after being discovered in bed with black lovers. “There are many white women in the South,” Wells wrote, “who would marry colored men if such an act would not place them at once beyond the pale of society and within the clutches of the law.”

Such statements were still dangerous and highly transgressive in 1912, but privately many black people in Forsyth must have wondered whether Ellen Grice’s story was just one more version of the “old threadbare lie.” If Grice really had been found with “a negro man in her bed,” wasn’t it possible that she had invited him in? Whatever John Grice and Joseph Brooks discussed with Cumming officials, all the papers said was that the topic of their meeting “has not been made public.”

With the mobs dispersed, the prisoners safely housed in the Marietta jail, and Ellen Grice’s relatives reassured, Mayor Charlie Harris must have been eager to put the whole affair behind him, so he could get back to the business of planning Cumming’s future—as terminus of the Atlanta Northeastern Railroad Company. Harris was said to be “incensed” by reports that some black families were abandoning their homes in the wake of the attack on Grant Smith, and in an interview with the
Georgian
the young mayor tried to
counteract all the negative attention. “The town is perfectly quiet today,” he told reporters, “and the fears of the negroes have been quieted.”

Harris was keenly aware of the financial and political risk if people in Atlanta came to associate Cumming with lynchings and mob rule. As he headed home for supper on Sunday evening, he must have hoped that the arrest of Toney Howell would appease the most violent whites in the county, and that when Howell and the other prisoners came back to Forsyth, they would be judged not by a barbaric lynch mob but in the courts of the Blue Ridge Circuit. Harris was no doubt sincere when he said he believed Forsyth’s “race troubles” were nearly over, and pleased to think of himself as exactly the kind of law-and-order man favored by Governor Brown.

WHAT HARRIS DIDN’T
know was that at that very moment, eight miles east of Cumming, in a little farming village called Oscarville, a woman named Azzie Crow was just beginning to worry. Like nearly everyone in Forsyth, Azzie had gone to church that morning, then spent the afternoon visiting her sister Nancy, whose children were the same age as Azzie’s two youngest girls, Bonnie and Esta, and her twin boys, Obie and Ovie. Before leaving church, Azzie had asked her eighteen-year-old daughter, Mae, to come by her aunt Nancy’s house that afternoon, because Azzie would need help walking the little ones home.

But now suppertime had come and gone, the sun was low behind the treetops, and there was still no sign of Mae. Azzie finally walked the children home by herself, and along the way she stopped at the farm of George Jordan, whose daughter Alice said she’d seen Mae that afternoon. The two girls had stood chatting at the fork where Durand Road branches east off Waldrip, Jordan recalled, before Mae waved good-bye and hurried off in the direction of her aunt’s place.

As the hours passed and their worry grew, Bud Crow finally lit a lantern and walked up and down Durand calling to his daughter, until a neighbor heard and came out to help. Soon search parties were formed, and little groups fanned out over the pine forests, orchards, and cornfields of Oscarville. The last light faded, the lightning bugs came out, and distant voices could be heard in every direction, shouting Mae’s name as they searched and re-searched the two miles between Aunt Nancy’s place and the Crow household. Men tromped through the woods and along the river’s edge until dawn, when yet another group came back with their dogs and lanterns and walking sticks, and reported that there was still no trace of Bud Crow’s oldest daughter.

It was only in the next day’s papers that firsthand accounts began to appear, written by journalists who’d raced north when they heard that a beautiful white girl had gone missing—in the same north Georgia county where Ellen Grice was said to have survived a rape attempt just days before. “When daylight came” on Monday morning, one reporter wrote, “the search [was] renewed with increased vigor, the party dividing and going into all the remote and secluded spots.” It was then, he said, that “several of the searchers were trudging . . . alongside an old abandoned path just one mile from the Crow home, when they stumbled onto the prostrate form of the missing girl.”

After a night of searching and praying to hear Mae’s voice call back through the woods, or to find that she’d gone to visit a friend without telling anyone or had suffered some mishap that would explain everything, the men had stumbled upon Azzie Crow’s worst nightmare. According to witnesses, Mae had severe head wounds, “her throat was badly gashed, and she lay in a big pool of blood.” A reporter said that “she had evidently been there for many hours” but was “still alive [and] breathing faintly, and as quickly as possible she was placed in a conveyance and carried to her home,
[where] Dr. John Hockenhull and G. P. Brice . . . began a battle to save the girl’s life.”

News of the attack spread quickly, and by the time word reached Cumming, whites were “seething with bitterness.” A reporter for the
Georgian
noted that “the inflamed state of the public mind had not had time to quiet down” since the Grice assault, when hundreds of local men were driven away from their own town square at the point of a bayonet. Now, as people listened to accounts of Mae Crow’s gruesome injuries, many concluded that the black rapists of the county, emboldened by the protection of government troops, had once again attacked a white girl.

This time, though, the Candler Horse Guards and the Marietta Rifles were nowhere in sight, having been ordered back to their bases in Gainesville and Atlanta. That left this new wave of “race trouble” in the hands of the county sheriff and hundreds of outraged local whites. The governor, the mayor, and the adjutant general could talk all they wanted about due process and the “rule of law.” But to many people in Forsyth County, the time for a reckoning had arrived.

3

THE MISSING GIRL

L
ike most farmers’ children, Bud and Azzie Crow’s oldest daughter went to school only a few months each year, during the lay-by time between planting and harvest. Even then, she often missed a quarter of the school session, no doubt when she was needed to help her mother manage a household that included eight other children. The last written trace of Mae’s life before the
attack comes from 1910, when a man named Ed Johnson stood in the shadows of a front porch, chatting with Azzie Crow. As they talked, he opened a big black census ledger and dabbed the nib of a fountain pen to his tongue.

Mae Crow, circa 1912

Crow household in the census of 1910

Journalists would soon refer to Mae’s father as “one of the most prominent planters in this section,” a description that might call to mind a plantation owner in a white suit and string tie. In reality, though, Leonidas “Bud” Crow never owned property in the county. He rented the fields he worked and the house in which his family lived. But such had not always been the case for the Crows. In 1861, when Mae’s grandfather Isaac walked to Dawsonville and enlisted in the Confederate army, his family owned two hundred acres in and around Oscarville, worth more than $1,000. Yet by the end of his life, after Isaac Crow had fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War—surviving Manassas, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg—he was all but destitute.

Isaac Crow, who had gone to war as a property-owning yeoman farmer, came back to a very different life. In 1904, his daughter Nancy wrote on a pension application that her father now had “no
property to dispose” and listed as the reason for requesting government support that the old man was “physically . . . run down and worn out.” Asked how Crow had supported himself during the previous year, a family friend said, “He tries to farm . . . he and his wife managed to make [a living] such as it was.” Asked what property they owned, the answer was “none.”

All over north Georgia, the war had left devastation in its wake, and the decades after the surrender at Appomattox brought a crippling shortage of credit to a region still struggling to recover. The crop-lien system instituted during Reconstruction meant that a man like Isaac Crow—who farmed land inherited from his father but lacked the cash to pay for labor, seed, and supplies—financed each spring’s planting by borrowing against the fall harvest to come. But if there was a drought, or a killing frost, or some other stretch of bad luck, he could find that he had absolutely nothing to show for a year of backbreaking labor.

When farmers like Isaac Crow went to the banks looking for help, they could often borrow against their land, but many creditors made loans contingent on a shift from food crops to potentially more lucrative cotton—even in mountain counties like Forsyth, which were not nearly as well suited to it, in terms of climate and soil, as the southern half of the state. With so much cotton on the market, prices plummeted, squeezing small farmers even further and making it nearly impossible for them to repay loans charging 12 to 13 percent interest. As a Forsyth farmer put it in 1888, “It is said that 36 percent . . . of Forsyth county farms are mortgaged . . . and not one in fifty borrowers [are] ready to pay the principal. . . . This is the great danger that threatens us.” The combined effect of all these forces was that throughout the 1880s and ’90s, many north Georgia families literally bet the farm every time they planted, and it took only a few bad years before the banks foreclosed and they lost their land forever.