Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (7 page)

In only a single generation, the Crows went from working fields their ancestors had owned before the war to being tenants and sharecroppers—plowing, planting, and harvesting for only a share of whatever they produced. In the wake of emancipation, this meant competing not just with other white renters but with a whole new class of free blacks, who many owners saw as more appealing tenants and employees than poor whites. In a Jim Crow South where African Americans were disenfranchised at the polls and powerless in the courts, landowners could hire and rent to poor blacks, secure in the knowledge that if there was ever a dispute over rent payments, crop shares, or wages, the white man’s word was sure to prevail.

AFTER BIDDING AZZIE CROW
a pleasant afternoon, census taker Ed Johnson made his way out through a yard teeming with children and spent the last few hours of daylight knocking on the doors of Buices and Gravitts, Dunaways and Hemphills, and the rest of the families that made up the village of Oscarville, which had a total population of just sixty-three people. The faces that appeared out of the shadows of kitchens and barns and the folks who hailed Johnson as they walked out of the corn rows were, almost without fail, white—at least until Johnson came to the end of Durand Road, where he knocked at one of the few black households on his route. There, just past the Waldrips, Johnson stood nodding and scribbling in his ledger for the last time that day, as he spoke with a fifty-eight-year-old man named Buck Daniel.

Born in 1852, Daniel left only one record of his existence prior to emancipation: whatever anonymous tally mark represents him in the 1860 census of Georgia slave owners. But by 1875, there is evidence of the Daniel family’s resilience—or at least some combination of the industry and luck that helped them make their way as free people. In the tax records from that year, Buck Daniel and his
father, Adam, had amassed what must have seemed like a small fortune to two former slaves: $100 in personal property.

Whether that sum represented savings from wages, profits from a stretch of good crops, a gift from a former master, or some combination of all three, by 1890 it was gone, and the tax collector reported that Buck Daniel had a “total estate” of five dollars. All that remains to hint at the story of his boom and bust in the postwar years is the fact that he moved several times, from one side of the Chattahoochee to the other, crossing the county line between Forsyth and neighboring Hall. At a time when black laborers were bullied and cheated with impunity by their white employers, it’s likely that Daniel’s trail back and forth across the river represents his willingness to move anywhere there was work, and his struggle to find terms that could support a growing family.

The turn of the century found Daniel on the Hall County side of the river, working for a white man named Calvin Wingo, one of the most prosperous landowners in the area. At forty-eight Daniel was then on his second marriage, to a woman named Catie Marr, with whom he fathered six children, including Jane Daniel and her younger brother Oscar. As if feeding all those mouths wasn’t burden enough, Buck and Catie had taken in four relatives in the late 1890s, when a younger sister named Nettie was widowed at twenty-two and left alone with three small children: Charlie, Erma, and Ernest Knox.

It was with this large clan in tow that at some point between 1900 and 1910 Buck and Catie moved to the little cluster of farms known as Oscarville, on the eastern edge of Forsyth County. Oscarville was overwhelmingly white, but there was decent land to rent, and plenty of work for “hired men” on the farms of the biggest landowners. Buck and Catie’s two oldest sons, Harley and Cicero, nineteen and seventeen, were hired out to a white man named William Bagby, while the rest of the family rented a place a mile north of
the Oscarville crossroads, at the end of Durand Road. They worked land owned by Marcus Waldrip, whose own hired man, living next door to the Daniel family, was one of the few other black people in that section of the county. His name was Rob Edwards—a tall, strongly built man in his twenties. Not long after they arrived, “Big Rob” began courting Buck’s pretty teenage daughter Jane, who by 1912 had become his common-law wife.

As white farmers like Bud Crow labored on in the long economic shadow of Reconstruction, they kept a wary eye on black neighbors like Rob Edwards and Buck Daniel. For longtime residents like the Crows, whose people had lived in Oscarville for so long that it was often referred to as “Crowtown,” the arrival of Edwards, Daniel, and Daniel’s crew of strapping young sons meant competition for scarce work, and even more options for white landowners when it came time to choose the next year’s laborers and tenants. As Ed Johnson closed his census book, wished Buck Daniel a good evening, and walked back down the hill, he would have passed Tom Crow’s general store, Mt. Zion School, the Oddfellows Hall, and the clean white spire of Pleasant Grove Church. In May of 1910, as Johnson unhitched his horse and headed back toward Cumming, Oscarville must have looked like any other quaint little farming village in north Georgia.

NOT LONG AFTER
the Daniel clan moved into Forsyth, something happened to Nettie Knox, for she disappears from the archival records without a trace, leaving her three children—Charlie, fifteen, Ernest, fourteen, and Erma, twelve—to fend for themselves. George Jordan’s daughter Ruth was fourteen in 1912, and she recalled that Nettie’s children “had become homeless” not long after they moved into the county and were barely surviving even with whatever help their uncle Buck and aunt Catie could afford to give. “I remember passing these children,” Jordan said,

when it was very cold and seeing these poor kids huddled together outside [an] old abanden [chicken] coop . . . with 2 or 3 joints of old stove pipe for a chimny. They was burning chipps and sticks and roasting red wormes . . . we called them fish wormes. These children had picked cotton for my father many times.

Charlie, Ernest, and Erma must have been living on the edge of starvation, especially during the lean winter months, when there was no cotton to pick and little to scavenge or hunt. At some point Buck Daniel asked his sons Cicero and Harley to see if their white employer, William Bagby, had any work for their cousin Ernest, and in 1910 Bagby’s son Gilford offered to make Knox his “hired man.” The term itself was an exaggeration, given that Ernest Knox was only fourteen years old when Buck Daniel said he would now live and work at Mr. Bagby’s place. The Bagbys offered his best chance for a warm bed at night, a dry roof overhead, and better meals than roasted “fish wormes.”

Ernest Knox, October 2nd, 1912

On Monday, September 9th, 1912, Ruth Jordan woke to the news that Mae Crow, a close friend of her older sister Alice’s, had gone missing in the woods outside of Oscarville. “I [went] to schoole that morning,” Jordan recalled,

but no one except the teacher was there. So she and I both left and started out to join in the serch [for Mae]. But we had not gone very far before we seen a big crode coming. We stoped while the car that had the girl passed. At that time most cars was Fords, Moadle Ts. They had made some kind of stracher, and layed it on the top of the back and frount seat. We didn’t have many hospitals in our county so they carried her home.

Falling in with a group of people trailing behind the car, Jordan found the crossroads in Oscarville suddenly transformed into a crime scene, swarming with reporters who had driven up from Atlanta, law officers like Bill Reid and Sheriff William Crow of Hall County, and hundreds of whites from both sides of the river.

As people milled around the little village, Jordan said, their attention soon turned to a group of black boys who sat watching all the excitement from the yard of Pleasant Grove Church. Given that Grant Smith had barely escaped a lynch mob just two days before, these boys had good reason to keep an eye on the growing crowd of whites “wrought up” over the attack. “Almost everyone living in a 100 miles was there,” Ruth Jordan said,

and the colord boys wer laying on the grass at the church . . . [when] one of the leading citisons of the county . . . walked down wher they wer and talked with them a while. They all liked this man. He was nice to everyone. After a while the man started to go, then he turnd around and sayd, “I found this merro. Dos it belong to either of you boys?” Then he showed the glas to them. “Yes sir,” Ern Knox sayd, “It’s mine.”

According to the
Atlanta Constitution
, this “merro”—that is, mirror—had been found in the woods near Mae Crow’s body, and a label on the back “indicated that it had been bought at Shackelford’s store, and Mr. Shackelford identified it as having been purchased by [Ernest Knox].” The discovery of the hand mirror was seen by many whites as the smoking gun of the case, and taken as proof that it was Ernest Knox who had attacked Mae Crow. But neither the newspapers nor prosecutors mentioned that when he was first questioned, Gilford Bagby’s young “hired man” freely admitted that the mirror was his and made no attempt to conceal that he had bought it from Mr. Shackelford. Knox seemed to have no idea that claiming it might implicate him in a crime.

Once the “leading citison” heard that the mirror belonged to Ernest Knox, he decided to continue their conversation in private. “The man ask Ern if he would ride over to a nearby house for some water,” Jordan said,

[and] after they had got away frome the crowd the man stopped his car and told Ern to get out. He then told Ern that he knew that Ern had don the crime, but he had to tell who was with him. At first the black boy denyed that he knew.

Then this man taken the rope of the well and tyed it around Ern’s neck, then the boy seen if he didn’t tell the whole thing he would be hung.

Soon newspapers all over the state would claim that Ernest Knox had freely admitted to attacking Mae Crow, but what the journalists failed to mention was that this so-called confession occurred during a form of torture known as a mock lynching.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, newspapers often reported with amusement on the tactic of terrorizing black suspects until they confessed. During the same month that Knox was lured to the well in Oscarville, for example, a Minnesota paper ran the headline “Mock Lynching Extorts Truth” and told how Sheriff Andrew Stahl of Kenosha, Wisconsin, had used “novel means to frighten [a] negro.” According to the story, after a black man was accused of grand larceny, “a ‘mob’ was organized by Sheriff Stahl in a realistic manner. The negro was overpowered and apparently about to be strangled when he broke down and confessed.”

For victims of such interrogation, there was little difference between real and “mock” violence, since a ruse arranged to fool a suspect could—and often did—change mid-performance into a summary execution, especially if the victim refused to cooperate. Attacked by white men who quickly turned from a play-acting “mob” into an actual one, the African American man in Kenosha did the only thing that might save his life: he confessed to whatever crime his white attackers claimed he had committed.

Ruth Jordan’s letter is the only surviving account of the minutes that led up to Ernest Knox’s “confession,” and her story leaves little doubt that Knox was presented with the same desperate choice as the man in Kenosha. Knox had every reason to think he was about to die when a man “taken the rope of the well and tyed it around [his] neck,” and he knew that a white man could do anything he pleased to a poor black teenager—particularly one who stood accused of attacking a white girl. It is easy to imagine that, as the rope tightened around his throat, Ernest Knox finally opened his mouth and, between gasps, agreed with everything the man said. When the “leading citison” told people in Oscarville what Ernest Knox had admitted at the well, reporters ran off in search of the nearest telephone. By the next morning, news that the killer had
“Confessed His Crime” was splashed across the front pages of the
Atlanta Constitution
and the
Georgian
.

BUT GIVEN THAT
rape accusations often led to castration, torture, and burning alive for black suspects in Jim Crow Georgia, is it even plausible to think that a black teenager who had raped and bludgeoned a white woman would choose to spend the next morning watching hundreds of people flood into Oscarville, rather than running as far and as fast as the night could take him? If Knox were guilty, would he have simply gone back to bed at Gilford Bagby’s place, then spent the morning watching the sheriff and his deputies comb the area for clues?

By all accounts, the investigation had turned up nothing until a rich white man draped an arm around Knox’s shoulder, then led him off to get a drink of water from a nearby well. By the time they returned, Sheriff Reid, Mayor Harris, and the rest of the white people of Forsyth had exactly what they needed: a “barefooted, fiendish-looking” black rapist who had admitted to “the dastardly assault.”

Even decades later, in 1980, Ruth Jordan was careful not to reveal the identity of Knox’s attacker at the well, but he was almost certainly a man named Marvin Bell. The
Georgian
reported that Bell was among a large group of Cumming men who drove to Oscarville “eager to unearth a clue that might unravel the mystery,” and the
Gainesville News
said that soon thereafter, “Knox confessed and was rushed here in an automobile by Mr. Marvin Bell.” As a scion of one of the county’s oldest and wealthiest families, the thirty-five-year-old Bell certainly fit Ruth Jordan’s description of a “leading citison” who was well liked by everyone.