Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (15 page)

WHEN IT WAS
time for the trials to resume, sentries of the Fifth Regiment admitted only “court officers, attorneys, newspaper correspondents, talesmen summoned for jury service, witnesses . . . and a few prominent citizens.” Those prominent citizens included Mayor Charlie Harris, members of wealthy clans like the Bells, the Hockenhulls, and the Stricklands, and others from the moneyed families of Cumming. It was these men who had convinced Governor Brown to send troops in the first place, and they who had the most to gain from a quick and convincing trial.

In that first week of October, corn, cotton, and tobacco leaves waited in rows all over the county, ripe and ready to be picked. Yet one field after another stood empty of the workers who were
usually busy with the fall harvest. To the merchants, planters, and large landowners who showed their passes at the courthouse fence and took their seats for the afternoon session, it mattered little whether the harvest had come to a halt because black families were being driven out or because poor whites were all in town to see the Fulton Blues. For such “prominent citizens,” what mattered more than anything else was getting the trials over with, and the pickers of the county back into the fields.

Even Charlie Harris—who had stared down a lynch mob on the courthouse steps—had a stake in expediency, since he had now sold stock in the Atlanta Northeastern Railroad Company worth $1.2 million. After a month during which the Atlanta papers were filled with stories of rape, murder, lynchings, and arson in Forsyth, Harris and his partner J. P. Brooke, lead prosecutor in the trials, were eager to show investors, potential clients, and government regulators that the foothills were no longer the outlaw territory of old but a quiet, profitable place in which to do business. And like so many upper-class whites in the Jim Crow South, they seem to have decided that if the price of peace was sending a couple of black teenagers to the gallows after a one-day trial—well, then so be it. As the trial resumed and proceeded at a record pace, it must have become clear to the prisoners that these elegantly dressed white men were no less dangerous than the crackers and “mountaineers” out on the square—and no less intent, in their way, on fastening a noose before sundown.

JUDGE MORRIS HAD
planned to decide the Knox, Daniel, and Howell cases in a single day, but as people settled into their seats after the recess, they could sense that the proceedings still might not satisfy the mob outside the courthouse windows. “Civil and military officials are afraid,” Angus Perkerson wrote in the
Atlanta Journal
, that if “all of the negroes are not convicted and sentenced
to hang the crowd will be inflamed to a dangerous point.” The trouble, Perkerson said, was that while Knox, Daniel, and Howell could be sentenced to death if convicted on rape and murder charges, Jane Daniel was charged with an accessory crime and faced a maximum penalty of imprisonment. Ed Collins and Isaiah Pirkle were held only as witnesses.

As Catron took his place next to the bench and scanned the returning crowd, he was already playing out in his mind a worst-case scenario: that the mob would accept nothing short of the death penalty for all six prisoners and, failing that, would try to take them by force. “If any one of the six [fell] into the hands of the crowd,” Perkerson wrote, “it is admitted by everyone . . . that he would be lynched immediately.” As the trial resumed, Catron ordered his men to have their rifles loaded and bayonets fixed.

The subpoena list for
State of Georgia v. Ernest Knox
includes a number of witnesses the audience expected to hear from during the afternoon session. Among these were Sheriff Reid and four white neighbors of the Crows: Joseph McClure, W. R. Stovall, Roysten Smith, and C. O. Wallis. These men could be counted on to describe the all-night search for Mae and the discovery of her body in the woods outside Oscarville. By calling them, the prosecution planned to forge ahead with its simple plan: have witness after witness recount Mae’s gruesome injuries and drive home the fact that on the morning she was found, Ernest Knox had “confessed his crime.”

But the prosecution’s parade of circumstantial evidence never even began, for as soon as Morris took his seat, Solicitor General J. P. Brooke rose and announced that instead of the planned group of white farmers, the prosecution wished to call one Jane Daniel, colored, of Forsyth County. As a petite young woman walked toward the front of the courtroom, a stir passed through the crowd. “Jane Daniel was a complete surprise,” the
Constitution
reported, “even
to her own counsel, who conferred with her yesterday afternoon as usual and were told nothing by her. This morning, however, she narrated the entire revolting story of the crime to Sheriff Reid, and to Herbert Clay, assisting prosecuting attorney.”

But if Jane Daniel had freely chosen to testify against her brother and cousin, as the papers claimed, is it really plausible that she would have volunteered that story to Bill Reid and Eugene Herbert Clay? Reid, the man who a month earlier had abandoned his post as a mob was threatening to lynch Jane’s husband, Rob? And Clay, an attorney for the prosecution? These were men Jane Daniel had every reason to fear, and it seems far more likely that during their late-night conversation in Reid’s pasture, the judge and lawyers had made Jane Daniel an offer she couldn’t refuse: that she might save herself and some of the other prisoners if she would only take the witness stand, look into the eyes of the people who had murdered her husband, and tell them exactly what they wanted to hear.

ACCORDING TO THE
Constitution
, once Jane was been sworn in, she told a hushed gallery how her cousin Ernest Knox had met “a crowd of negro friends returning from Sunday afternoon church services, [then] went home with them.” She confirmed earlier testimony that Knox had spent the evening of September 8th at Ed Collins’s house, and that as he and Rob Edwards left, they asked to borrow a lantern, then headed off “in the direction of the Crow place.”

But it was here that Jane departed from what the audience had already heard, and seemed to offer, for the first time, an eyewitness account. According to the papers, Jane told prosecutors that earlier in the evening Ernest had “accosted [Mae] on the road [where] she was dragged into the woods, and knocked insensible with a rock. . . . Her body was dragged to a point 120 yards away from the road and there, after being cruelly treated, she was left for dead.”

Jane went on to tell how late that night Oscar, Ernest, and her husband, Rob, appeared before her, their faces lit by the glow of the lantern. She claimed that they forced her to walk to a secluded place in the woods, where all four stood staring down at Crow’s unconscious body. The men threatened to kill her, Jane said, if she did not hold the lamp as “the negroes satisfied their lustful passions on the insensible body of the victim.” It is easy to imagine the howls that erupted in the courtroom—as Judge Morris banged his gavel and called for order, as reporters scribbled frantically, and as the guards surrounding Jane’s chair gripped the stocks of their rifles and glanced nervously at Catron.

Jane’s story horrified whites, but it must have also filled many with relief, since her account allowed all those who had taken part in the killing of Rob Edwards to decide once and for all that the lynching had been not a gruesome communal murder but a case of old-fashioned frontier justice. Anyone could see how young Ernest Knox was as he sat listening to his cousin’s story, but Jane’s testimony convinced the crowd that however harmless he looked, Knox was one of Forsyth’s bloodthirsty black rapists, and a murderer who would soon “take [his] departure from Cumming to hell.”

THERE IS NO
indication that Knox’s court-appointed lawyers cross-examined Jane or in any way challenged her testimony. But there are a host of questions a defense attorney might have asked. If Knox had indeed encountered Mae Crow on the road and for some reason assaulted her, would he not—in the world of Jim Crow Georgia—have simply run for his life? Is it within the realm of possibility that he would have walked several miles in order to find Rob Edwards, Oscar Daniel, and Jane Daniel, then led them back to the scene of the crime, with the purpose of gang-raping Crow’s unconscious body? Surely if he had told Rob Edwards and Jane Daniel of such an attack, their first move would have been to get Ernest Knox as
far away from the mobs of Forsyth as possible. Instead, the next morning found him watching all the excitement on the lawn of Pleasant Grove Church—looking for all the world like a boy with nothing to hide.

Jury deliberations lasted nineteen minutes. Then, at 4:08 p.m., the door to the courtroom opened, and the twelve white men of the jury filed back toward their seats. When Judge Morris called for their verdict, foreman Tom Pool rose and said, “We the jury find the defendant guilty.” Morris quieted the boisterous crowd, then informed Knox that in the morning he would be sentenced for the rape and murder of Mae Crow.

HAVING SHOCKED THE
courtroom once, Jane Daniel was forced to give an encore during the second prosecution of the day, though this time her performance was witnessed not by a packed gallery but two small teams of lawyers, a dwindling row of reporters, and a handful of weary militiamen. After at last hearing the horror story they’d craved, and cheering the conviction of Ernest Knox, hundreds of white people who had come to see the trials streamed out of town, hurrying to make it home before dark. By sundown it was so quiet on the Cumming square that as Oscar Daniel’s trial ground toward its inevitable conclusion, a reporter could hear the crackle of the Fifth Regiment’s campfires through the open windows, and the clank of spoons on tin bowls, as “the choice tenors of the regiment . . . crooned sentimentally.”

The journalists, too, were losing steam as they listened to the day’s eighth hour of testimony, and as Jane was forced to repeat the whole lurid tale: of three black men raping and killing Mae Crow, of her brother Oscar’s role in the attack, and of how she stood holding the lantern while he, Ernest, and her husband, Rob Edwards, took turns raping Crow. The few spectators left surely jeered and hissed at Oscar, as they had at his cousin Ernest, and the closest anyone
came to sympathy was when a reporter described the eighteen-year-old Oscar Daniel as “a shade more human-looking than Knox.”

Unlike his cousin, who’d “confessed his crime” to Marvin Bell, Oscar Daniel maintained his innocence throughout the trial, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. And in Jane’s story, Oscar was only later drawn into a plot that had been begun by Knox and Edwards. Even to whites eager for a hanging, Oscar seemed the least culpable of the three. As he sat in his handcuffs, watching his sister through the candlelight and listening as her words quietly sealed his doom, at least a few jurors must have seen before them not a fiendish black rapist but a frightened teenage boy.

The jurors in the second case deliberated for nearly an hour. When Morris finally asked for a verdict, foreman Ed Johnson announced, “We the jury find the defendant guilty.” It was 9:20 p.m., and even the low murmur of the soldiers in their tents had fallen silent. A hoarse-throated Morris rose and declared that Oscar Daniel, guilty of rape and accessory to murder, would be sentenced first thing in the morning.

After more than twelve hours, both cases were closed, and as the judges and lawyers gathered their things and walked out onto the Cumming square, they passed the last spectators heading home, as well as a few of Major Catron’s sentries, still patrolling the deserted streets. For their own safety, Ernest, Oscar, Jane, and the rest of the prisoners spent the night not in the rickety old jail but deep inside the courthouse, at the center of the Fifth Regiment’s bristling ring of protection. Judge Morris, who had complained to a reporter that he had been denied his customary morning nap, finally settled back into his bed at a local boardinghouse.

In an adjacent room, another of Leo Frank’s lynchers, Eugene Herbert Clay, must have felt pleased with how the day’s surprises had unfolded. Not only had both men been convicted, as expected, but Jane’s testimony had given the whole town the eyewitness
account they’d been longing to hear for more than a month. Politicians in Atlanta could criticize Forsyth all they wanted for the lynching of Rob Edwards. But Clay knew—in light of Jane’s lurid tale—that if such a thing had happened to their own daughters, they, too, might have picked up a crowbar.

A TREMENDOUS RAINSTORM
passed over Cumming a few hours after the trials, and, according to one reporter, “All things changed at midnight . . . as water trickled under the [militia’s] tents and sentries stood guard soaked to the skin.” The next morning, as Judge Morris walked toward the courtroom, he found that where thousands of people had swarmed the day before, now there were only muddy puddles and a few weary, rain-soaked sentries. They stood at attention as he passed, and Morris, himself a former captain of the Marietta Rifles, was so impressed that he decided to devote a majority of the morning’s session to praising what he called the “courageous and gentlemanly” conduct of the troops.

But first there was the business of sentencing two black convicts to die, which Morris dispensed with in short order. Taking the bench at nine a.m., he told Ernest Knox to rise, then ordered that Knox be “hanged by the neck until he is dead and may the Lord have mercy on his soul.” Morris sentenced Oscar Daniel to die in the same manner. Georgia law required a waiting period of at least twenty days between conviction and execution, and Morris granted the men exactly one extra day of life, setting October 25th as the date for the double hanging.

The judge then turned to his main subject for the day: the exemplary conduct of the Fifth Regiment. As Knox and Daniel were led out of the courtroom, they passed the square-jawed Major Catron, standing at attention as photographers jostled for position and as the judge turned in his seat and spoke directly to the commander. The two boys ducked their heads and shuffled out into the hallway,
and the last thing they heard from the man who had condemned them to die were words of praise for the white community’s “admirable restraint” and his sympathy for all that the soldiers had endured during their service. “It speaks well for the citizens of Forsyth,” Morris said, “that they should have exercised the degree of restraint that they did.” He ended with an encomium to the Fulton Blues that was reprinted in all the papers. “I want to thank both officers and men,” Morris said. “Every member of this detachment has been courageous and gentlemanly. They have endured much hardship . . . and they came here at a sacrifice.”