Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (19 page)

After breakfast on the morning of Friday, October 25th, Reid made his way to the middle of Strickland’s pasture and began waving to the families who were staking out prime locations on the grassy banks. Dr. Lindorme, who was there to ensure that the hangings were carried out in a humane manner, was just as appalled as Catron:

The ground selected by the Sheriff . . . could not have been better for the purpose—to let the thousands of people who gathered to see it well done by him, THE SHERIFF. It made on the writer the impression of an execution as was indulged in in the early times of the 18th century.

As mules, horses, and buggies clogged Tolbert Street and Kelly Mill Road, and as thousands of new arrivals took their places on the hillsides, Catron’s men used barbed wire to create a one-hundred-yard cordon around the gallows. The only people allowed inside, said Catron, were “newspaper men, some two or three Sheriffs from adjoining counties, and a few relatives of the Sheriff of Forsyth County.” Basking in the attention of the crowd, and having used his position to give “a few relatives” the most coveted seats in the house, Reid filled the hours between daybreak and the arrival of the prisoners by showboating for the crowd and whipping them up for the hangings to come. “He was boisterous and went out where everybody could see him,” Catron reported,

and [he] wrestled with a young man, dragging him down the hill by the foot and in other ways [tried] to create a scene. The mob around the fence were constantly calling to him to let them know when he needed them, and he would call back to them that he would do so. He was constantly yelling to the people around the fence outside. The Sheriff so conducted himself that if the sentence of the court could have been carried out without him I would have placed him under arrest for inciting to riot. . . . [He was] openly in accord with insurrection.

As the anticipation built, more and more people “took up their position on the hills above the pasture and waited,” witnesses said, “like eager crowds waited for a circus parade.” The audience included many “fathers and mothers with children on their arms” who “had full view of the execution . . . [since] the wooden fence around the scaffold was burned [and] every detail of the gruesome program could be seen from the hills.”

While Catron was disgusted by the “festive mood,” at no point were his troops challenged by members of the crowd, who seemed to realize that a lynching was now redundant, since Reid had arranged for them to witness all the pomp and drama of a state-sponsored killing. Still, as Knox and Daniel made the half-mile walk from the courthouse, their dread of the gallows must have been matched by a sense that at any moment the mob might grow impatient. As Catron put it, “Most of these people were merely idle spectators, but there was a large element of vicious and lawless people . . . and we had no way of distinguishing them.”

BEFORE THE HANGING
could begin, there was one more group of guests to be led through the military checkpoint and seated inside the deadline. When they appeared at the edge of the pasture, a hush fell over the crowd, and for the first time all morning the raucous men quieted down, mothers shushed their children, and even Bill Reid stopped hamming long enough to take off his hat and assume a somber pose.

More than five thousand people watched as a solider led Bud and Azzie Crow to their seats at the base of the gallows—where, as the bereaved parents of the victim, they would have the honor of seeing Knox and Daniel die before their eyes. They were followed by their twenty-year-old son Major, Mae’s oldest brother, then her younger siblings Ed, Lee, Rinta, the twins Obie and Ovie, seven-year-old Bonnie, and the baby of the family, eighteen-month-old Esta. This was the row of children Mae, the eldest daughter, had been on her way to fetch almost seven weeks earlier, when someone attacked her in the woods outside of Oscarville. For those gathered on the hillside, the sight was heartbreaking: Mae’s grieving mother and father, and their long line of mournful children trailing behind.

As was customary, the condemned prisoners were offered a chance to speak before they were led up onto the scaffold. Accounts of their last words differ. The
Forsyth County News
claimed that “shortly before his death Knox confessed, but Oscar Daniel carried his secret of the crime through the trap, denying his guilt to the moment of his death.” But another eyewitness said that “neither negro had a word to say [and] they went stolidly to their death, apparently unmoved by the fate that awaited them.”

According to a story passed down in the Crow family, soon after he was led through the barbed-wire cordon, Oscar Daniel turned and looked directly at Azzie Crow. Oscar held her eye, perhaps hoping to silently communicate to Azzie that whatever terrible thing had happened to her daughter, he’d had nothing to do with it. Either the newspapermen weren’t close enough to witness that fleeting exchange or they chose not to report it. And so, for forty years the story was a secret Mae’s mother kept to herself. Only in 1952, on her deathbed, did she admit to her daughter Esta that she still remembered the look on Oscar Daniel’s face, and had carried all her life a terrible fear that the boy was innocent.

Even if she had wanted to stop the executions at that point, there
is probably little Azzie could have done. The hillsides were packed with thousands of people who had come to see a double hanging, and Major Catron and his troops had strict orders: to ensure that a court-ordered death sentence was carried out. Whatever Azzie thought in that instant when her eyes met the eyes of Oscar Daniel, she said nothing, and a moment later Sheriff Reid and the two attending physicians rose and took their places. At a nod from Reid, Deputy Lummus led Knox and Daniel up a narrow wooden stairway and onto the scaffold, where two thick nooses hung at eye level.

IN 1912, HANGING
convicts “by the neck until dead” was still the primary means of execution, and it would be more than a decade before courts moved to the newly invented electric chair—which gained favor precisely because killing someone with a rope is not as simple as it sounds. American legal authorities had been hanging
prisoners as far back as the Jamestown Colony, but botched executions were common well into the twentieth century. State law stipulated that Forsyth County ordinary Herschel V. Jones design a scaffold and prepare nooses appropriate for the hanging of Knox and Daniel. Mobs may have simply thrown the end of a rope over a tree limb or the nearest telephone pole, but to play his role in the pageant of capital punishment, Jones had a number of problems to overcome.

Azzie Crow, mother of Mae, c. 1950

The goal was to drop the prisoner from such a height that as the slipknot tightened and the body reached the end of the rope, forces multiplied enough to fracture the spine. If all went according to plan, such a hanging was the most humane form of execution available at the time, resulting in instantaneous and bloodless death. But there were two unsavory risks: decapitation and strangulation. If the force generated by a fall was too great, the spine might be not just broken but completely severed. Many people on the hillsides overlooking the gallows must have recalled the 1900 hanging of a Georgia man named Benjamin Snell, whose execution went so awry that the
Atlanta Constitution
gave a lengthy account:

The heavy rope cut through the neck of the murderer and severed the windpipe and blood vessels, and practically pulverized the bones of the neck. The tough muscles at the back of [Snell’s] neck saved the total severance of the head from the body. Blood gushed from the severed arteries almost instantly, and dyed the white linen shirt and collar, and then flowed down the clothing, extending to the shoes. It was a spectacle that was most revolting . . . had the drop been four inches lower decapitation would certainly have resulted.

Clearly, whoever planned Snell’s hanging had gotten the figures wrong. The most common reason for such errors was a desire to avoid the equally gruesome alternative to decapitation: the sight of
a prisoner writhing, gasping, kicking, and moaning at the end of a rope, as he or she died a slow and noisy death by strangulation. This happened when the drop was too short and the forces were not enough to fracture the vertebrae. In such cases the prisoner eventually choked to death, but it could take as long as half an hour.

When, in early October, Herschel Jones had sketched the scaffold through which Knox and Daniel were to fall, he would have consulted a “table of drops” that was widely used to calculate the length of the noose, based on a convict’s body weight. The key fact for Jones was that the two prisoners to be hung in Forsyth were not grown men but adolescents. For Knox and Daniel, the charts would have recommended a nine- to ten-foot drop—a height normally reserved for hanging women. To snap their necks, Herschel Jones needed a high scaffold and two unusually long ropes.

AFTER WEEKS OF
tension and violence, the ritual up on the platform took less than a minute. Theo Wills, the pastor of Cumming’s First Baptist Church, led the crowd in a brief prayer, during which even the rowdiest spectators fell silent. According to the
Forsyth County News
, when Wills finally opened his eyes and looked up at the heavens, “Deputies Gay Lummus and Monroe Jones assisted in tying the hands and feet of the negroes, and in placing the noose about their necks.” The last thing Knox and Daniel saw before black sacks were placed over their heads was a hillside dotted with thousands of white faces—young and old, rich and poor, men, women, and children. Squinting into the midday sun, they would have seen the rooftops of the fine houses on Kelly Mill Road, the spires of a dozen little churches poking up through the treetops, and, on the edge of town, in the hazy gray distance, the familiar humpbacked silhouette of Sawnee Mountain.

They may have even seen, among the chauffeurs and buggy drivers on the margins of the crowd, a few of the last remaining black
people of Forsyth. By October 25th, the only families left were a few property owners reluctant to leave their homes in town, as well as those who worked as servants for Cumming’s wealthiest white residents. If such “town negroes” had known Knox and Daniel at all before their arrest, it would have been as illiterate, barefoot field hands from the farms out in Oscarville. What Knox and Daniel did not see was anyone from their own families: not Jane Daniel, not Buck or Catie, not Oscar’s older brother Cicero, Ernest’s sister, Erma, or his long-vanished mother, Nettie Knox. Side by side, as they’d been so often over the past month, the two cousins stood on the wooden platform as Deputy Lummus fixed the hoods that would shield their eyes—and hide their dying faces from the crowd. He lowered the nooses over their heads and cinched the slipknots tight.

With his usual flair for the dramatic, Reid let the prisoners stand for a long moment over the trap doors, which were held closed by a rope that ran under the gallows, ending in a knot around a post where the sheriff stood. Reid raised one arm, then, as the voices of thousands of whites gathered and roared down from the hillsides, “cut the rope trigger with a hatchet.” There was a “quick ker-thrash,” the
Forsyth County News
said, as “the souls of the negroes were rushed into eternity.”

Bud and Azzie Crow stared silently as the two bodies plunged into the shadows, jerked violently at the bottom of their ropes, then spun several times in one direction and slowly back the other way. “The trap was sprung at 12,” Dr. Lindorme said, “[and at] 12:11 the heart stopped beating.” Lindorme’s time line suggests that Herschel Jones had gotten his figures right, since eleven minutes is within the normal range of time it takes a prisoner’s heart to stop after the spinal cord has been severed. The crowd on the hillsides cheered and shouted their approval when, fifteen minutes later, the doctor signaled for the prisoners to be cut down. A legend passed down for
generations says that when the bodies of Knox and Daniel were laid out, and their hoods removed, Bud and Azzie Crow sat only inches away, at the center of the front row of spectators. An eighty-two-year-old Ruth Jordan remembered that “the famely of the murderd girl all had ringside seats” and said that when Reid “cut the rope that threw the boys, they fell almost at [their] feet.”

Having stood over his mutilated daughter just weeks earlier, and having seen Rob Edwards laid out on the courthouse lawn, Bud Crow found himself facing a corpse for the third time that fall. He rose from his chair and paused briefly over Knox and Daniel before a soldier led him and his family back out through the barbed-wire fence.

Hundreds of postcards and lynching photographs from the Jim Crow era attest to the fact that whites often gathered keepsakes from a lynching—and it was no different that day in Ansel Strickland’s field. The line of militiamen prevented spectators from slicing fingers and toes off the corpses as they filed past, but Major Catron couldn’t stop Reid and his men from cutting up the two hangman’s nooses and handing out small pieces as souvenirs.