Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (24 page)

FEW AFRICAN AMERICANS
were desperate or reckless enough to cross the county line in the years that followed, but on those rare occasions when a black face did appear inside the “whites only” zone, he or she was usually arrested and charged with a crime. In April of 1914, there were reports that a thirty-two-year-old man
named Will Phillips had been caught trying to rob merchants in Cumming and was “followed by his tracks in the mud from Cumming to Buford, where he lived.” A journalist for the
Atlanta Constitution
wrote that “the negro was exceedingly clever” and claimed that

his method [was] to enter a merchant’s house in the stillness of the night and steal the keys to his store from the pockets of his trousers and then proceed to the store and divest the money drawer of its contents.

After hearing such accusations, Deputy Lummus arrested Phillips at his home in Buford and, just as he had done with the prisoners in 1912, delivered him to the Fulton Tower in Atlanta.

It is, of course, within the realm of possibility that Phillips did steal shop keys from sleeping merchants in Cumming, then empty the registers of stores on the town square. But given Forsyth’s reputation as the home of lynchers, arsonists, and shotgun-wielding night riders, it is difficult to believe that a black man intent on robbery would have chosen Cumming as his target. Will Phillips lived in Buford, a station on the Southern Railway, which offered its own wealth of money drawers stuffed with cash at the close of each business day. In order to accept contemporary accounts of his arrest, we have to believe that Phillips instead chose to walk thirteen miles west to Cumming, across a landscape where, only a few years earlier, thousands of blacks had been shot at and threatened, their homes dynamited and burned by white mobs.

It seems much more likely that Phillips was simply caught on the wrong side of the county line, and that his arrest was meant to drive home a familiar message: Forsyth was now out of bounds for African Americans. Phillips was brought back north to stand trial in May of 1914, and he spent what must have been a terrifying
night in the Forsyth County Jail. The next morning, he was found guilty on all charges and given the maximum sentence of forty years on the Georgia chain gang.

A similar case was recorded in October of 1915, when a black man named Joe Smith was accused of burglary in Cumming. According to the papers, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and “Sheriff W. W. Reid, of Cumming, was appointed to bring back Smith, who is said to be in Leon County.” Leon County lay just across Georgia’s southern border with Florida, but Bill Reid made the long journey anyway. Whatever had tempted Smith to trespass into the “white man’s county” of Forsyth, the arm of the law was long enough to reach him, even three hundred miles away.

Prosecutions like these helped cement Forsyth’s reputation as a bastion of white supremacy and Georgia’s most racist county. While some of the African American residents who returned may have come back seeking revenge, it seems far more likely that they were simply trying to recover their own lost and stolen possessions, whether livestock, furniture, farm equipment, or some other valuable left behind in the rush to escape the night riders. However briefly and however stealthily they tried to return, it was now clear that a black man could be arrested for simply
being
in Forsyth County.

14

EXILE, 1915–1920

T
he codes of racial segregation grew more rigid and oppressive throughout the South during Woodrow Wilson’s two terms in the White House, but no place was more committed to a complete racial cleansing than Forsyth. The county gained wider notoriety as people from other parts of the state found themselves face-to-face with the enforcers of a “whites only” rule that was extraordinary even by the standards of Jim Crow.

In September of 1915, the
Times-Enterprise
of Thomasville, in south Georgia, ran a story meant to shock readers with the fact that in the Georgia mountains there was “A County Without a Negro in It.” “Every family was run out of the county,” a reporter wrote, “and now an automobile cannot pass through and take a colored servant. This fact has just been ascertained by a physician who went there on a visit.” That physician was Hudson Moore, a wealthy Atlanta man who had business at the Forsyth County Courthouse on September 4th, 1915. When Moore drove north to Cumming, he took with him “a colored nurse and colored chauffeur” and left them waiting in the car while he went inside. Witnesses said that while Moore was speaking with officials, “he heard a commotion outside, and rushing out he found a crowd of
several hundred gathered around the two servants, threatening them. Mr. Moore took his two employees in his automobile and rushed them out of the county.”

What Dr. Moore clearly hadn’t realized was that by their very presence on the Cumming square, his black employees were committing what many local whites now regarded as a hanging offense. Not long after Moore’s harrowing trip, another group of white aristocrats would make the same mistake, when they took part in an automobile tour of the north Georgia hill country and brought their black chauffeurs onto the wrong side of the Chattahoochee River.

LOOKING TO CAPITALIZE
on a recent craze for glamorous driving tours, in the fall of 1915 the Georgia Chamber of Commerce organized an event called “Seeing Georgia,” which would lead a group of automobile enthusiasts through the northern region of the state, staying each night in a different town. “Seeing Georgia” attracted the interest of mayors, business leaders, and society women, as well as northern capitalists looking to make investments in the South. The list of participants included many bold-faced names, such as Charles J. Haden, president of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce; James Price, state commissioner of agriculture; and K. G. Matheson, president of Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. There were also prominent businessmen like A. C. Webb, manager of Atlanta’s first Studebaker dealership, and Wylie West, a former racecar driver who was now a regional manager for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.

When Cumming mayor Charlie Harris learned that the tour would bring a group of rich and powerful men into the foothills, he used his connections at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce to get Forsyth County added to the proposed route. Harris knew that “Seeing Georgia” was a rare opportunity to promote his home
county—and to show the whole state just how much money could be made there once the Atlanta Northeastern Railroad was complete.

The “Seeing Georgia” tourists en route to Forsyth, October 3rd, 1915

After driving from Macon to Milledgeville and then to Athens, the second leg of the tour entered the north Georgia mountains, where the tourists viewed the colorful fall foliage and spent a night near a state-of-the-art hydroelectric plant at Tallulah Falls. The group was then scheduled to turn back south toward Hall County, and from there to drive west, for a brief stopover at Cumming.

But during their lunchtime break in Gainesville, a group of Hall residents urged tour leaders to decline Charlie Harris’s invitation and skip Forsyth County altogether. The reason for their concern: many of the cars, carrying affluent white men and women, were being driven by uniformed black chauffeurs. After hearing warnings about rabid white mobs, several of the drivers asked for permission to go home by train from Gainesville, hoping to avoid the “white county” where Hudson Moore’s employees had nearly been lynched just a month before.

According to reporters, when Harris learned that the tourists might cancel their visit, he dispatched a messenger, who drove to Gainesville at breakneck speed. Harris’s man arrived just as tour organizers were debating whether or not to take a detour, and he assured the
participants that their black drivers would encounter no problems. The mayor of Cumming offered his personal guarantee of safety.

STEADY RAIN ON
the morning of Monday, October 4th, turned the red clay road between Gainesville and Cumming into a quagmire, and journalist Emma Martin, covering the “Seeing Georgia” tour for the
Macon Telegraph
, said the long line of automobiles needed frequent help from locals as they made their way west. “The good farmers of Hall county came to our rescue by the dozens,” she wrote, “and whenever we skidded they came on foot and on horseback, and went with us to the Forsyth county line.”

But as they rounded a curve and saw Browns Bridge coming into view, Martin learned that even the white farmers of Hall now thought of Forsyth as a world apart, and treated the county line as more than just a border between two local governments. “They would not cross the bridge,” Martin said,

because of our negro chauffeurs. Many times we were warned not to enter Forsyth . . . but we had the personal pledge of the mayor of Cumming, and of the better element of the community, that there would be neither trouble nor danger.

Having put their faith, and the lives of their drivers, in the hands of Charlie Harris, the tourists soon realized that they had made a serious mistake. After rattling over the Chattahoochee on the narrow, wooden-planked bridge, the long line of cars rolled into a sleepy little crossroads settlement that the maps referred to as Oscarville. It was exactly the kind of quaint rural village that the organizers had promised the tour would feature. But according to a reporter for the
Georgian
,

farmers at [the] hamlet spied a negro chauffeur in the car of W. A. McCullough, of Atlanta, and went after him. One threw a stick of stove wood that passed dangerously near the head of the frightened darky, and also near Mr. McCullough and his guests.

“When McCullough’s car hove into sight,” said another witness,

one of the men saw the negro chauffeur driving and shouted
“Look yonder, boys, get him, get him.”
As the car shot past, one of the men grabbed a stick and let fly. . . . From there on into Cumming there were frequent curses and threats and rocks hurled at the cars.

The tour’s genteel passengers came from some of the wealthiest families in Georgia, and it is easy to imagine their horrified faces as they peered out through muddy windshields and got their first look at the cursing, violent white “mountaineers” of Forsyth. Skidding and fishtailing over the rain-soaked roads, the black drivers raced out of Oscarville, and toward what they hoped would be a safe haven at the county seat.

A smiling Charlie Harris was waiting for them on the Cumming square, and after hearing reports of the “trouble” out in Oscarville, the mayor assured everyone that their ordeal was over, and that the black drivers were now perfectly safe. The
Constitution
said Harris was “most cordial and reassured the tourists that there would be no harm done to any one . . . [as] school children lined up and sang songs.” But when word spread that there were black men sitting in a row of cars lined up outside the Cumming courthouse, “mob spirit” boiled up all over town. The children had just finished their performance and the tourists were hurrying to get back on the road when “things took on a more serious aspect.” According to one reporter,

several men gathered around the Rome car and threatened to take from it the negro chauffeur. . . . One man caught hold of the negro’s arm and said “I’ve got his arm. Somebody take his legs.” Mr. Simpson warned them not to execute their threat and ordered the negro to speed up, [until] the car shot out of line and forged past the others.

After months of anticipation, “Seeing Georgia” had finally brought to Forsyth exactly the kinds of businessmen and deep-pocketed investors who could help Charlie Harris transform Cumming into a prosperous railroad town. But all he could do was watch in horror as one car after another roared down Main Street at full throttle, pursued by a mob of screaming, rock-throwing whites.

Emma Martin told readers that she and several other ladies on the tour were “transferred to a speedy Ford . . . and shot through the town and county like a bullet out of a 12-centimeter . . . to avoid the rocks and profanity being hurled.” With their car now being driven by one of the white tourists, the black chauffeur “sat on the seat with me,” Martin said, “while Mrs. Wall, her hand on a pistol, sat in front.”

Martin hunkered down below the height of the doors as they sped toward the county line, and when she looked over she saw that the black man next to her “was quite pale” with fear. Finally, she said, “we passed a cabin on the porch of which sat a negro woman.” At that, “the driver sprang up and said: ‘I know we’s back in God’s country now’ . . . and we were.”

THERE WAS GREAT
indignation when reports of the attacks reached Atlanta, and many of the participants in “Seeing Georgia” vowed to speak out against the mobs who had tried to lynch their employees. When the tour stopped for supper in Tate, a lawyer and former superior court judge named Wright Willingham addressed reporters
and called on state leaders to take action against Forsyth’s racial ban. “A sense of duty,” Willingham said,