Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (4 page)

AT THIRTY-NINE, MAYOR
Charlie Harris was in the midst of his own climb up the social ladder. Like Reid, he was the son of a dirt farmer, but Harris had gone from plowing his father’s fields as a teenager to enrolling at North Georgia Agricultural College in the mid-1890s. After college, Harris distinguished himself as a law student at the University of Georgia. And he seems to have made some valuable friends there, for in March of 1908 his name was added to a corporate charter issued by the state of Georgia, granting Harris and his partners the right to build a new railroad—the Atlanta Northeastern, which was to run due north from the state capitol and terminate in the little town of Cumming.

The plan could hardly have been more ambitious or potentially lucrative, given that the hill country of Forsyth had proved remarkably resistant to development after the Civil War, even as nearby cities like Gainesville grew, helped by their location along the Chattahoochee River. Cumming, by contrast, was too far west to use the river for transport and had been bypassed by both the Southern Railway, which followed the river valley, and by the Atlanta, Knoxville & Northern, which passed through Canton, to the west.

County leaders had been courting railroad entrepreneurs since the earliest days of the Gilded Age, and in 1871 a group of citizens had convened a “mass meeting” and appointed a committee to try to persuade the Southern Railway to open a station in Cumming. But while locals predicted the “stupendous results in adding to our county wealth and population,” the board of the railroad remained unconvinced. In 1872, that same committee made a public pledge to “tender right of way to the first company that will build a road through the county,” and twenty years later, in 1891, Forsyth was still struggling to convince the Richmond and Danville Railroad that Cumming was the ideal terminus for a new branch. Local businessmen had grown so desperate that they offered “to donate
to the company the sum of $20,000.” The recurrence of such pledges across a fifty-year span attests to the aching desire many residents felt for a rail link, and their frustration as one company after another bypassed Forsyth.

All of this means that when he hung out his shingle on the Cumming square, Charles L. Harris, Esq., arrived with a rare combination of talents. He was an ambitious young lawyer and entrepreneur, yet had the common touch of a local farm boy made good. And during his time in law school he had made connections with powerful men in Atlanta, who could finally put Cumming on the transportation map of the South.

Plans for the Atlanta Northeastern received final approval in 1908, and a stock sale raised $50,000, to be used for preliminary land purchases and the construction of power plants along the route. Once completed, a rail station promised to transform Forsyth’s agrarian economy, bringing it once and for all out of the dark days of Reconstruction. “The line which is to be built from Atlanta to Cumming,” said the
Constitution
, “will prove one of the greatest developers of a great section. . . . When that time comes millions of dollars will be added to the taxable values of Georgia, and hundreds of thousands of people to north Georgia.”

Unmentioned in such sunny predictions was the fact that, despite its proximity to the state capitol, Forsyth was still something of a backwater. It could boast of a handful of wealthy planters and progressive leaders but was home to a much larger population of poor, illiterate whites, who were more worried than excited by talk of rail passengers arriving from Atlanta. Though such a line would bring business opportunities to rich and powerful men in town, it would also put Forsyth in contact with all the competition and the dizzying diversity of the city. To many of the county’s wary hill people, such radical change was something to be fended off, not welcomed.

But in the summer of 1912, Charlie Harris had a vision of a
future in which gleaming locomotives would roll into Cumming Station—bringing wealth, technology, and all the benefits of the new century right into the heart of Forsyth County. As Harris and his partners spread out their crisp maps and pictured the towering bridges and breathtaking tunnels of the Atlanta Northeastern, it must have seemed like a sure thing. It must have seemed like nothing in the world could stop them.

Charlie Harris, 1912

ON THE SAME MORNING
that Grant Smith was horsewhipped on the Cumming square, the black congregations of the county were gathering at the Colored Methodist Campground, just outside of town, preparing for their annual picnic and barbecue. The event brought together hundreds of parishioners from the African American community’s many small rural churches—Mt. Fair, Shiloh Baptist, Stoney Point, Backband Church, and Shakerag Church
were all there—and was traditionally held just as the harvest began in September. It was a time when even the poorest in the community could partake in one of the great pleasures of farm life: the heaps of roasted corn, black-eyed peas, butter beans, and biscuits, and the whole hogs that had been roasting on spits all night.

But this year, as the first families arrived, they learned that five young men had been arrested out in Big Creek. Word spread that Morgan and Harriet Strickland’s nephew Toney had been accused of rape, and when someone coming from the square reported that whites there were threatening to lynch Grant Smith, many in the crowd could stand by no longer. A group of men who had planned to spend the day tending the barbecue pits instead started walking toward town, knowing that Reverend Smith was not much safer in the custody of Bill Reid than he had been in the hands of the mob.

In 1912, the African American community of Forsyth County was largely made up of illiterate sharecroppers and field hands. But there was a smaller group of educated blacks with close ties to prominent whites, and many of them were leaders of the black churches. Among the crowd at that Saturday picnic were men like Joseph Kellogg, who had helped found the Colored Methodist Campground in 1897, and whose two-hundred-acre farm near Sawnee Mountain was the largest black-owned property in the county.

Another attendee was Levi Greenlee Jr., whose recently deceased father, Levi Sr., had been the pastor at Shiloh Baptist for many years, and left to his children more than 120 acres inside the Cumming city limits. Greenlee was so well liked that in the 1890s he was invited to join the Hightower Association, a gathering of white clergymen from around north Georgia, and was inducted as the group’s first and only black member.

In surviving church minutes from Shiloh, we can still hear Reverend Greenlee’s voice on a typical Sunday, thanking those in attendance “for their donations of $6.36.” When Greenlee accepted
the collection plates and looked out over the congregation, he saw the benches filled not only with familiar black faces but also a number of white visitors. Greenlee thanked everyone for their generosity, “and especially our white friends . . . for their 10 and 25 cent pieces.” This means that as Levi Greenlee Jr. and other men from the church picnic walked anxiously toward town, they had reason to hope that, scattered among a sea of enraged faces outside the county courthouse, they might find at least a few sympathetic white allies.

Joseph Kellogg, date unknown

AT THAT SAME MOMENT
, hundreds of whites from outlying areas were loading their rifles and shotguns and heading toward Cumming, drawn by a rumor that spread like wildfire: an army of black
men had been spotted leaving the Colored Campground, people said, infuriated by the attack on Grant Smith. Black rebels, the story went, had filled a wagon with explosives and were planning to “dynamite the town . . . without sparing women and children.”

One witness reported that whites “on horseback, in buggies, in automobiles and afoot . . . streamed into town and loitered about the courthouse,” as the square became “a mecca for armed men . . . [where] the protruding coat above the hip told that they were armed for war.” For anyone who arrived unprepared, enterprising gun dealers had set up tables on the courthouse lawn and spread out their inventory of rifles, shotguns, pistols, and wooden crates filled with ammunition.

If the tale of Ellen Grice’s rape represented one of the most vivid fantasies of southern whites, this new rumor was fueled by another: the vision of crazed black men rising up and taking vengeance on their former masters. That fear had recently been stoked by reports of a full-scale “race war” in the north Georgia mountains. Only a month before, in July 1912, headlines all over the state had warned that a “pitched battle between the races” had broken out in the little town of Plainville, sixty miles west of Cumming.

The Plainville incident began innocently enough, with a black girl and a white boy picking peaches in the same orchard. At some point the boy, Ivey Miller, was struck by a rock he said was thrown by the girl, Minnie Heard. But when Heard’s father went to town the next day, hoping to explain the misunderstanding and make peace with the Millers, he was set upon and beaten by whites, who warned him never to come back. According to the
Macon Telegraph
, Minnie Heard’s father stayed away, but her uncle had the audacity to appear in Plainville the following morning. As soon as they saw him, whites accused Heard’s uncle and three other black men of “forming a plot to burn the town.” They were lined up against a wall and whipped, until one of the black men saw his chance to
escape and took off, firing a pistol over his shoulder as he and the other men ran, pursued by whites who returned fire. As the Southern Railway’s afternoon train arrived from Chattanooga, first-class passengers glanced out the windows of a dining car and saw one of their oldest and deepest fears sprung to life: a raging gun battle between whites and armed black men.

Hiding in the woods, wounded and bleeding, the four black men took stock of their situation and quickly came to a desperate conclusion. Having dared to defend themselves against a mob, they now faced the prospect of either being lynched once they were captured or legally hung when they were tried by an all-white jury that was likely to include friends and relatives of the men they had shot. As they peered through the leaves and saw a posse approaching, they decided it was better to be killed in a gunfight than surrender to the kind of white men who regularly tortured, shot, castrated, and burned African Americans alive—often for far less than what these men had already done.

After making it to the cabin of a local black family, the men barricaded themselves inside, took up positions at the windows, and stared out at the gathering mob. Some accounts say the gunfight lasted all night, others that it was over in an hour. By the time the smoke cleared, three prominent whites had been wounded, including the sheriff of Gordon County. Ten black men and two black women were also shot, though their names went unrecorded, and there is no report as to whether they lived or died. The
Macon Telegraph
said “the battle was maintained until the negroes ran out of ammunition, [then] they were beaten into insensibility by whites who crowded into the cabin . . . [and] a lynching was only prevented by officers who pulled their revolvers and stood guard.” Newspapers as far away as San Francisco and New York portrayed the event not as a case of black men defending themselves against lynchers but as an “ambush” of white law officers by “a band of negroes.”

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1912
, the Plainville “race war” was still fresh in the minds of the white citizens of Forsyth. As they spun the cylinders of Colt revolvers, oiled the bolts of old Winchesters, and thumbed shells into the barrels of shotguns broken over their knees, the lesson must have seemed crystal clear: whites in Plainville had allowed their own sheriff to be gunned down, and only the brave deeds of a posse had stopped a black insurrection. Milling around the impromptu gun market that had sprung up outside the courthouse, whites became convinced that they were now the ones in terrible danger. Everyone had heard that a black army was rolling down Tolbert Street, trailing behind it a wagonload of dynamite. The town of Cumming, whites believed, would soon be under siege. And as the sun climbed high over the square, they prepared to defend it with every weapon they could find.