Brambleman (13 page)

News of Martha Jean’s death put whites in a
fury and brought a hundred vigilantes roaring into Gainesville
Monday night. Mob members with clubs pounded on the locked front
doors of the Hall County Courthouse and threatened to break them
down. Wright, who had stayed with his prisoner, knew he had to act
quickly to save Dent. At this point, many sheriffs would have
simply looked the other way or handed the keys to the mob, but
Wright slipped out the back door with the prisoner. He commandeered
a touring car and took off for Atlanta with Dent and two deputies.
The fifty-three mile trip over mountain roads took three
hours—record time back then. Meanwhile in Cumming, the mob of angry
whites surrounding the courthouse broke up when they learned Dent
had been twice removed from their grasp. They would return,
however.

Tuesday morning, deputies brought in Dent’s
three alleged accomplices and two men Wright considered material
witnesses with knowledge of the crime, Ike Driscoll and Sam
Hardaway. That afternoon, a mob of 300 stormed the courthouse
during Wright’s absence, smashing doors with crowbars and rushing
past outnumbered and outgunned deputies to the jail cells. They
were frustrated to find only Galent. Deputies had hidden the two
witnesses and Oscar, while Wright had spirited the woman away that
morning. Talton believed lawmen deliberately chose to sacrifice one
black victim to the mob in hopes of limiting the violence.

As the cowering prisoner kneeled on the floor
and begged for mercy, several men with pistols and rifles stepped
forward and started blasting away. After they riddled the body with
bullets, mob members beat his lifeless corpse with crowbars, then
dragged him outside and down the town’s main street before
stringing him up on a telephone pole near the spot where Roberts
had been whipped. Upon his return, Wright found that the white
community’s bloodlust had been satisfied, so he seized the
opportunity to transport the remaining prisoners to Atlanta.

The mob was only temporarily sated, however.
After admiring their work, posing for pictures beside Galent’s
bloody corpse, and collecting some ghastly souvenirs, it was time
to get back to lynching. There was unfinished business in Marietta,
so they set off to find Ronnie Harris and Preacher Roberts in
connection with the earlier “attack” on the unnamed white woman.
Wright called the circuit judge in Marietta and advised him a mob
was heading his way. The judge ordered the prisoners moved to the
Tower, Atlanta’s heavily fortified city jail, where they would join
Dent.

Once word spread that there would be no fun
that night, the crowd dispersed, its members melting back into the
hills from whence they came. Wright regretfully advised the judge
that there were no warrants for Roberts’s arrest, so the black
preacher was released from jail that night. He did not return to
Forsyth County. Nothing more of his fate is known.

White sentiment continued to run at fever
pitch. “Great emotion against these brutes persists,” the
Atlanta Sentinel
noted after Galent’s death. Closer to home,
the
Gainesville Democrat
editorialized, “The good people of
Forsyth have behaved themselves with noteworthy self-control,”
complimenting them for not tracking down more victims to lynch.

In any case, with the suspects gone,
prospects for violence seemed to decrease and reporters left town.
There wouldn’t be much news coming out of Forsyth until trial
coverage began in early October. Contrary to the Gainesville
newspaper’s editorial, however, Forsyth whites showed no signs of
calming down. Every store in the county sold out of guns and
ammunition; armed men continually roamed the countryside, looking
for blacks to harass.

Crime—both real and imagined—became the
rallying cry for poor whites, but their primary motive no longer
involved punishing rapists. Instead, they saw an opportunity to
knock blacks down a peg or two.

For nearly a half-century, lynching and
terrorism had been used in the South as a means of racial control,
and Forsyth whites were ready to find a new use for such violence.
No longer content to make bad examples of individual blacks, the
white community quickened with resolve and grand ambition. While
most white Southerners could live with blacks as long as they
remained powerless and subservient, Forsyth County’s poor whites
were tired of competing with black labor and especially weary of
seeing African-American landowners performing better economically
than they did. Such whites were often envious of blacks, the
preferred tenants of landowners. Talton stated that the South’s
ruling class found blacks cheaper, more dependable, and easier to
work with than whites, who insisted on higher wages for less work
and had an undeniable mean streak. The Southern aristocracy had a
history of pitting poor whites against blacks, and in Forsyth
County, the conflict turned extreme.

Blacks could not stop this reign of terror
without powerful white allies, and therefore, they were out of
luck. While not unique, Forsyth County, pinned against mountains to
the north, was not a typical plantation county. Farms were small
and soil was not rich. Unlike the cotton belt, this region lacked a
large, entrenched aristocracy with paternalistic ties to former
slaves and their families. In Forsyth, blacks had few white
benefactors, and none willing to stand up for their rights. In the
end, local leaders bowed down to the mob.

The whites began a process known in later
decades as “ethnic cleansing.” Then, it was called
“whitecapping”—nightriding in the tradition of the once and future
Ku Klux Klan, disbanded during Reconstruction and resurrected atop
Georgia’s Stone Mountain in 1915 in response to
The Birth of a
Nation
and America’s most famous lynching, that of Leo Frank, a
Jew, in Marietta.

As in other Southern states, Georgia blacks
were emasculated politically in 1912, especially in rural areas. In
1908, constitutional disenfranchisement capped two decades of
legislation designed to keep blacks in a state approximating
slavery. Talton called this process “affirmative action for
whites.”

And so, with the tacit approval of their
wealthier neighbors, Forsyth’s poor whites pushed forward with
their pogrom, inviting comparisons to the treatment of the area’s
Cherokees in the previous century. “These fierce, warlike
Scotch-Irish hill folk reverted to their old ways, fueled by an
ancient rage and rekindled by this unspeakable act,” wrote a
Northern reporter. “All would pay for the sins of the few. The
issue was no longer justice. This was war: Defeat the enemy and
take the spoils.”

Talton called Forsyth County’s 1912 troubles
“an ultra-violent labor action against blacks by poor whites, egged
on by their upper-class neighbors who wanted little to do with
either of them.”

Shots were fired into sharecroppers’ cabins
and landowners’ homes. Warning signs were posted:
Nigger Git Out
of Forsyth
. Fires were set. Barns, houses, schools, and
churches burned. As a consequence, more blacks joined the exodus.
In the great diaspora of a displaced people, this was a minor eddy
in the ocean, but it was remarkable in its completeness.
Furthermore, it was the major event in the lives of those forced
out. In a 1983 interview conducted by Talton, eighty-year-old
Isaiah Smith recalled the day he left town “sometime late September
the year of all the trouble”:

“I was nine years old when they ran us out
of Forsyth County in 1912. My father let me take one thing I wanted
when we left. I chose a baseball he’d bought for me in the spring.
I remember gripping it tight in my hand as we pulled away from our
house. My mother was expecting my sister then, so she laid down in
the back. We had a mule named Sam that Pop sold when we got to
Atlanta. White men on horseback watched us with their rifles
pointed in the air. Pop was staring forward with the reins in his
hands. ‘This is what they do, son,’ he told me. ‘This is what they
do.’ I heard the sound of glass breaking and turned to see a
lighted torch fly through the front window. Pop grabbed my head and
twisted it around so hard he hurt my neck. ‘Damn it, boy, don’t
look back,’ he said. ‘Don’t give them the pleasure of seeing your
pain.’ Most of the day passed before he talked again. He never got
over it. That was his land, handed down to him by his father. So
the white men stole it, just like they stole the land from the
Indians. Took our crops, too. And they’ve had their way up there
ever since. Today’s not one bit different in Forsyth County than
the day I left.”

* * *

On September 30, 1912, the Blue Ridge Circuit
grand jury sitting in Cumming returned indictments against Dent and
Oscar in the rape and murder of Martha Jean Rankin. One grand juror
happened to be the victim’s uncle. To the modern observer, this
might seem like a conflict of interest, but it was a minor
infraction of protocol compared to what happened when the trial
began.

Fearing more lynchings and negative
publicity, Governor Brown had declared a state of insurrection in
Forsyth County and called up four militia companies to escort the
prisoners from Atlanta to Cumming. Their orders were to protect the
suspects and quell any racial disturbances that might occur, but
they were told nothing of the nightriding that was still going
on.

There was no train service to Cumming. The
closest stop was in the Gwinnett County town of Buford, a dozen
miles away. The soldiers, 150 strong, arrived in Buford around noon
on Wednesday, October 2, and deboarded with the prisoners—Dent,
Oscar and his sister Jane, along with the two hapless witnesses in
the case. Harris—the suspect in the earlier “phantom” case—was also
brought for trial.

The soldiers marched the prisoners across a
rolling stretch of land that would disappear several decades later
under Lake Sidney Lanier. Idly curious whites watched as the ring
of militiamen surrounding chained prisoners tromped through the
mud. As the sun set, the procession arrived at the courthouse in
Cumming. The soldiers presented the prisoners to Sheriff Wright,
who locked them up in holding cells. The soldiers then formed a
circle around the courthouse and set up bivouac.

As the county prepared for trial, farmers
stood around the courthouse in sweat-stained work shirts, spat
tobacco, cussed the soldiers, and talked about “niggers needing
hanging.” However, word quickly spread about the overwhelming
opposition a mob would face. While Brown was no friend of blacks,
whites knew he was willing to give “shoot to kill” orders to
protect Georgia’s law-and-order image. This same battle-hardened
militia unit had recently enforced martial law in Augusta during a
violent streetcar workers’ strike, killing two passers-by who
failed to halt on command.

The separate trials of Dent and Oscar began
Thursday morning and ended that night. One company of soldiers
stayed inside the courthouse while the others ringed the building,
standing in picket with fixed bayonets. This show of force relieved
locals of their civic duty to burst into the courtroom and lynch
the defendants, so they turned their attention elsewhere. Vendors
took advantage of the crowds and set up an impromptu street fair,
selling drinks, sandwiches, and cheap jewelry to the gawking hill
people. Meanwhile, the town’s remaining blacks went into
hiding.

With Judge Clement Riley presiding in the
courtroom, the victim’s father, William Rankin, served as the main
prosecutor before an all-white, all-male jury (as required by
Georgia law at the time). “This was proof that the trial was a sham
and an extension of mob law,” Talton wrote. “What juror could
resist his pleadings and
testimony
when he cried out in
anguish and banged the jury box, railing as he recounted his horror
at finding his darling girl lying on the ground, broken beyond
repair?” Sitting beside Rankin was Robert Hay, the Blue Ridge
Circuit solicitor general. Like Brown, he would, just a few years
later, have a hand on the rope around Leo Frank’s innocent
neck.

While Dent and Oscar had attorneys, whether
they actually had a defense was another matter. Their lawyers
argued that they were Negroes and knew no better, then called on
jurors for mercy. The evidence consisted mainly of the testimony of
their accomplices. Driscoll and Hardaway, the two material
witnesses who had been held for a month, testified in exchange for
their freedom—even though they had never been charged with any
crime. (Talton drily noted that “freedom” meant safe passage out of
Forsyth.) The most damaging testimony came from Jane Oscar, who
testified for her life as she spoke against her blood kin.

Dent and Oscar were both convicted of rape
and murder, the jury returning its verdict shortly after 9:30 p.m.
By then, a heavy rain had begun falling and the crowds had
dispersed. Inside the courtroom, only court officials, lawmen, the
defendants and their attorneys, soldiers, and reporters remained.
Word filtered out through town and countryside that night, but any
talk of lynching was quelled by inclement weather—and the soldiers’
sputtering campfires encircling the courthouse, which served to
remind locals of the resistance they would face. The next morning,
Judge Riley sentenced Dent and Oscar to death by hanging on October
25. He ordered the troops to return the prisoners to jail in
Atlanta so they would survive until their executions.

Riley postponed Harris’s case, which was
already falling apart. The prosecutor openly stated that the
evidence against him was slight, and that his alibi witnesses were
afraid to testify because they feared mob violence. The judge
stated his hopes for trying Harris in calmer surroundings and
assured the public there would be no need for a military presence
at the upcoming trial. Talton interpreted this as an apology and
invitation to the mob: “Y’all come back now, y’hear?”