CRUSH THE THING IN ITS INFANCY
Just a few miles east of Oscarville, across the Chattahoochee, there was another predominantly white county, with its own poor and exploited black population and its own white underclass. In Hall County, too, race hysteria spread in the fall of 1912, and residents there witnessed a similar spate of attacks on black workers and black homes. But what happened as a result could hardly have been more different.
Whatever racial tensions existed in Hall prior to the Forsyth exodus, they were aggravated by the arrival of hundreds of displaced families, who camped along the roads leading into Gainesville, and crowded into the homes of friends and relatives in the African American sections of town. The “influx of negroes,” the Constitution said, “has created a wave of resentment throughout the hot-tempered and lawless element.”
The Gainesville Times told of a morning that October when “a crowd variously estimated at from a dozen to one hundred went to Mr. M. A. Gaines’ building near the city hall and ordered the negro brickmasons to quit work. . . . The negroes left the job as soon as they could get away and have not returned, [so] the building remains in an unfinished state.” Soon local farmers were getting similar visits from men who demanded that black workers be fired and leave Hall County for good. The Constitution reported that on October 14th,
a mob of whites appeared at the home of Joe Hood, a negro, living about three miles north of Gainesville. A spokesman demanded Hood’s removal from the vicinity [but] the negro slammed the door in the white man’s face. A fusillade of shots was fired by the crowd into the house. Hood, his wife, and family barricaded themselves behind mattresses and bedding, and escaped unhurt, although their home was riddled with bullets. Large holes were rent in the sides of the building, showing the effect of shotgun shells, and the entire side was peppered with pistol and Winchester bullets.
Just as in Forsyth, such attacks were part of a sustained effort to drive out the black population and, especially, black labor competition. “Not only has the entire section suffered from the abandonment of farms and loss of labor from the fleeing negroes,” a journalist wrote,
prominent businessmen of Gainesville have received . . . attacks by hostile whites. Many black chauffeurs of the city have been ordered to give up their jobs, and anonymous letters demanding the dismissal of negro employees have been sent.
While “cooler-headed” residents hoped that the violence would remain a local matter and not damage Gainesville’s reputation as a center of trade, on Saturday, October 12th, the mobs of Hall County made headlines all over the state when the Southern Railway’s flagship New York & New Orleans Limited stopped to take on water at Flowery Branch, at the southern edge of the county. As the train idled, passengers en route to Atlanta looked out their windows and were startled to see a mob dragging a black man down off the train. The man, named W. A. Flake, worked in the mail car, and it seems that the mere sight of him in his uniform was enough to enrage local whites. “Cursing the negro and surging dangerously around the car,” one witness said, “the crowd frightened Flake until he cowered in a corner of the coach. D. P. White, chief clerk on the train, stepped to the doorway, and ordered the mob away, threatening to shoot the first [person] who attempted to mount the car.”
Such an ambush makes it clear that Hall County was not immune to the waves of white terrorism that were transforming Forsyth in 1912. But while that October saw numerous attacks against blacks in Hall, by the time winter arrived things had calmed down, and the bands of night riders gave up their efforts to create another “white man’s county” on the eastern bank of the Chattahoochee. Given that the racial cleansing succeeded on one side of the river but failed on the other, it is natural to wonder what made the difference. Why was the expulsion of African Americans part of Forsyth County’s identity for nearly a hundred years, but only a brief episode in the history of Hall?
THE ATTACK ON Bill Hurse provides some clues. Hurse was a black sharecropper who lived and worked in Hall County, on the property of a wealthy white planter named Raymond Carlile, whose farm was not far from the railroad siding where W. A. Flake had narrowly escaped a lynching. The Gainesville News reported that on Monday, October 14th—just two days after the train was ambushed—“five nightriders went to a negro house on Mr. Raymond Carlile’s place” and tried to force Hurse and his family to flee. But unlike in Forsyth County, the paper noted,
the nightriders met with such opposition as all like marauders ought to meet with—a shot gun at the hands of the property-owner. The shooting occurred at about 10 o’clock . . . at the house of Bill Hurse, coloured. Mr. Carlile lost no time. . . . He made up his mind that his croppers should not be run off. . . . When he heard the shooting at his tenant’s house, [Carlile] grabbed his shotgun and went to the place to protect his negroes and his property. He returned the fire and followed the marauders, winding up with the capture of Tobe Tullus, and securing information enough to identify [other] participants in the outlawry.
When the shooting was over and Carlile knew that Hurse and his family were safe, he delivered his prisoner, Tobe Tullus, to Hall County sheriff William Crow, and gave a full report. The next morning, Crow and a posse of deputies rode out in pursuit of the other night riders who had attacked Carlile’s black tenants.
The men alleged to be in the party [of night riders] are Will Jenkins, Bud and Jess Martin, Tobe Tullus and Wash Phagan, warrants for each of whom are in the hands of officers.
Tobe Tullus was the only one captured [on the night of the attack] and he is languishing behind the bars of Hall County jail, while officers are looking for the other men, all of whom will be captured if they do not get out of the county.
Just before the Gainesville News went to press, the editors added a last-minute update. “Bud Martin, Will Jenkins, and Wash Phagan were arrested,” readers learned,
by Messers. Lon Spencer and John Tanner . . . and brought to Gainesville on train No. 12 and lodged in jail. Mr. Spencer was sworn in as a Deputy by Sheriff Crow . . . and returned to Flowery Branch to take active charge of the situation. He will apprehend any others who may engage in night-riding or the commission of other unlawful acts. The officers and the people are going to put an immediate stop to the depredations . . . the night-riding and warning of good negroes to leave must stop—and stop at once.
Though Sheriff Crow was himself a distant cousin to the white girl who had been murdered just across the river, he told reporters that he had every intention of finding and arresting whites who engaged in violence against black families. “We don’t need any military,” he later said, “because we’re going to break this thing up ourselves.” Tobe Tullus, Bud Martin, Will Jenkins, and Wash Phagan were tried and convicted for the attack on Hurse, and soon thereafter five more white men went to jail for driving bricklayers off W. A. Gaines’s jobsite in downtown Gainesville. Once again, the names of the perpetrators appeared on the front page of the Gainesville Times: “Horace Smith, Tom Hall, Newt Strickland, John Strickland, and Tolman Strickland” were convicted “for interfering with persons engaged in lawful pursuits.”
These prosecutions stand out, against the backdrop of Jim Crow Georgia, as rare instances in which white offenders were punished for violence against blacks. One witness to the raids in Forsyth later said, “If we could have gotten a few detectives in here right at the start . . . and convict[ed] one or two of [the night riders], the rest would have been frightened.” By pursuing and jailing the first, boldest offenders in Hall, legal officials sent a message that whites in Forsyth never had to consider: that the power of the locally elected government would be brought to bear on “lawless” white men, even when their victims were black. As Royal Freeman Nash put it in The Crisis,
When the crackers in Hall County started to . . . make a sweep of their own county, at the same time, the word went out, according to local gossip, to spend ten thousand dollars if necessary to crush the thing in its infancy. . . . Eleven arrests were made within twenty-four hours after the terrorization started, and it was subsided in just a few days.
Georgia was still Georgia, and in 1912, emancipation’s guarantee of freedom was still in many ways an empty promise. But when hundreds of Forsyth refugees crossed Browns Bridge and stepped onto the eastern bank of the Chattahoochee River, they were right to feel some small measure of relief. In Hall County, at least, it was still a crime to kill a black man.