The 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,
will not permit me to remain silent over a liability which thrust itself upon us in the beautiful county of Forsyth . . . where we were confronted with a spirit on the part of many of the citizens of that county which [is] the antithesis of all the virtues we have discovered elsewhere. And this because every negro man, woman, and child has been exiled from their homes and because a few of our tourists had negro drivers . . . culminating in an effort at Cumming on the part of Forsyth county citizens to take one of the negro drivers from the car and to do with him the Lord knows what.
Had one white passenger not “reached for his revolver,” Willingham said, there might have been another lynching on the Cumming square—in full sight of the mayor, the “Seeing Georgia” tourists cowering in their cars, and the schoolchildren standing with songbooks tucked under their arms. “Conditions like this,” Willingham went on,
can no longer be regarded with calm satisfaction but must commend themselves to the patriotic men of our state. The Governor of Georgia, the men who represent this state in the legislature, the judges of the superior courts cannot pass in silence over this state of anarchy which is being bred in this commonwealth. . . . Ultimately, unless checked, [it] will bury its fangs in the body politic.
As he sat in his office at the Cumming courthouse, scanning the headlines on the morning of October 5th, 1915, Charlie Harris must have been despondent. Only a day earlier, reporters visiting north Georgia for the first time had described how “the wonders of this section fill one with an inexpressible sense of having been through a land of resources [and] . . . a profound respect for the possibilities of the country.” Businessmen all over the South read about the mineral riches of Dahlonega, “the enchanted country of the Nacoochee Valley,” and the network of paved roads that was being built in Hall County. But on that Tuesday morning, after Harris had worked for months to ensure that the tour passed through Cumming, journalists told a very different story about Forsyth. All over the state, people read about wives who held off the mobs with drawn pistols. Newspapers as far away as Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and New York spoke not of the resources and business opportunities in Harris’s home county but of its widespread bigotry. “Georgia Crackers Rock Negro Chauffeurs,” one headline read. “Stoned by Georgia Mob,” said another.
The message to his investors in Atlanta was unmistakable. Harris had tried since 1912 to reassure them that Forsyth was the ideal terminus for a rail spur linking the state capitol to the foothills. But the very first delegation of business leaders who’d gone there, at the invitation of the mayor and the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, had been stoned and cursed by furious white men who’d tried to lynch their black chauffeurs.
Soon thereafter, Charlie Harris finally gave up on his troubled railroad plan. In 1916, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a new charter, granting a competing group the right to build “an interurban line . . . from Atlanta, Ga., north to Roswell, thence northeast via Alpharetta to Cumming.” This was the same route Harris had been struggling to open since 1908. And just like Harris’s Atlanta Northeastern Railroad, it would never be completed.
Instead, the mayor quietly turned his gaze southward, to new opportunities far from the “lawlessness” that had plagued his every effort in Forsyth. The boll weevil had been introduced into Georgia in 1915, and it had quickly devastated the cotton economy of south Georgia. This meant that just as Harris began scouting for some new venture, abandoned farms all over the region were being sold off at bargain prices. In 1919, Harris decided to take the plunge, and he relocated from Cumming to the little town of Cordele, in Crisp County, two hundred miles south of Forsyth. Once there, he formed the South Georgia Land and Auction Company and, with local partners at the Cordele Bank and Trust Company, began buying and selling large parcels of farmland in south Georgia. In Cordele, Charlie Harris would make his fortune in the 1920s, investing all the energy, talent, and drive that had made him a leader in Forsyth.
Harris’s departure was in many ways the beginning of the end of resistance to the purge, as moderate figures left one by one or simply learned to hold their peace, as John and Laura Hockenhull had done. The future of Cumming was left in the hands of men like Ansel Strickland, who believed that Forsyth was, and should remain, “a white man’s county.”
Deputy Mitchell Gay Lummus had made a valiant attempt to stop the lynching of Rob Edwards back in 1912, and twice he tried to unseat Bill Reid as county sheriff. But not long after his second defeat, in 1914, it seems that Lummus, too, had had enough of his troubled home place. If the railways of the new century would not be coming to Forsyth, Lummus decided, he would go to them.
When he filled out his World War I draft card in 1917, Lummus was living in Atlanta and on the payroll of the Georgia Railway and Power Company, where he worked as a motorman on the city’s streetcar lines. The former deputy seems to have adapted quickly to life in the city, and he left his second wife and children back in Cumming. He would never again live in Forsyth County.
The room Lummus rented at James Travis’s boardinghouse on Piedmont Avenue was so close to the Butler Street railyard that it was a popular address for streetcar drivers and train conductors. But the neighborhood was also teeming with workers and tradespeople of all types, including shoemakers, mechanics, barbers, plasterers, booksellers, upholsterers, and grocers. In the census records of Atlanta’s Sixth Ward, where Lummus lived in 1920, one finds blacks and whites living side by side—as well as Christians and Jews, “native-born” Americans and recently arrived immigrants from all over the world. As he walked down Piedmont each morning, heading to the Butler Street yard, Lummus would have passed people chattering in Russian, German, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese, Turkish, and Italian. And even among his American neighbors, there were people who had come to Atlanta from all over the country. Travis’s flophouse may have been only an afternoon’s drive south of the “white county” Lummus left behind, but it was, in almost every way, the polar opposite of Forsyth.
Lummus and Harris were once the most visible white allies of the county’s black residents, but only a few years after the expulsions, they were gone. And with their exit, the last open opposition to the racial cleansing fell silent. They left behind a place that—unlike other counties that endured episodes of night riding and attempts at racial cleansing—had actually succeeded in closing its borders to African Americans. With no one left to speak out against the bigotry and intimidation, the county went into a kind of Rip Van Winkle sleep, as residents resumed lives that on the surface looked no different from any other rural place in Georgia. White Forsyth’s communal crime had been fiery and explosive in 1912, but its erasure would happen slowly, quietly, and one fence post at a time.