While the public whipping of Grant Smith had put the entire black community on edge, the sight of Rob Edwards’s corpse hanging over the public square sent whole wagon trains of refugees out onto the roads of the county; they fled south toward Atlanta, east toward Gainesville, and west toward Canton. African Americans in Forsyth knew that nothing they said or did was likely to convince Bill Reid to pursue those who had murdered Rob Edwards. And if anyone still held out hope that, in the wake of the killing, whites might leave their black neighbors in peace, they learned otherwise the next morning, when tensions rose over the burning of a building near Cumming.
When they heard that the storehouse of a white man named Will Buice had mysteriously caught fire in the night, whites concluded that it was the work of black arsonists, retaliating for the lynching. The Georgian reported that “the clouds of race war which have hung over Forsyth . . . threaten to break into a storm of bloodshed today.” The fire was taken as proof that, just like in Plainville, Cumming was now on the brink of a black insurrection. “Rumors that the negroes . . . are rising and arming themselves have led almost to a panic among the women of the little town,” one observer wrote, adding that
even the conservative men fear that the lynching of yesterday and the burning of a store today are merely the first movements in a race war which may sweep the county and bring death to many. Citizens are arming for trouble.
But despite all the rumors, most black residents were too busy trying to protect their families to think about retaliation. Like African Americans all over the Jim Crow South, they understood that even the mildest forms of resistance or the faintest hint of protest could trigger a new wave of white violence. Many would have heard about the black woman in Okemah, Oklahoma, who, in 1911, had been killed for no crime other than defending her fifteen-year-old son against a lynch mob. Newspapers reported that when Laura Nelson confronted the white men who had accused her boy of stealing, Nelson was dragged from her house and repeatedly raped before she and the son she’d tried to protect were hanged side by side from a bridge over the Canadian River.
If anyone in Forsyth’s black community thought of publicly naming the leaders of the mob that had killed Edwards, they would have understood the terrible risk. Only a few years later, in 1918, a pregnant woman named Mary Turner would be killed in Lowndes County, Georgia, for having openly grieved for her husband, Hayes. When she threatened to swear out warrants against the men who had abducted and lynched him, the response was swift and savage, even by the standards of Jim Crow Georgia. According to historian Philip Dray, “before a crowd that included women and children, Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death.”
The lynching of Laura Nelson, 1911
Like Mary Turner, Jane Daniel must have carried an almost unbearable burden of grief, rage, and fear once she learned—hardly a day after her cousin Ernest had been taken prisoner—that her husband, Rob, had been hanged on the Cumming square, his body gawked at by whites, and torn apart by hundreds of bullets. But if Jane was tempted to go to county officials seeking justice, or to raise her voice in lament, she knew that to do so could have deadly consequences. It had happened many times and would happen again in Georgia: after lynching a black victim, mobs often turned their attention to surviving family members—for crying out in grief, or calling for arrests, or for simply knowing who it was who had pulled a trigger or lobbed a rope over a tree limb. Like thousands of other widows of lynched black men, Jane Daniel knew that her only chance at safety was silence.
Not even that was enough in the end, for on Wednesday, September 11th, newspapers reported that Jane Daniel, her brother Oscar, and their neighbor Ed Collins had been arrested in connection with the Crow assault. According to the Constitution, “Another lynching at Cumming [was] narrowly averted” when “a mob formed to take . . . these negroes . . . and swing them up to the same telephone pole on which their partner in crime swung yesterday.” This time, though, Mayor Charlie Harris was ready, and before the mob could organize a second siege of the county jail, he had Reid and his deputies “slip [the prisoners] out of the jail and [make] a run . . . in automobiles for Atlanta.”
HAVING SAFELY DELIVERED Jane, Oscar, and Ed Collins to the Fulton Tower and added them to a group of prisoners that now included eleven black residents of Forsyth, Bill Reid took time Wednesday morning to speak with Atlanta reporters. Under the headline “Graphic Story of Terror Reign,” the Georgian gave Reid center stage, introducing him to readers as “the picturesque sheriff of Forsyth county” who came to Atlanta with a carload of black prisoners and tales of a mob run wild in the Georgia foothills. Squinting down at a crowd of reporters with their pencils poised, Reid quickly warmed to his role: as the mustachioed, six-shooter-carrying country lawman fighting a “race war” on the north Georgia frontier. “The people of Cumming have been sleeping with one eye open,” Reid began.
The fall of night has brought fear and dread to the town and surrounding county, for there [is] no telling what might happen—it’s the dread of treachery, the torch, and the knife stab in the back. We could easily handle any emergency in the day time. The white people are armed and would promptly crush any uprising on the part of the blacks. Excitement has been high, and an uneasy feeling pervade[s] the community.
Given that raids on black churches and homes were already driving many families across the county line, Reid’s account of the situation in Forsyth now seems not just distorted but downright delusional. He describes a white population in terror of an impending “uprising on the part of the blacks” and fearful that they might wake to “the knife stab in the back”—when in truth the only real “uprising” was being carried out by white vigilantes and arsonists. Yet even as black families stood guard over their homes, listening for the sound of approaching hoofbeats or the ominous snap of a twig, whites were the ones in a state of constant paranoia, unable to shake their deepest, oldest fear: that the sins of their forefathers would finally be avenged by the children and grandchildren of slaves.
When reporters turned to the subject of Rob Edwards’s lynching, Reid hit his stride as a star in the tabloid drama. On the day of the lynching, the sheriff had gone to great lengths to extricate himself from the thorny problem of opposing a mob that included many of his own relatives, friends, and political supporters. But once he got to Atlanta, he didn’t miss an opportunity to recast himself as the hero who had tried in vain to save Rob Edwards.
“I was at my home when the mob began to form,” Reid said, “and feeling against the negro burst forth in all its fury.” Though newspaper reports all agreed that it was Lummus who was left to “lock the doors of the jail and put the heavy bars in place,” Reid now claimed it was he who had bravely tried to thwart the lynchers:
I realized it was too late to attempt to get [Edwards] out of the jail and spirit him away. There was but one thing to do—I hid the jail keys. I did this as I knew that even though I should be overpowered, the mob would still be handicapped.
At a single stroke, Reid’s revision of the story solved two problems. He erased the genuine bravery with which Deputy Lummus had stood his ground, and claimed that it was actually he, Forsyth’s crafty old sheriff, who had slowed the rioters. Such quick thinking had not ultimately saved Rob Edwards, Reid implied, but that was not because he hadn’t done his darnedest. “A few minutes” after he hid the keys to the jail, he told reporters,
a crowd of fully 100 men called at my home and demanded the keys. I told them they could not get the keys and begged them not to attempt violence . . . then at a signal the crowd went [back] to the jail. There was no jailer on duty there, as I have to look after the jail and care of the prisoners myself.
By whitewashing Lummus out of the scene, and skipping over the fact that he himself had abandoned his post, Reid implied that he was the last line of defense. “The mob poured wildly into the jail, smashing locks as they came to them,” he said, adding just enough detail to help readers forget that he had not, in fact, been present at the time:
Breaking down Rob Edwards’ cell door, the infuriated men yanked the cringing negro into the corridor . . . someone struck him on the head with a sledge hammer, fracturing his skull. Then someone else shot him.
As a final flourish, Reid said that “several friends kept [me] in [my] home” while the jail was under attack. Then he reminded readers that even had he been there, “the big sheriff” would have been unable to save Edwards:
Of course, it would have been all the same if I had been there . . . Even though I do carry about a lot of flesh and muscle, I would have been like a straw in the whirlwind against that crowd.
The sheriff had hardly finished his tale when a reporter for the Georgian, recognizing a scoop when he heard one, ran off to file his story. Reid had managed, in one rambling, Falstaffian interview, to claim that he’d ingeniously hidden the jail keys; that he had been held prisoner by the mob; and that he would have been unable, despite his great strength and muscular physique, to have stopped the lynchers even if, by some superhuman effort, he had managed to escape his captors. With that, the future Ku Klux Klansman and self-proclaimed “straw in the whirlwind” of the lynching climbed into a car and drove off. He was anxious, he said out the window, “to be on the scene when darkness came.”
THE STORY OF the “race riot” in Forsyth disappeared from Georgia’s newspapers almost as quickly as it had appeared. In a single week, Cumming had witnessed the near lynching of Grant Smith; the arrival of the Marietta Rifles to quell an imagined race war; the discovery of Mae Crow’s bloody body; the killing of Rob Edwards; and the imprisonment of nearly a dozen young black suspects, who were now awaiting trial in the Fulton Tower. As Reid drove back north on the afternoon of September 12th, editors in Atlanta were proofing the last of the stories they would run about Forsyth for almost a month. “Quiet reigns in Cumming,” they assured readers. “No disorder of any kind.”
When Reid went to work the next morning, he found the town square humming with activity for the first time in days. Wealthy wives of the county were finally willing to brave the streets, and visions of a black revolution were fading into the background as Cumming returned, for the most part, to business as usual.
Everyone knew that the prisoners would be brought back from Atlanta to stand trial, and that their return would whip “the violent element” of the county into another fury, particularly if witnesses were called—as they surely would be—to testify about Mae Crow’s injuries. But all of that lay in the future, and in an effort to defuse the situation, Judge Newt Morris announced that both the Grice and Crow cases would be postponed until the next regular session of the Blue Ridge Circuit court, scheduled for late October. This left white residents in a state of uncertainty, particularly since Bud and Azzie Crow’s daughter was still unconscious out in Oscarville, in critical condition from her head wounds. Mayor Harris and Deputy Lummus wouldn’t have been the only Cumming residents who looked warily toward the future, wondering just what sort of mayhem news of her death might unleash.
BUT FOR HUNDREDS of black people in the county, the worst kind of trouble had already begun. Though it would take weeks before reports reached Atlanta, in the days after the attack on Crow a nighttime ritual began to unfold, as each evening at dusk groups of white men gathered at the crossroads of the county. They came with satchels of brass bullets, shotgun shells, and stoppered glass bottles of kerosene, and sticks of “Red Cross” dynamite poked out through the tops of their saddlebags. When darkness fell, the night riders set out with one goal: to stoke the terror created by the lynching of Edwards and use it to drive black people out of Forsyth County for good.
In 1907, W. E. B. Du Bois had put into words what every “colored” person in Georgia knew from experience, which was that “the police system of the South was primarily designed to control slaves. . . . And tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, the days when all white men had been legally empowered to pursue and arrest fugitive slaves were only fifty years in the past, and the fathers and grandfathers of many locals would have been part of such posses in the days of slavery.
So it must have seemed natural to many whites when, each night around sundown, a knock came at the door and the adult men of the family were summoned to join a group heading out toward the clusters of black cabins scattered around Forsyth—along the Chattahoochee out in Oscarville, in the shadow of Sawnee Mountain north of Cumming, and south, toward Shakerag and Big Creek. It would take months—and, in a handful of cases, years—before the in-town blacks of Cumming were finally forced out, since many lived under the protection of rich white men, in whose kitchens and dining rooms they served. Instead, it was to the homes of cotton pickers, sharecroppers, and small landowners that the night riders went first, and it was these most vulnerable families who fled in the first waves of the exodus.
Written traces of the raids are few and far between and consist mostly of vague reports of “lawlessness” after dark. Since journalists only started writing about the expulsions once the wagon trains of refugees grew too large and too numerous to ignore, it is hard to say precisely what took place on those first nights of the terror. Some of the attacks later made headlines in Atlanta (“Negroes Flee from Forsyth,” “Enraged White People Are Driving Blacks from County”), and it’s likely that similar raids had been happening since the discovery of Mae Crow’s body in early September. The night riders fired shots into front doors, threw rocks through windows, and hollered warnings that it was time for black families to “get.” But of all their methods, torches and kerosene worked best, since a fire created a blazing sign for all to see and left the victims no place to ever come back to. In mid-October, the Augusta Chronicle reported that “a score or more of homes have been burned during the past few weeks . . . and five negro churches.”
The arsonists must have been terrifying wherever they struck, but for Forsyth’s poor black farmers, the burning of churches was a true catastrophe, striking not just at the community’s spiritual home but at what Du Bois called “the social centre of Negro life.” In 1903, sitting in his Atlanta University office, just forty miles south, he had described Georgia’s rural black congregations as “the most characteristic expression of African character” in the entire community. “Take a typical church,” Du Bois wrote.
[It is] finished in Georgia pine, with a carpet, a small organ, and benches. This building is the central club-house of a community of Negroes. Various organizations meet here—the church proper, the Sunday-school, two or three insurance societies, women’s societies, secret societies, and mass meetings of various kinds. Entertainments, suppers, and lectures are held. . . . Considerable sums of money are collected and expended here, employment is found for the idle, strangers are introduced, news is disseminated and charity distributed. At the same time this social, intellectual, and economic centre is a religious centre of great power. Depravity, Sin, Redemption, Heaven, Hell, and Damnation are preached twice a Sunday after the crops are laid by.
The erasure of such places from the map of Forsyth was complete. Today, all that’s left are a few scant details about the dates on which churches were founded, lot numbers for the land on which they stood, and the names of a handful of ministers and worshippers who once gathered there. Backband Church, out near Oscarville, was where Buck and Catie Daniel sat on Sunday mornings—surrounded by their sons Cicero and Harley, their daughter Jane, and their youngest boy, Oscar—listening to the sermons of a local farmer and preacher named Byrd Oliver. Stoney Point, down in Big Creek, was where on some Sunday in August of 1912 Harriet and Morgan Strickland took their visiting nephew, Toney Howell, to meet the congregation and be welcomed into his aunt and uncle’s church. Shiloh Baptist, founded by Reverend Levi Greenlee Sr., lay just outside of town on Kelly Mill Road and was home to many of Cumming’s maids, cooks, servants, and butlers.
Faint traces of other black churches are tucked away in handwritten ledgers at the state archives at Morrow; in the collections at the University of Georgia in Athens; even in the basement of the Forsyth courthouse, where a cardboard box atop a metal filing cabinet still holds deeds for the land on which black residents once founded Mt. Fair, Shakerag, and Stoney Point—about which nothing is known but names and approximate locations. All that can be said for certain is that, again and again in the fall of 1912, white men sloshed gasoline and kerosene onto the benches and wooden floors of such rooms, then backed out into the dark, tossing lit matches as they went. All over the county, beneath the ground on which black churches stood, the soil is rich with ashes.
IN THEIR RACE to outdo one another, and to further sensationalize the story, journalists had been reporting Mae Crow’s death almost from the moment she was discovered in the woods. “GIRL MURDERED BY NEGRO AT CUMMING” the front page of the Augusta Chronicle had blared on September 9th, in an article that informed readers that “the negro’s victim died at her home near Cumming tonight.” The Macon Telegraph went further, claiming that when Ernest Knox attacked Crow, he “beat her into unconsciousness and then threw her over [a] cliff.” Once a single false report of Crow’s death appeared in print, other editors felt compelled to follow suit, and a typical article in the Constitution closed by informing readers of the sad fact that “although every effort was made to save her life, [Crow] died late Monday afternoon.” By the beginning of October, interest in the story had grown so intense that the Georgian upped the ante, writing that Cumming was in an uproar over “the death of two white women at the hands of negroes.”
Meanwhile, Ellen Grice was alive and well out in Big Creek, no doubt busy with the work of running a household and a small farm with her husband, John, and keeping a low profile after all the trouble her allegations had stirred up. Mae Crow lay in her bed in Oscarville, watched and prayed over by her parents, Bud and Azzie, but still very much alive. In the first few days after she was found, Dr. John Hockenhull even told reporters “she will likely recover.”
For many locals, Mae became an object of fascination during her sickness, and at least two men were so desperate to get a glimpse of the beautiful, bedridden girl that they made a drunken pilgrimage. According to Azzie Crow, “when our darling daughter was living here at the point of death . . . one Sunday Wheeler Hill and another man came up to our house intoxicated.” Hill and his friend, Crow said,
wanted to see what the negroes had done . . . They hung around awhile, and before we knew it, they had gone to the back of the house . . . then pushed open the door and climbed up and were in the room where our precious daughter lay.
As much as they were offended by Hill’s intrusion, Bud and Azzie made it clear in a letter to the North Georgian that they were not opposed to the raids being waged in their daughter’s name and were as anxious as everyone else to be rid of “those fiends of hell, negroes.”
As September waned and as the first cold breezes rippled across the Chattahoochee, Mae grew weaker from her injuries, despite everything the doctors of the county had tried, and despite her mother’s prayers. At some point during the second week of her coma, Dr. George Brice told Bud and Azzie that their daughter had contracted pneumonia. On September 23rd, 1912—two weeks to the day from when she was first found in the woods—Mae Crow died.
MAE’S FUNERAL WAS held at Pleasant Grove Church, a short walk from the house where she grew up, and in the center of a whole community of Crows. According to her schoolmate Ruth Jordan, the sight of Mae’s coffin being lowered into the ground was almost more than the white people of Oscarville could bear. “After she was buried it seemed like all hell broke loose,” Jordan recalled. Soon “the night was filled with gunfire [and] burning cabins and churches,” and the Jordans could hear whites “shooting at any black they could find.”
George Jordan and his wife, Mattie, were poor sharecroppers, like most other whites in Oscarville, but all her life Ruth had heard the story of how, when her mother’s mother died at a young age, “a black woman that lived nearby . . . became a mother-figure [to Mattie], teaching her to cook, keep house, and care for the younger children.” And so, as they listened to the crack of gunshots and smelled the smoke of distant fires, George and Mattie Jordan feared for their black neighbors.
At one point, Ruth’s father went out to check on an African American couple named Garrett and Josie Cook, who owned twenty-seven acres not far from the land George Jordan was working as a sharecropper. George told his wife that he was going out “to get news of the goings on,” but with gangs of night riders on the move, Forsyth had become dangerous even for a forty-four-year-old white farmer like Jordan. As he “walked down the road that night,” Ruth remembered, “he was drawn on by a group of armed white men [and] it scared him so bad he came home.”
At first light, George Jordan walked toward Garrett Cook’s place. “Pa went to check on them,” Ruth Jordan said, and he found that their house “had been shot so full of holes that all the legs on the tables, chairs, and bed had been shot off.” When George called out, Garrett and Josie Cook finally emerged, having spent the night hiding in the woods:
Pa told this man to go back to his farm so the two of them could defend it against anyone that tried to take it from him. . . . The man replied, “George, that would just get us both killed,” and he left Forsyth County forever.
For days afterward, the Jordans could hear the sounds of the night riders each evening at dusk, and this went on “every night,” Ruth Jordan said, “until no colored was left.” Asked whether her father was ever challenged by locals for having tried to help his black neighbors, Jordan answered that to her knowledge “the subject was never again brought up by any of the whites involved.”
ISABELLA HARRIS, THE eight-year-old daughter of Cumming mayor Charlie Harris, also remembered that September as a terrifying time, particularly once she learned that the night riders were not “mountaineers” from outside the county but gangs of ordinary white men, well known to all. Harris recalled that one day as she walked home from school in Cumming, “a group of men, part of a mob, passed me in the dirt side walk.” As they stormed past, Harris said,
They looked ahead of them, their eyes angry, their faces impassive with anger and determination. I was so frightened that . . . I climbed to the top of a rail fence and clung there until these men with their horrible faces had gone by.
Such mobs may have been on the other side of Du Bois’s “color line,” but they were far from strangers to the black people they terrorized in the weeks after Mae Crow’s death. When black residents like Garrett and Josie Cook woke to the sound of a rock smashing through a window or the jangle of bridles outside their door, the order to leave was usually delivered by men whose voices they had heard many times before: employers and landowners for whom they had plowed and picked cotton; merchants with whom they had traded; and white neighbors they had lived and worked with for years.
And whereas in early September, men from the church picnic had been bold enough to try to stand up to the white men pursuing Grant Smith, after the lynching, and in the wake of Mae Crow’s death, it didn’t take much to “run off” the few black residents still in the county. Joel Whitt, a local white man who was twenty-three in 1912, said that in the beginning, the night riders used gunfire and torches, just as Ruth Jordan remembered. But later, Whitt recalled, “Certain men would go to a black person’s home with sticks tied up in a little bundle [and] leave ’em at the door.” By late October, if you made such a thing and placed it outside the cabin of some last, proud black farmer, by sunup he and his whole family would be gone.