Byrd and Delia Oliver lived two doors down from Ed Collins and his wife, Julia, and not far from the cluster of houses where Rob Edwards, Oscar Daniel, and Ernest Knox had lived before the “race troubles” began. Having seen three of his neighbors arrested and one of them lynched on the Cumming square, Oliver must have realized, in October of 1912, that his days in Forsyth County were numbered. In the weeks after the trials, he watched the black community grow smaller and smaller, as one family after another decided it was better to risk the uncertainties of the road than to take their chances with the armed and increasingly dangerous white people of the county.
Forsyth’s vigilantes eventually caught the attention of the national press, and papers as far away as New York told readers of a mass exodus and a black population “In Terror of Night Riders.” “The anti-negro movement began in Forsyth,” a correspondent wrote in the New York Times. Unchecked by local law enforcement, he said,
the crusade against the negroes is being conducted by bands of mounted men, who ride through the country at night and leave notices at the homes of the negroes warning them to leave at once. . . . In many instances respectable, hard-working negroes have been frightened into sacrificing their property and fleeing.
As a renter in the overwhelmingly white community of Oscarville, Byrd Oliver was just such a “respectable, hard-working negro” when he, his wife, Delia, and their seven children, ages three to fourteen, set out on foot, heading east toward the Chattahoochee River. They were bound, like so many of their fellow refugees, for the railroad town of Gainesville, in Hall County.
The Oliver family’s flight from Forsyth was similar to what hundreds of their neighbors endured, but unlike those who left no trace of the journey, Byrd Oliver used to tell his daughter Dorothy all about it. “Every so often, he would sit on the doorstep and talk. . . . He could talk about it 15 or 20 years later,” she said. “He would always sit with his chin in the palm of his hand and the tears would run down his sleeve. He has cried about it many a day.” When Forsyth once again made national headlines in 1987, seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy Rucker Oliver recounted her father’s memories for the Gainesville Times.
Byrd Oliver, date unknown
“My Dad saw everything” in 1912, she said, referring to the arrests of Knox, Daniel, and Collins, the burning of black homes and churches, and the ultimatums delivered in the night. “They knew everything that was going to happen . . . it doesn’t take bad news long to spread.” Byrd Oliver told his daughter that many black families were forced to leave behind “drums of syrups, canned goods, family keepsakes, and most important, farmland.” And when, as a child, Dorothy asked her father if he had really grown up in “all white” Forsyth, Oliver told how his family banded together with other groups of refugees for safety, then set out across a landscape teeming with white mobs:
[He] traveled with a group of about 75 people . . . they would walk so far and then count [everyone in the group]. Just before they got to the river, three of his relatives were missing. But you couldn’t turn back to look for them.
According to family lore, Byrd and his wife, Delia, got separated somewhere along the road, with the three oldest daughters following their mother, and the four youngest making the eleven-mile journey to Gainesville with their father. Byrd and these four children reappear in the census of 1920, living with Oliver’s second wife, Beulah Rucker, who he met once they had resettled in Hall County.
It’s not clear whether Byrd and Delia chose to part ways when they fled Forsyth, or she and the older children never made it to a planned reunion, or they suffered some violent attack along the road. But the records confirm Byrd Oliver’s story of losing half of his family on the journey out of Forsyth, never to be seen again. While he and his second wife, Beulah, would go on to become leaders in the black community of Gainesville—and founders of one of the most successful African American schools in the state—according to Dorothy, her father never forgot about all he’d left behind in Forsyth. And like so many others, his life was divided between what happened before and what came after the fall of 1912.
AS MORE AND MORE hardworking, law-abiding people like Byrd and Delia Oliver abandoned their homes, the county’s white landowners began to feel deeply concerned about the future. A report in the New York Times makes it clear that as the violence spread, the night riders began threatening not just black residents but many of their white employers:
Recently warnings have been sent to white planters who employ many negroes and who have announced that they intend to protect their employees. To these planters the night riders have sent notices stating that unless they cease to protect the negroes their barns and homes will be burned.
Everyone knew that arson was no idle threat among the white people of north Georgia, and as the terror escalated, Cherokee County, which borders Forsyth to the west, saw a sudden influx of refugees. “Three wagon loads stopped here last week,” a witness said, “and we are informed that several more are in and around Canton.” Residents of Hall County saw long lines of displaced families walking along the roads leading out of Forsyth, and the Savannah Tribune ran an article with the headline “Gainesville Invaded,” describing the arrival of “hordes of Negroes from Forsyth and neighboring counties, who have been driven from their homes by indignant whites.” The story went on to tell how
anonymous letters have been sent [to] almost every planter in the hill country. . . . These missives threaten arson and dynamiting of the houses in which the Negroes live as penalty for disobeyance. In many instances, mobs of whites appeared at the Negro homes on farms and openly demanded evacuation.
A. J. Julian, a longtime resident of Forsyth, was an old friend of Joseph Mackey Brown’s, and after hearing reports of such “lawlessness,” he wrote directly to the governor, to make sure Brown understood that the convictions of Knox and Daniel had not brought an end to mob violence, and that the situation was growing worse by the day. “My Dear Gov,” Julian began,
A very important matter I desire to call your attention [to] is the protection of the citizens of Ga. & especially of Forsyth. . . . There is a gang of night marauders . . . that have run off about all of the negroes . . . & they are bold in their operations. It seems that the Sheriffs are cowards and fearful.
Julian told of one raid on a group of young black women and their infant children, who were visited by night riders only after whites made sure that all the adult men were away and the women unarmed:
Last Sunday week five men went to [a] Negro House. . . . They sent a young man up to see if the Negro men were gone & ask the women if they had any guns. When they found the men gone & no pistols, they went up [and] ordered the women to leave, one with right young baby & it pouring rain. After they left they shot the dogs, taken all their furniture, clothes, & bedding, piled it out in the yard [then] set fire & burned it, dogs & all.
Julian clearly meant to shock the governor with the image of a young mother, babe in arms, being driven out into a storm, as her family’s whole household was burned “dogs & all.” He also knew Brown would be troubled by news that rich farmland lay abandoned and unplanted due to the violence:
Hundreds of acres of land . . . will not be cultivated [this year], which will be a loss in taxes to both state & counties. Labor now can not be found to hire or rent. Is this state of affairs to go on? It will end in race war if some check is not put on these outrages.
The “check” Julian proposed was simple: pursue and arrest the offenders, and prosecute them vigorously in the courts.
When Brown wrote back, he offered a fifty-dollar reward to anyone who could identify the perpetrators of violence against black citizens and said he, too, “deplore[d] the action on the part of the lawless element who are committing so many outrageous crimes on the people of that section.” But while Brown shared Julian’s anxiety about the financial consequences, he was steadfast in his view that this was a problem to be solved by local people themselves whenever possible, not state or federal authorities. “The law-abiding element,” Brown’s reply to Julian concluded, “will have to by concerted efforts run down these people and bring them to justice.”
In mid-October, a group of Forsyth whites tried to do just that, when they announced that a mass meeting would be held at the Cumming courthouse, to address the “lawlessness” that was driving black residents out of the county. The problem was clearly not going away on its own, and on the evening of Wednesday, October 16th—a little more than three weeks after “all hell broke loose” on the night of Mae Crow’s funeral—concerned citizens gathered to discuss actions “the law-abiding element” might take to stop, and hopefully reverse, the exodus. Many surely felt a moral, Christian duty to speak out against the violence and in defense of black families who had lived in their homes, cooked their meals, and nursed their children for generations—in some cases going all the way back to the days of slavery. As one local man put it, “They drove out a cook who raised seventeen children out of my kitchen!”
The children of Jeremiah and Nancy Brown, who were expelled from Forsyth in 1912. Left to right: Harrison, Rosalee, Bertie, Fred, Naomi, and Minor Brown, c. 1896
Present at the mass meeting were planters, mill operators, and mine owners, as well as members of rich white families who could hardly imagine life without their black “help.” All these people had in common an urgent goal, and that was to stop the intimidation as soon as possible, lest they wake to find that every black field hand, overseer, driver, cook, and washerwoman in the county had vanished into the night. Cumming mayor Charlie Harris presided over the gathering, and its secretary was John F. Echols, a twenty-four-year-old who had grown up in Cumming, gone to school in Atlanta, and recently returned to serve as a clerk in Harris’s law office.
The official resolution that Echols recorded in his stenography pad shows that many whites in Cumming were deeply troubled by what was happening after dark. Their resolution informed the governor that the violence was not a series of unrelated attacks but part of a coordinated “effort on the part of some unknown persons to drive the colored people from the county, which is evidenced by letters written and dropped at the door of this class of our people, and in their mail boxes, notifying them that they must leave, and containing threats against them as well as letters to some of the white people—all of which is unlawful and detrimental to the interest of the common people.” In a cover letter to the governor, Harris added that “Quite a number of black churches have been burned and inhabited houses shot into by persons unknown and letters of intimidation sent through the mails . . . contrary, we believe to the laws.”
This last detail, about threats being delivered through the U.S. Postal Service, was no small matter, for it meant that these “persons unknown” were violating not just county and state criminal codes but federal law. The implicit argument was that this was no longer a problem for a part-time mayor and a small county police force but a matter worthy of the attention of the governor and the federal judiciary. As part of their appeal for help, those present affirmed their commitment to peace and order. “We condemn this conduct,” they said, “and pledge ourselves to give to the innocent and law abiding colored people in the County the reasonable and lawful protection in our power, and our aid in ferreting out the real perpetrators and bringing them to justice.”
The resolution called on Judge William T. Newman of Georgia’s Northern District federal court to open an investigation, and reminded state officials that Knox and Daniel were soon to be brought back and hung near the Cumming square. Citizens of Forsyth asked the governor to send the Georgia National Guard to help “in maintaining order and preserving the peace as well as suppressing evils already existing.” Finally, the resolution called for “immediate action” from Governor Brown and Judge Newman and stressed the key role Bill Reid would have to play in stopping the violence. “We pledge ourselves to stand by Sheriff Reid,” the document concluded, “and give him our support in protecting the innocent citizens of our county.” Given Reid’s complicity with the mob that had already killed Rob Edwards, this now sounds like a case of tragically wishful thinking.
THE PROCLAMATION OF the October mass meeting was a clear and unequivocal call to end the violence, and it provides evidence that only three weeks into the expulsions many white residents understood what was happening around them and tried to stop it. Rather than sitting idly by, they called upon those with state and federal power to “investigate these depredations and bring the guilty parties to justice.”
The answer Governor Brown sent back to Cumming, five days later, was just as clear and unequivocal as Mayor Harris had been in his plea for help. “I am in receipt of your letter . . . asking my aid in restoring peace and order in your county,” the governor wrote.
In reply [I] will state that this is a matter for the judge, sheriff and other local authorities to handle; the Governor has no authority to take any steps to give protection until the local authorities advise that they are unable to enforce the laws and properly protect life and property. I sincerely hope that the good people of Forsyth County will cooperate in giving protection to all who peaceably pursue their avocations and obey all the laws.
Judge Newman also failed to act, even though the Cumming resolution implored him to launch a federal investigation and to use his office to arrest those making terrorist threats. Instead, Newman was busy playing his part in America’s original “war on drugs”: prosecuting thousands of poor, small-time moonshiners, who were arrested in large numbers after Georgia passed one of the earliest Prohibition laws in the nation, in 1908. With corn prices depressed for much of the first decade of the century, and with much of north Georgia unserved by railroad lines, thousands of upland farmers had realized that it was far easier to transport a wooden crate of mason jars than it was to move heaping bushels of corn over the rocky roads out of the hills. Once those jars of “white lightning” reached places like Gainesville and Atlanta, they fetched far more on the black market than any wagonload of produce ever could. Pound for pound, ears of corn were no match for white corn liquor, no matter the risk of arrest by federal “revenuers.”
The massive leather minute book of Judge Newman’s Northern District court is filled with convictions of one poor white distiller after another in the fall of 1912, usually on charges of federal tax evasion. What it doesn’t contain is a single case brought against the night riders who, during those same months, were using the U.S. mail to make terrorist threats against African Americans. It was a federal offense for a man to stand in some shady hollow of Forsyth and quietly fill a jar with liquor, and the government sent a virtual army of revenue agents into north Georgia to arrest moonshiners and break up their stills. But when those same white men spent their nights shooting, bombing, and burning black residents out of their homes, the federal government, like Governor Joseph Mackey Brown, turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.
IN THE SUMMER of 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, sent a journalist named Royal Freeman Nash to Cumming, to investigate reports of a wholesale exodus of blacks from Forsyth County. The resulting article, which appeared in November of 1915, gives us one of the only written accounts of these events that comes from outside the southern point of view. Nash was a social worker and secretary of the NAACP, but as a white man, he could walk through places like Forsyth in relative anonymity, and years of investigating racial crimes had honed Nash’s gift for getting people to talk.
After interviewing whites all over Forsyth, as well as members of the black community who had fled to neighboring counties, Nash described how whites had exploited the desperate situation of their black neighbors in 1912 and had swooped in with offers to buy livestock and farm implements at a fraction of their real value. “A negro would receive an anonymous letter giving him twenty-four, thirty-six hours, occasionally ten days to quit the county,” Nash wrote,
and that meant precipitate flight and abandonment of everything owned in the world. In other cases it meant a sale at a few days’ notice, during which a cow worth $25 would bring $8–9, and hogs worth $15–20 sold for $4–6. House and land brought nothing. If the Negro owned a mule he moved out his furniture, otherwise it burned after his departure.
Nash went on to tell of the dire consequences if black residents tried to hold out, and he spoke with one family who’d received their ultimatum not from grown men but two white children:
Failure to vacate on the date set meant a stealthy visit in the night and either dynamite or the torch. The result was a state of terror which caused one Negro family to accept a twenty-four hour notice [delivered by] two children aged five and six respectively, who had learned the game from their elders.
As Forsyth’s white children learned “the game” of terrorizing black neighbors and driving them from their homes, a small group of African Americans tried to continue living peacefully in town, hoping they might be protected by their close connections to rich whites. Nash spoke with one black employee at a Cumming boardinghouse and told how even “after repeated notices . . . the owner kept her on until January, but let her go then for fear he could no longer protect the servant’s life.” Nash heard similar stories about longtime employees on the farms of the county, whose white bosses only dismissed them, often with regret and apologies, after repeated threats from the mobs. Asked if he knew of any cases where blacks were defended by whites, a Forsyth farmer told Nash that
Old Man Roper yonder had a nigger he well nigh couldn’t live without, knew every stone and stump on the farm. The boys warned him time and again to get shet of him, but Roper would keep him on. So one night they jest had to put a stick of dynamite under the nigger’s house. . . . No, it didn’t kill him, but it started him for Hall County right smart. . . . I reckon they won’t be back. You see, the young fellers are growing up sort of with the idea that this is a white man’s county.
Farm by farm, cabin by cabin, the last black residents who dared to remain in Forsyth after the death of Mae Crow were rooted out, and those who defended them were taught, with dynamite and torches, the cost of resisting the new “whites only” rule. Whatever Sheriff Reid knew about the men behind such terrorism, and whatever role he played in the violent performances that took place after dark, there is no record of a single warrant or arrest for any of the crimes committed against the property and people of black Forsyth in 1912. By mid-October, the editor of the Dahlonega Nugget could claim that “A gentleman of Forsyth County, who was here last week, said every Negro who lived in it was gone. Not a single one is left to tell the tale.”