Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  Starting in 1951, the state took action by trying to make segregated schools more equal by shepherding a sales tax bill through the Georgia legislature to fund all-Black schools. The governor wanted to fend off court challenges. In 1953, Talmadge pushed through a state constitutional amendment to provide public funding for private whites-only schools. Over the next two years the Georgia General Assembly added provisions to provide publicly leased land free to the private schools and to add the private school teachers to the state’s retirement system.4

  By 1957, the landscape looked different. The U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division forced the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, from the barrel of an M14 rifle. TV footage of white adults spitting and hurling racial epithets at Black children led the nightly news, branding Little Rock as a place of hate. In the two years following the confrontation, business investment in Little Rock dried up. Everett Tucker, the leader of Little Rock’s development organization, blamed massive resistance for the decline in business investment.

  Georgia’s leaders worried about the effect on their bottom line. While they remained ardent segregationists, Jim Crow violence was bad for business. The Georgia legislature created a commission to study the problem. The Sibley Commission found more than 60 percent of white Georgians wanted pure segregation, but the commission listened to the businessmen and recommended tokenism.5

  In the 1960s, Georgia moved away from massive resistance by using a system that looked like freedom of choice but prevented real integration by relying on school boards to use test scores and so-called cultural differences to keep African Americans out of white schools. Georgia reacted much like Virginia, providing the veneer of integration without changing the underlying structure.

  Ninety-one percent of African American students in Georgia remained in completely segregated Black schools. Georgia, like its sister states in the Deep South, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, would fight equality to the bitter end. In 1967, in my new home of Walton County, less than 2 percent of Black children attended integrated schools, even though Walton County was more than 30 percent African American.6

  In February 1968, African Americans in Social Circle, just a few miles south of Monroe, began to protest racial segregation. Two Black teachers and one white teacher challenged inferior segregated schools by taking their pupils out of class. When the school superintendent showed up, he ordered the teachers back to the classroom. When they refused until conditions improved, the superintendent fired all three. Soon, hundreds of Black parents and children protested the dilapidated conditions in Walton County’s segregated school system. They blocked the buses coming into the school as a protest. Quickly, the white county police grabbed the protesters, cuffed them, and put them in a penal bus for processing. The national press began covering the story. Two Walton county sheriff deputies roughed up a Newsweek photographer for taking pictures.7

  With no other recourse available, the parents of three Black students sued the Walton County Board of Education in U.S. District Court to end the racially segregated school system and won on July 30, 1968. With the strongly worded opinion, the judge meant to kill tokenism and segregation in Walton County.8 Because the judgment came just before classes started, the Walton County high schools had a short reprieve. The judge allowed the county to meet full integration by sending African American students from Carver High School to Monroe High School at the start of the 1969–1970 academic year.

  That allowed George Hearn and the Dirty Dozen enough time to create George Walton Academy before the court-ordered integration occurred. By the fall of 1969, the new George Walton Academy began classes in an abandoned school building in Good Hope, while the board of trustees built a new campus. Ironically, the abandoned building had previously housed a segregated Black school named Good Hope–Peters. Governor Herman Talmage funded that building and scores of others in 1958 to impede integration. In 1968, Good Hope–Peters, like many Black schools, closed in preparation for court-ordered desegregation. Walton County’s newly integrated school system had far more buildings than it needed. Racism is not only morally wrong, but fiscally stupid.9

  By the time I arrived in 1977, George Walton Academy had two new buildings off Spring Street. The first was a cinder-block low-ceilinged structure that housed all K–12 classrooms along with a cafeteria that we used for every ceremony including graduation. The other building was a prefab metal-clad gymnasium that looked like a tractor supply building.10 I played basketball, poorly, for three seasons in that building, styling in Chuck Taylor All Stars shoes.

  While the basketball team was important, football reigned supreme. After all, this was Georgia in the 1970s. While the practice field was a red-clay pit, the game-day field featured lush, irrigated grass. My most vivid memories of high school came on that football field as a George Walton Academy Bulldog with a black helmet and red jersey, just like the University of Georgia, twenty-five miles northeast of us.

  During my senior year in 1979, we played twelve football games, going 11-0-1 on our way to winning the Southeastern Association of Independent Schools State Championship. State champions. Yet, with hindsight, our state championship doesn’t quite compare with others. Two hours south of Monroe, a different football team celebrated a different football state championship in 1979.11

  Johnson County High School won the state for the second consecutive year led by Herschel Walker, a six-foot-one, 220-pound African American running back who also won state honors in shot put and sprinting. Walker and I had one thing in common: we graduated from high school the same year. I saw Walker play as a freshman at the University of Georgia. His combination of size, speed, and power seemed miraculous. As a cornerback, if I had played football at the public school, I might have faced Walker—a terrifying thought.

  Luckily for me, we played other schools just like ours—small segregation academies all less than a decade old. Not one player on those twelve teams or on my Bulldog team was an African American. Not one Black cheerleader rooted any team on to victory. Not one Black person watched the game on either side of the stands.

  At George Walton Academy, we had no trouble finding other segregation academies to play. By 1970, Georgia had about four hundred seg academies. By one count, the non-church-affiliated private school enrollment in the former Confederate states increased by nearly 250 percent from 1961 to 1970. The same held true for Protestant schools, which increased over 150 percent. Yet nationwide private school enrollment dipped by more than 20 percent from 1965 to 1970.12 I was a part of the white flight movement that reacted to racial integration by leaving the public school system.

  Of the twelve schools we played, only four remain open today. As the court tightened avenues of state funding, the only schools that remained were those that increased their academic rigor. George Hearn and the rest of the board of trustees hired my dad with his Virginia boarding school pedigree to refashion George Walton into a real college prep school. In 1971, the school published an “open admit” policy to retain its tax-exempt status, but it remained lily-white through my graduation.

  George Walton Academy today has abandoned its whites-only policy and has thirty-five African Americans, almost 5 percent. Granted that’s much lower than Monroe’s percentage of African Americans, but it markedly beats the other remaining schools. The four other schools we played that haven’t shuttered have far fewer African American students.

  Of all the schools we played that year, one stood out in my memory—John Hancock Academy in Sparta, Georgia, in Hancock County, about fifty miles east of Monroe. Hancock County’s population is 70 percent African American, and it remains one of the poorest counties in Georgia. Yet more than 50 percent of the white population attend private schools, even though tuition payments can be a hardship. The more African Americans in a county, the more likely it will have a seg academy standing today. A white child attending Hancock County public schools would be a racial minority, and most white parents refuse
to consider that an option.13

  John Hancock’s mascot was then and remains the rebel. Their fans screamed the high-pitched rebel yell while they waved the Confederate Battle Flag. John Hancock Academy wasn’t the only place I saw the flag. In 1956, as a reaction to the requirement to integrate, the Georgia Assembly changed the state flag to incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag. As Denmark Groover, the legislator who guided the bill to passage, said at the time, “The Confederate symbol was added mostly out of defiance to federal integration orders.”14 While I lived in Georgia, the white supremacist Confederate Battle Flag dominated the state flag.

  In 2003, Georgia changed its flag, losing the Confederate Battle Flag and returning to a version of the flag first introduced in 1879. The current flag is an homage to the first Confederate national flag, the Stars and Bars. White southerners continue to focus on a four-year period when they fought a rebellion to create a slave republic and lost badly.

  * * *

  I LIVED IN Monroe, graduated from high school in Monroe, but during my entire time there I never talked to a Black person, even though the city was 50 percent African American. My only contact with a nonwhite person was during a summer job at National Egg Products in Social Circle. Perhaps my lack of contacts in the Black community accounts for my ignorance of Monroe’s racist history.

  Monroe had a secret. A terrible hidden secret. Maybe other kids knew. My dad knew, but he never talked about it. Nobody talked about it. Monroe was infamous for the last mass lynching in American history, which I discovered after reading Laura Wexler’s 2003 book, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. When I read that book, it caused another belated epiphany. If Lee and Confederate worship created one side of the white supremacy coin, violent terror to enforce racial domination provided the other side. Lynching underpinned the white power structure in both my hometowns. Northern Virginia had eleven recorded lynchings with two in Alexandria. Walton County had nine lynchings from 1877 to 1950.

  By the late nineteenth century, mob violence became rare in most parts of the country, but not south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage called lynching a “pervasive and semiofficial institution in the South.” Before the Civil War, most lynching victims were white men who failed to adhere to community standards. Slave owners preferred to let the justice system execute enslaved people because owners would receive state compensation. During the Civil War, that changed. To intimidate enslaved workers from uprisings, white communities gruesomely executed Black people to enforce submission.15

  After the war, during the chaos of Reconstruction, mob violence increased as white southerners attempted to regain political and economic control. White people killed thousands of African Americans for wage disputes, labor contracts, and refusing to show deference.16

  During Reconstruction, mob violence became a form of political terrorism to prevent African Americans from voting. During campaign seasons, the level of violence became so acute that perhaps thousands of African Americans died. The historian William Gillette labeled the actions of the Ku Klux Klan and sister organizations “guerrilla warfare.”17

  In Walton County, three Ku Klux Klan “dens” operated in 1871 with over three hundred men, more than 10 percent of the white men in the county. The Klan’s violence ensured newly freed African Americans understood their place at the bottom of the new postwar social structure with no education and no access to the ballot box. Walton County’s Klan leader was William Felker. Felker Street still runs through downtown Monroe.18

  Walton County’s Klan’s activities were so brutal that federal officials ordered an inquiry in Atlanta in 1871, providing us with a clear view of the Klan’s terror campaign. The blacksmith Jake Daniels refused to repair a buggy owned by a white man. The customer owed Daniels money from a previous job, and Daniels wanted the man to pay up. Daniels stood up for himself, and the Klan made him pay. Late the next night, Felker led fifteen to twenty men disguised in white dresses to the Daniels house. Felker knocked on the door and Daniels opened it. When he saw the posse, Daniels turned and started running away. One Klansman shot him in the back of the head. As Daniels fell, the rest of the mob ran in and shot him repeatedly before fleeing.19

  The Klan ensured a social structure where African Americans remained second-class citizens, unequal to whites in every way. Felker’s Klan served as enforcers. Often the terror would result in beatings, not death. One night, Felker and his fellow Klansmen burst into Augustus Mills’s home. Mills lived in a small house with his wife and four children. When Felker’s Klan den raided the Mills home, they forced the couple to strip and lie on the ground. Then the men beat them with a hickory stick. The wife was nursing their baby as the Klan beat her. When the couple’s four-year-old daughter started crying, Felker leaned over her with the butt of his pistol and said, “If you don’t hush, I’m going to mash you.”20 Walton County had a long tradition of using violence to enforce racial domination.

  After Reconstruction ended in 1877, the violence did not abate. Into the twentieth century, white mobs continued to lynch African Americans to ensure their economic, political, and social subjugation and maintain white supremacy.21 The evidence is clear. Violence against Black people maintained a racial hierarchy. From 1882 to 1889, the ratio of Black to white lynching victims remained about the same as in the antebellum era—four to one. After 1900, the ratio was seventeen to one. Some white people were lynched as vigilante crimes, but African Americans suffered the overwhelming number of extrajudicial killings.22

  As mob violence became more widespread and effective in enforcing racial subjugation, lynchings became more public and more macabre. Huge crowds would gather for the planned events. Hanging proved too quick and efficient a means of death. Instead, lynch mobs turned to genital mutilation, dismemberment, and burning, like something from the medieval era. Crowds would clamor to take souvenirs of the hanging tree, rope, and even the fingers and skins of the victims. I remember the first time I saw postcards depicting a lynching. A young white boy smiled at the feet of a hanging victim. Lynchings became violent public spectacles that united the white community while ensuring the subservience of African Americans.23

  Many of the lynchings in Alexandria and Monroe involved an accusation against an African American man of sexual assault, improper touching, improper language, or even “loitering” around white women. White men feared Black male sexuality above all else. As the Virginia author Thomas Nelson Page wrote in his 1904 book, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem, lynchings showed whites’ “determination to put an end to the ravishment of their women by an inferior race.”24 The terrible irony was that during the slave era and beyond, white men sexually exploited Black women routinely. Conversely, white men rejected the very idea that white women could consent to sex with a Black man.

  While lynch mobs in Virginia murdered 84 people according to exhaustive reporting done by the Equal Justice Initiative, my adopted home state of Georgia was far more violent. Georgia lynch mobs murdered 589 people between 1877 and 1950. Most of the attacks in Northern Virginia and Walton County came after accusations of Black men raping white women. Several lynchings occurred because African American men did not act in a docile manner, upsetting the racial conventions demanded by white society.25

  The lynching of Jim Hanson in Walton County in 1890 provides an example. Sarah Williams accused Hanson of waking her with the “touch of a large rough hand,” calling him a “huge grinning Negro.” According to newspaper reports, Williams’s daughter rushed in after hearing screams, followed by the husband with a shotgun. Somehow Hanson allegedly took the shotgun after a struggle and then escaped. The next day, Hanson was arrested, but he never made it to even a sham trial. Walton County’s white citizens took Hanson to a pond and floated him out on a log. Once he was away from the shore, they pointed their guns at him and started firing. The newspaper reported that after at least eighty-five shots, his body sank.26

  His family could not bury the
body. As I researched this case, I thought not only of the terror Hanson must have felt but of his family’s reaction. They had no body to conduct a proper funeral and no ability to protest this awful injustice. Nor could they tell anyone about this crime. Intimidation prevented the Hanson family from talking. The lynching created a short news article in Georgia newspapers but resulted in no widespread publicity. No one was investigated or indicted, much less convicted of the crime.

  The next lynching in Walton County garnered far more publicity. On an early April evening in 1911, Leila McKnight went looking for a cow in her pasture. When nightfall came and she had not returned to her house, McKnight’s mother went searching and found her unconscious in the pasture, covered in mud. When she recovered, Leila said that she was struck from behind at dusk. She accused an African American man named Tom Allen and another man she did not recognize of assaulting her. Immediately, the sheriff had bloodhounds on-site, but the dogs found no scent to follow.27

  By the next evening, the sheriff had arrested no one, but that didn’t stop a “mob of several hundred citizens” from surrounding the jail. Infected by racist bloodlust, the mob forced their way into the jail, searching the building for any African Americans. They found none. When the sheriff arrested Tom Allen, he was shipped to the Atlanta jail for safety.28

  In May, Allen went back to Monroe for trial with an escort of dozens of National Guard soldiers. As the troops guarded him, one white citizen nearly shot Allen as he rode to the courthouse. At the last second, a soldier’s bayonet forced the assassin away from the defendant. The trial was postponed when Leila McKnight refused to testify because of illness, sending Allen back to the Atlanta jail. His lawyers asked for a change of venue because Monroe’s white citizens kept publicly demanding a lynching. Of course, the outcome of a jury trial was clear. No African Americans could sit in judgment of Allen; it would be an all-white trial, except for the defendant. After a month’s delay, Leila McKnight was ready to testify.