by Ty Seidule
Newspapers across the country and the world condemned the quadruple lynching and the brutality of white people in Georgia. The Washington Post ran an op-ed called “White Blight.” The paper declared, “This was no ordinary crime. It was a community outrage against society.” Then the paper declared Monroe “Lynchtown.”59
Hundreds of letters to the editor around the country ran the gamut from outrage to pleas for decency and equal rights. One of the more poignant letters written to the paper of record in Georgia, The Atlanta Constitution, came from a young student at Morehouse College: “We want and are entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens … equal opportunities in education, health, recreation, and similar public services; the right to vote.” The seventeen-year-old student’s name was Martin Luther King Jr.60
Some white Walton County residents decried the killings, and several churches issued a joint statement condemning the violence, but other Monroe natives, like J. P. Adai, a retired farmer, gave reporters the white supremacist line: “You got to understand the nigger is the most brutish people they is. They don’t think the same way as humans … They all lie and steal and when they get drunk all they want is a white woman. You gotta keep ’em down.” The Social Circle justice of the peace, O. R. Lindsey, told FBI agents that he approved of the lynchings: “The negroes of Walton County were getting out of line and the lynching had a deterrent effect upon the belligerent and ‘uppity’ negroes.”61
If the lynching had occurred thirty years earlier, the killings would have been a local concern. But this time was different. Black veterans had fought and died for their country, even though the army remained segregated. In Chicago, fifteen thousand people attended a rally. Other rallies took place in New York and San Francisco. A Black veteran held a sign at one rally that said, “We veterans are still being killed by fascists.”62 Americans sent thirty thousand letters and telegrams to President Harry Truman, Congress, and the leader of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover reacted by sending twenty FBI agents from all over the South to Monroe to investigate the lynching. They encamped in a Monroe hotel for months.
Yet the outcome of the investigation was the same as every other lynching investigation over the last seventy years. Not one of Monroe’s white citizens said a word. As the FBI’s lead investigator said, “The best people in town won’t talk about this. They have an idea who it is.” The agent went on to say that he had never seen a case with less cooperation from local authorities. “We’ve been out on things like this before, but never anything like this.” After three months of FBI investigation, the case remained ice cold.63
In a final effort to break the case, the Justice Department and the FBI convened a grand jury to ask questions. After Lamar Howard, a young African American worker, testified, James and Tom Verner brutally beat him. The Verner brothers went to trial, and James admitted he beat Howard. Tom described how he saw his brother assault the Black man. Despite their confession, the all-white jury returned with a not guilty verdict in less than an hour. The FBI realized that even if they had evidence against anyone in the lynching, no jury in Walton County or anywhere in Georgia would convict white men of killing four Black people. It bears repeating. Georgia was a racial police state, not a democracy.
In July 1947, the FBI admitted defeat and closed the investigation. A writer for the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender railed at the FBI: “The nation’s crack investigation agency—the FBI—admits that it has been outwitted by the 20 or more unmasked backwood fiends who committed the ghastly crime.” Walter White, the NAACP’s head, wrote with incredulity, “Even the nation-wide condemnation of the lynchings had no more appreciable effect than water on a turtle’s back.”64
While Walton County’s white citizens did nothing and said nothing, the assassination of the Dorseys and the Malcoms spurred one important person to action. President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9808, creating the Commission on Civil Rights. Truman was an unlikely champion of civil rights. His grandparents had enslaved people, and he grew up with racist views. Truman’s uncle James Chiles rode with the notorious Quantrill’s Raiders, pro-Confederate guerrillas, and participated in the Lawrence, Kansas, massacre. The historian David McCullough said Chiles was a “living terror” to African Americans. As Truman would later say, “I was raised amidst some violently prejudiced Southerners.”65
When asked after he left the White House what inspired him to create the Civil Rights Commission, Truman remembered exactly. It was the Monroe lynching combined with the beating and blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard in South Carolina that horrified the president.66
On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard departed Fort Gordon, Georgia, after his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army. While on a Greyhound bus moving toward his home in North Carolina, he asked the white bus driver if he could use the restroom. After initially saying no, the driver let him off the bus, and then, after Sergeant Woodard reboarded, the bus continued. At the next stop near Aiken, South Carolina, the driver notified the police that Sergeant Woodard had been drinking and was a nuisance, even though Woodard was not a drinker and had said nothing after getting back on the bus.67
The chief of police, Lynwood Shull, removed Woodard from the bus and along with several deputies took him into an alleyway and beat him for not first addressing the policeman as “sir,” although Woodard did say “sir” after Shull demanded it. In the town jail, Shull and his deputies continued to beat the sergeant while he was still in uniform. Woodard described how the police took the end of a nightstick and jammed the end repeatedly into his eyes. By the next morning the savage police beating left Woodard with crushed eye sockets.68
The police kept him in the cell for two more days without seeking medical treatment before he was taken to a local hospital in Aiken where he received poor care. Finally, two weeks after he went missing, his family found him, and the U.S. Army rushed him to one of its facilities, but the damage was too extensive; the Aiken police had blinded Sergeant Woodard for life.69
The reaction, like the reaction to the Moore’s Ford lynching, was nationwide horror. Orson Welles, the famous movie and radio star, discussed the case on his show. The songwriter Woody Guthrie wrote “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” Adding to the outrage, the all-white jury acquitted the police chief, Lynwood Shull.70
Woodard’s blinding and the Moore’s Ford lynching became exhibits A and B for Truman’s Civil Rights Commission. Part of their report discussed how some communities would not hold people accountable for shocking crimes. “A case in point is the 1946, Monroe, Georgia, lynching. Four Negroes had been killed. Twenty agents were assigned to the case; 2,790 individuals interviewed; and 106 witnesses presented to the grand jury which failed to return an indictment.” Monroe squirmed to try to avoid the glare of the “Lynchtown” moniker, but it stuck.71
Truman took the commission’s report recommending an end to Jim Crow segregation and acted. He could not count on Congress to embrace civil rights. Southern Senate segregationists like Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, author of the 1947 racist diatribe Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, were implacable. Bilbo wrote,
There is not enough power in all the world, not in all the mechanized armies of the Allies and the Axis, including the atomic bomb, which could now force white Southerners to abandon the policy of the social segregation of the white and black races.72
No hope there. Instead of facing Bilbo and his ilk, the president issued two executive orders. One of those orders required the military to desegregate immediately. The Moore’s Ford lynching began to change the nation. In Monroe, African Americans fought back.
In 1964, African Americans in Monroe protested the town’s segregated policies. White police arrested Black protesters for trying to sit in segregated restaurants. Other Black citizens tried to desegregate the movie theater. Monroe’s reaction to attempts at equality followed a similar pattern. Five hundred white people showed up downtown near the courthouse to jeer at Blac
k Americans trying to further civil rights. The mayor asked for state troopers to come in to prevent more violence. Eventually, the town council voted to impose a curfew on the community. That didn’t stop white people from shooting at several African Americans when they protested against racism at a gas station.
In response to pressure and publicity, the town created a biracial commission and even hired two Black policemen for the first time. While Monroe did take at least this one small positive step, albeit only in response to African Americans’ protest, the reaction of the largest church in town was more revealing. The First Baptist Church voted to bar Black people from its worship services. Downtown, the Monroe Drug Store shut its communal eating area rather than integrate.73
I kept looking for racial incidents in Walton County, and I kept finding them. In 1972, Social Circle, six miles south of Monroe, erupted in violence after an African American man was shot inside a white woman’s home. The man, James Gober, had a relationship with the woman who lived in the house. A white man entered the house and shot Gober in the back. Gober was nude at the time, and his clothes were never found. When the ambulance came, they took the white woman and her child, leaving Gober in the house, bleeding. Finally, a police car drove Gober to the Monroe hospital. The attending physician said Gober’s injuries were too serious for treatment there. Two and a half hours after being shot, Gober arrived at the Athens hospital, twenty miles east of Monroe, where he died.74
Police ruled the shooting justifiable homicide, and the man who shot Gober was never arrested. Black residents continued to protest. Nineteen seventy-two was not 1946. When people have no political outlet nor means of changing a racist society, rioting is their only voice. During the rioting that followed the murder, fifteen vacant homes and two old buildings burned in Social Circle, but no white people suffered any injuries or much property damage.75
The same was not true for Social Circle’s Black citizens. Ralph Ivey became the first Black city councilman, and Bobby Howard created the Community Organization for Progress and Education in response to the murder. Hours after Ivey assumed his position on the council, his and Howard’s homes were firebombed and Ivey’s mother injured. The reaction to equal rights in Walton County was white violence against Black leadership. White vigilantes stalked other members of the African American community. The Social Circle mayor’s comments to an Atlanta reporter about the firebombing were telling: “The less we have in the press about it, the better.”76
As in Alexandria, the African American community in Social Circle protested. Six hundred and fifty Black children walked out of the school and held a march to protest racism. Hundreds of Black citizens met in the Cargle Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Social Circle to protest the violence, but this time the Georgia State Patrol protected the churchgoers.77 When I first looked at Monroe’s history, I knew I’d find the lynchings before World War II, and I knew about the Moore’s Ford lynching, but the racial unrest in 1964 and 1972 surprised me.
So too did another case a year after I graduated from high school and left Monroe for college. In Social Circle, the town where I spent summers working at the egg processing factory, there was another violent incident. Specialist Lynn Jackson, a twenty-year-old soldier on leave from Fort Bragg, went missing from his home in Social Circle in August 1981. Fort Bragg declared him AWOL because he never reported back to his unit after his leave. His family didn’t even know he was missing until the Fort Bragg military police contacted them about his AWOL status. On December 8, 1981, two hunters tromping through the woods several hundred yards behind Jackson’s house found his decomposed body at the end of a rope, hanged on a tree branch eighteen feet in the air.78
In February, a coroner’s inquest declared Jackson’s death a suicide. The African American community in Social Circle was incredulous. They gasped audibly, “No!” How did Jackson climb nearly twenty feet up the tree wearing normal sneakers? How did he tie the rope? The family saw no indications of suicide. Where was the suicide note? Why did he go so far into the woods? Rumors abounded in the small town. Jackson dated white women, which was still taboo. The army sent psychiatrists who argued that Jackson was unstable. The family countered with other evidence that he was fine. Authorities hoped the suicide ruling would end the issue. Instead, it led to more violence.79
Civil rights leaders from Atlanta including Dr. Ralph Abernathy, a former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the state representatives Hosea Williams and Tyrone Brooks traveled to Walton County. On the evening of February 19, 1982, 175 people met at the First African Baptist Church in Monroe, led by a dynamic preacher, the Rev. Clarence Grier Jr. Together, they planned a march the next day from Social Circle to Monroe to protest what they believed was a lynching of Specialist Jackson.80
Meanwhile, ten miles north of Monroe in an unplowed field, the New Order of the Ku Klux Klan led a gathering of 350 to 400 white Georgians. The leader of the rally was Edward Fields. The Anti-Defamation League has a large file on Fields, starting as a teenager in the 1940s. His first racist group was known as the Columbians, “a fascist stormtrooper group … [and] para-military combat group that actively plotted a takeover of the state of Georgia.” In 1958, Fields founded the National States’ Rights Party, whose members wore armbands with the Nazi thunderbolt symbol. Their professed goal was to “save Alabama and the nation from Jew Communists and their nigger allies.” In the late 1970s, he founded the New Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in northern Georgia and became the Grand Dragon.81
During the ninety-minute New Order rally north of Monroe, Fields and his Klan supporters showed off their impressive collection of weapons. About halfway through the rally, a robed Klansman stood next to Fields and brought out an effigy of Representative Tyrone Brooks with a noose around its neck. When the Klansman held the effigy aloft, the crowd began shouting, “Hang Tyrone! Hang Tyrone! Hang Tyrone! Hang Tyrone!” Then the mob switched their rallying cry to “White Power! White Power! White Power!” At the end of the rally, Fields led the group to a fifteen-foot wooden cross wrapped in burlap and lit it. Once it burned brightly, a Klansman threw the effigy of Representative Brooks into the fire to the cheers of the crowd.82
The next day, Sharon Murray, state secretary of the New Order of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, promised that Klan members in their white robes would greet the Black marchers. The local Klan thought the march would help its recruitment drive and held a countermarch with an equal number of people. The Klan and other white people shouted racial epithets at the Black marchers. A hundred state troopers decked in riot gear tried their best to keep the peace as the Klan threw bottles at the marchers. Despite the intimidation and threats of violence, eleven hundred people braved the cold weather and marched from Social Circle to the county courthouse in Monroe. 83
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AT THE TIME I graduated from high school in 1980, I knew nothing about Monroe’s and Walton County’s racial past. No one ever talked about it. As late as 2000, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that Monroe’s veil of silence remained.84
In 2018, I attended a conference at the University of Georgia. On my way back to the Atlanta airport, I stopped in Monroe. I went to George Walton Academy to see a thriving school, still seemingly centered on the football field. In downtown Monroe, I saw the large 1906 Confederate monument outside the now-sparkling downtown. The city looked much better than it had in the 1970s. Because of its picturesque qualities, Monroe served as the small southern town for the filming of the wonderful 2016 movie Hidden Figures about Black women mathematicians at NASA.
During my short driving tour, I looked for plaques and road signs that discussed the racial strife of my hometown. Nothing mentioned the lynchings during Reconstruction or those in 1911 and 1913. Nothing talked about the history of slavery or Jim Crow segregation—except one marker.
I drove east out the Old Athens Highway. Next to a small road turnoff, I saw a plaque. I pulled over and stepped out of
my rental car, right into some red clay. Yes, I was back in Georgia. Staring me in the face was a highway marker for the Moore’s Ford lynching. The marker served as a modest reminder to a ghastly crime. Not at all like the monumental obelisk honoring the Confederate veterans in front of the Monroe courthouse.
I read the Moore’s Ford lynching marker, near tears. I felt the emotion of finally seeing a part of the truth revealed in Monroe, but I also felt angry that I had grown up surrounded by the trappings of white supremacy and I hadn’t even realized it. Soon another emotion hit me. How the hell could I feel aggrieved as a middle-aged white man? I didn’t suffer. In fact, I had more in common with the lynchers than with the victims. No, the lies and silence I grew up with can’t compare with the pain of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and oppression, but the damage done to everyone who grew up in a racial hierarchy is still real. I took a picture of the sign, created in 1999. One small roadside marker doesn’t change the past, but it does make history more inclusive—and more accurate.
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I GRADUATED FROM George Walton Academy with the other eighteen young men and women in my class and left Monroe for good. My dad took a new job at another private prep school, and we moved to Mobile, Alabama, near the Gulf Coast. UMS Prep School, my dad’s new school, was far more prestigious but every bit as white. Well, not quite. I worked as a janitor and maintenance worker at the school during my summer breaks. All those mowing grass and scrubbing toilets were Black men and women except for me.