by Karen Branan
While we may have a stronger grasp on this phenomenon, we still haven’t remedied it, as evidenced by our mass incarceration of African Americans entirely out of proportion to their population.
The Mountain Hill district had long been a breeding ground for white outlaws, some of whom had attained the stature of heroes. Back in 1889, Frank Huckaby, Dozier’s father, a white man, was murdered by a cocky young gunslinger named Will Wallace. It was in that year that Wallace and his gang also took to terrorizing blacks in Mountain Hill, assassinating one Ransom Gordon while he worked in the fields. Gordon had been a follower of a black teacher who’d already been run out of town; his school was burned down. The day after Gordon’s funeral, Wallace stopped a black preacher on the road and forced him at gunpoint to reenact Gordon’s funeral, then shot off his mustache. Enraged at all this (since it scared their farmhands and threatened white livelihoods), some of Mountain Hill’s better white people called upon the governor to put a reward on Wallace’s head. He disappeared but was caught and jailed in Hamilton, where, however, his friends engineered a Christmas escape. Soon afterward he taunted lawmen by riding through Hamilton firing his rifle into the air.
After he was captured he spent two years in rooms off the warden’s office at the notorious Columbus stockade, where he’d be rewarded for stopping a breakout. Upon release he found redemption as a detective and a bailiff. In 1893, a long interview with Wallace appeared in the Columbus Sun-Enquirer embellishing his Wild West image and enhancing his fame with tales of daring and machismo while living in Texas. Soon thereafter he was murdered in Alabama by Negroes he’d been hired to catch for conspiring against several white planters. This elevated him to near sainthood among his young male admirers in Mountain Hill.
It was shortly after Wallace’s death, in 1896, that another Harris County man with close ties to the Mountain Hill section, the recently returned Edgar Stripling, had taken up the outlaw-hero banner. In the bright heat of a summer morn, Stripling—then a substitute Columbus policeman—and his lieutenants battered down the doors to a Columbus courtroom. Jessie Slayton, a black man, was on trial for raping a white woman. Stripling dropped a noose around Slayton’s neck and dragged him down the stairs and onto Broad Street, where he and his mob hanged the already-dead man to a tree.
Governor W. Y. Atkinson, an ardent foe of lynch mobs, arrived in town the next day for a wedding and angrily announced an enormous reward of five thousand dollars for information leading to the arrests of mob members.
These were depression days and no one needed that cash more than the farm families of Harris County’s western section. Many knew Edgar Stripling had led the mob, yet none reported him.
One year later, Stripling made front pages by murdering a white man he claimed had insulted his wife and sister-in-law. Billy Cornett was shot at close range through his bedroom window as he was unlacing a shoe. Stripling was tried in Harris County, where the crime occurred, found guilty, and slapped with a life term. So stringent a sentence for a white man in a matter involving defense of self and wife or “the unwritten law,” as it was called, was almost unheard-of in Harris County. Within days friends engineered his escape from the Hamilton jail. Again a reward was offered and it, too, went unclaimed. Stripling remained in the county for several weeks, undetected and unreported, while arrangements were made for him and his large family to leave the state. If anyone knew his whereabouts, they did not say.
Now, fifteen years later, he was back in the Columbus jail while a massive campaign, headed by none other than Laney C. and Flynn Hargett, Jr., stirred public outrage to produce a gubernatorial pardon for the unrepentant (“I’d do it again!”) Stripling. The themes of the current campaign—the righteousness of honor killings, protection of white womanhood, rights of the community over the courts to determine guilt or innocence—served to inflame the attitudes swirling around the Norman Hadley murder.
Beyond the murders already identified as part of the black “conspiracy” against white neighbors, another one was added: Sambo Gordon’s September 1911 killing by his black friend and moonshine partner Josh Caldwell, a quick and angry duel that left the two men dead in the road near the Goat Rock Dam. Sambo and Josh had grown up together. They’d been buddies and business partners. Several years earlier, Josh Caldwell had run away to Chattanooga to avoid testifying in a moonshine case. These were hotheaded people who were not inclined to sit down and work out their differences.
Sambo Gordon was one of those men, like his cousin Norman, who lived in two worlds at once. In the daytime he was “Mr. Sambo,” the boss man, the landlord, arguing over rents, over cotton production, over broken farm plows and poorly treated mules, sometimes using the strap on the backs of his “boys.” At night he was one of those boys, drinking their liquor, winning their money, or losing his to them in games of poker and faro, wooing and bedding their women at will. He’d been married not so long ago to an unhappy-looking woman named Pansy and they had a little girl, but none of that had straightened his ways.
It was six o’clock on that August evening of 1911. The sun had not yet gone down, but the drinking was well under way. Still, he was “Mr. Sambo” to Josh, or perhaps that is just the way the eyewitnesses, almost certainly black, reported it in order to avoid further hard feelings. Just as it was passed down in Sambo’s family that he had gone to the barbecue to meet Josh on some business errand; just as it had been explained in court that Sambo was at Alfred Moore’s shack the day Alf was killed to console “Aunt Jane” over the earlier death of Sog; and just as, more recently, an attempt would be made to have Norman shot in his bedroom rather than at a Negro shack. So it was handed down through the generations that Josh said to Sambo: “I got you. I got you, Mr. Sambo.” And Sambo said back, “I got you, too, Josh.”
In different ways, old resentments and rage were also reignited by the 1909 prison release of Louis Moore, then the 1911 release of Jule Howard. Incorrectly or not, Howard symbolized a white man wronged by a black. Moore was another matter altogether, for Sambo Gordon’s testimony had helped send Moore to prison wrongfully. But the fact that he’d returned home only shortly before Sambo’s killing stoked rumors that Moore was behind it—just one more on a mounting load of logs being laid for a sacrificial fire.
And so it began to build. Black-white killings took on a distinctly racial odor, a combustible quality, that had been more or less absent when they occurred. Men gathered in feverish knots outside Pratt’s Store by the river, behind the churches, in the lodge hall to insist that something must be done.
In the chill air of January 1912, the recently memorialized war came to mean a lot more to them than it normally did. Suddenly everybody was remembering who served with whom, and now it was not those sorry Narramore boys but Private Oliver Narramore’s two sons who had died at the hand of Negroes. People started counting white men dead by black men’s hands and mourning in particular how they’d all gone more or less unavenged. Coon Narramore, then his half brother Dozier Huckaby. Sambo Gordon. Normally the Narramore/Huckaby branches were overlooked on the Hadley-Moore family tree, but now it would be mentioned that they were kin.
Law enforcement in those tangled swamps was often boiled down to a popularity contest—folks simply liked Bryant’s victim better than Bryant. Now, the Sambo situation was a problem because he could be a snake in the grass, but standards were standards and he was a white man. Moreover, with the recent celebration of George Washington Gordon’s fiftieth anniversary at Kivlin Lodge having everybody so fired up with Gordon love and loyalty, followed quickly by the cold-blooded killing of the presumably innocent Norman, something had to be done. Though poor Buddie Hadley had only just been elected sheriff, did anybody really want to mess up his honeymoon by undermining his authority? Besides, they’d agreed to give him a chance with the judge and a speedy trial. Nothing would happen just yet.
CHAPTER TEN
Brazen Iniquity
As I interviewed elderly black women and men throughout the
county, one subject kept coming up, usually unbidden: interracial sex and procreation. The people I approached simply knew from experience that the lynching I was asking about had a sexual component to it. Seated on her front porch in a pair of her grandson’s oversize Nikes and a pink cotton wraparound, Verna Hudson gave me what she called “the real nitty-gritty on white folks.” She told me all the ways that her black family was related by blood to the white Hudsons and how common it was back then for “old white bachelors who lived with their mothers or sisters to come sit in colored women’s houses.” She was eighty-six years old when I met her. On the day General James H. Wilson’s troops burned Hamilton, it was her great-grandfather Lewis Hudson who grabbed a sharp rock and wrote the date—April 17, 1865—on a large boulder a short walk from where Verna still lived. He was one of the first men to line up at the courthouse that long-ago day in August 1868 when the freedmen got to vote.
As Verna told her stories, I thought about Big Mamma, my Williams grandmother, an olive-skinned woman who once confided to me as a child that her most horrible memory was of the time she got off a plane that also carried prizefighter Joe Louis and was asked by a reporter if she was his mother. The fear of discovering oneself to have “Negro blood” was widespread among southern whites, who were aware that many mixed-race people had “passed” and that any one of them might have been an ancestor.
Learning as a child that being mistaken for a black woman was Big Mamma’s worst memory said to me that being black, or even being seen as black, was the worst thing that could happen. And there was plenty around me to reinforce that idea. Black people had the hardest jobs ( if any at all), received the harshest treatment at white hands, made up most of the chain gangs I saw regularly along the roadsides, and were routinely the object of my white family’s scorn or ridicule. Early in life I was aware of the contradiction between what I was taught about black people and what I knew about the few who were in my life, such as Edna, other friends’ maids, and our yard man, Roosevelt, all of whom I liked and trusted. Edna, I loved. But it would take years before I learned all the ways white people had constructed and then taught one another a caricature of blackness in order to stay in charge.
Of all the potentially combustible issues simmering in Harris County in the winter of 1911–12, the most volatile was the issue of sex—forced, semi-consensual, and consensual—among black women and white men. Miscegenation had been a key ingredient in the war of words between North and South since the 1850s. Abolitionists had sought to shame slave owners, noting that while they regarded slaves as subhuman they frequently and callously spawned children with them, often working them like animals or selling them down the river. Slave owners’ wives had sometimes confided in their diaries on these matters. Just over the Muscogee County line from Harris, Laura Beecher Comer, a relative of the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher and his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, complained to her diary during the Civil War, after learning of her husband’s bachelor habit of eating and sleeping with slaves. Sex between white men and black women was commonplace in Harris County, long before and long after the Civil War. The “old bachelor” Brit Williams told the census enumerator in 1830 that a free “woman of color” and three free “children of color” shared his residence. His slaves, eventually numbering nearly one hundred, were all listed as black, though numerous slaves of his extended Beall, Hudson, and Mobley family and other elite families were categorized “Mu” in federal censuses.
Before his death, “Uncle Render” Hutchison, who lived out by the river near Mountain Hill, had ordered an eighteen-foot, four ton, granite obelisk erected at his gravesite and bragged to friends and neighbors that he wanted it known he’d personally bred more slaves than any other white man in the county. In nearby Talbot County, during slavery, Joseph Edgar Biggs had gathered his black and white children and told them they were brothers and sisters. Cautioning that they could never reveal this publicly, he urged them to stay close through the generations.
Miscegenation became a matter of heated public debate between blacks and whites in the early days of Reconstruction, when, in response to white lawmakers’ efforts to force black men to support their wives and children, black Republicans started calling for white men to support their black children and mistresses.
In New Orleans, black concubines went on strike to force financial support for their services. Beneath such movements lurked the specter of interracial marriage. Such talk so terrified whites that most southern legislatures passed laws against it at war’s end before blacks could be elected to office.
In 1867, Rev. Henry M. Turner, premier leader of Georgia’s freed people, told a large outdoor assemblage at Macon that “all we ask of the white man is to let our ladies alone, and they need not fear us.” As if that were not enough, he’d further enraged whites by telling his audience of between six and eight thousand people, “I am half white and half black, so I can speak to both races.”
In Savannah, blacks mobbed a white lodge, demanding the protection of female virtue. Newly freed black men across the South were taking umbrage at the fact that, while they were falsely accused of raping white women, white men granted themselves total immunity in the matter of black women. Few whites agreed, at least publicly; many argued that black women were natural seductresses who lured weak white men into liaisons for economic gain. Most refused to use the word rape in that connection, but at least one prominent Georgia lawyer spoke up during Reconstruction to say, “It is all on the other foot. The colored women have a great deal more to fear from white men.” He was a rarity; most white men claimed the practice stopped at war’s end and that what vestiges remained were the work of white trash.
During Reconstruction, lurid articles describing southern-based radicals, black and white, marrying or cohabiting with the opposite race began to crop up in white newspapers, occasionally revealing—always with great disgust—a marriage between a white southern woman and a black man. From then into the twentieth century, the Macon paper often reported on police busts in neighborhoods where black and white cohabited, and was always careful to note the lowly station of the whites.
In 1886, the Columbus Daily Enquirer reported a grassroots Louisiana antimiscegenation movement, which was “approved in high places.” The article read like a how-to, but nothing similar would take hold in Georgia for another twenty years; nor did it amount to much in Louisiana then. It was about the same time, however, that a bill was passed in the Georgia General Assembly to forbid blacks and whites to attend the same school; this was aimed at white children, primarily in Atlanta, who were enrolled in black schools by their Yankee schoolteacher parents. Editorials in support of the law equated integrated schooling with eventual interracial sex, just as any interracial activity was equated with sex by influential whites. No law specifically segregating white and black, except in marriage, had heretofore been deemed necessary. This would be the start—accelerated by the U.S. Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1895—of local and state laws segregating public facilities such as trains, parks, pools, and benches.
It was during the late nineteenth century that white church women began to speak out and seek legal remedies on behalf of black women and girls—including repeated, failed attempts to raise the age of consent from ten to fourteen, a move opposed by white men who feared blacks would use such a law against them. In tandem with that grew white men’s proclamations of the sacred nature of the white woman. While there were certainly white women raped by black men, the numbers never reached the mammoth proportions frequently claimed. This rationale worked so well that for decades it would remain the chief propaganda item to justify lynching and discourage social relationships between blacks and whites. It would also, for a time, muffle any white advocacy for the protection of black women and girls.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Heroines
The tide began to turn in the 1880s when a black Memphis teacher named Ida B. Wells began to write antilync
hing articles in a church newsletter. Her columns drew the notice of white Memphis papers, which reprinted some of them. She came to the attention of Thomas Fortune and his National Afro-American League, the first black national organization to address the terror already beginning to sweep the South. Wells’s incisive research and clear voice would be the first to disprove the myth of the black rapist and to show the countless other reasons blacks were lynched. From that decade well into the twentieth century, her voice would remain the most powerful and persistent.
Wells’s interest in the topic caught fire in 1891, when businessmen friends of hers were lynched. In response she bought her own paper and assumed the role of investigative reporter. Through her research into the actual reasons behind lynchings, she found that alleged rape accounted for only 23 percent and that many of those were false charges. Once a believer in the “black rapist” myth, she now viewed it as a pretext for eradicating successful blacks, giving the lie to white claims that black hopes lay in self-discipline and hard work.
The fearless Wells, who in 1884 bit the hand of a conductor who ejected her from a “whites-only car” and sued the railroad (successfully, until her case was overturned by a higher court), kept on fighting: She wrote a pamphlet called Southern Horrors, won the support of Frederick Douglass, the most famous black American of his day, made several tours of Europe, and gained an international audience for her views. She regularly referred to the fact that many southern white women had consensual sex with black men, which infuriated white leaders, who routinely denied it even though white southern newspapers often reported these liaisons.