by Karen Branan
When Milford Moore killed Coon Narramore in 1901, Laney C. Hargett’s son Hershall Vanderbilt, or H.V., as he was known, hired on as Milford’s defense lawyer.
While preparing Milford’s defense, Hargett learned that “the boys” from Harris were gathering around the Columbus courthouse, where Milford was to be tried, in preparation for a lynching if he was not found guilty and given either life in prison or a death sentence. His source, a bailiff by the name of Brewster Land, a Hargett cousin, had good reason to know what “the boys” would and would not do, since he had recently delivered a black prisoner accused of rape into the hands of these or other boys, who had immediately killed him out by the river on the Columbus side of the line.
Hargett believed he could get Milford off with a much lighter sentence, if not acquittal, because an entire cadre of powerful white men, including Coon’s own kinfolk, were willing to testify to Coon’s bad character and Milford’s sterling one. This was something that had never before happened in these parts—and it was not going to happen now, because the lynch threats were real and Hargett and Moore both knew it, each being intimately acquainted with the people who made them.
And so Hargett deliberately lost the case, with Milford’s resigned consent, and Milford was hustled off to a life sentence in prison, only mildly heartened by Hargett’s promise to get him out as soon as possible.
Johnie Moore might have known what great efforts both Hargett lawyers made to free both Milford and Louis from prison. Laney Hargett, who represented Louis, had set up another brother, the true shooter, to confess. Crawford, also a mulatto, was born to Jane and presumably James B. shortly before his death. Laney sent depositions by Jane and the guilty brother, Crawford, along with piles of petitions, including names of the sheriff, the prosecutor, and the jury that had found Louis guilty, to the governor and the parole board. But before Crawford could be tried he became Jane’s third son to be murdered. So Louis served out his sentence and had only recently stepped down from the train in the Hamilton depot, half a leg missing due to an accident at the convict-labor mines. As with many other things going on around Hamilton those days, his return had stirred up old animosities. Poor Milford, his heart almost gone was still being forced to labor in the mines, while H. V. Hargett continued to work hard on his clemency appeals.
If Johnie was innocent, he could rely on that shred of hope, the possibility of a Hargett coming to his rescue, but true innocence was a skimpy garment for a black man in Georgia in those days. Besides, big-city headlines had already declared him guilty. Regardless of any claims or alibis, he had to figure that that stain would stick.
Even if H.V. had had the time or the inclination to come to Johnie’s aid, it’s likely he would have been afraid of certain parties in Mountain Hill mad enough by now to kill anyone to sate their hunger to avenge Norman Hadley’s death, including some of his own blood kin.
Within the Hargett clan itself were men well-known to be capable of putting away anyone coming to the aid of the men believed to be Norman Hadley’s killers. In 1901, Flynn, Jr., and Laney C.’s brother Marshall had killed a man at a Valentine’s party near Mountain Hill, allegedly for going after Marshall’s wife. A younger Hargett by the name of Shaffer was fast gaining a reputation as a one-man lynch mob. Rumors said he was killing off black laborers who displeased him (or whom he didn’t want to pay) and dumping their bodies in the Chattahoochee.
Something else might have kept the usually helpful Hargetts away from this case: they were blood kin to Norman Hadley’s uncle Mitch Huling. It would not look good for them to stand up for someone accused of murdering the second of the family’s men killed in six months.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nobody’s Negroes
The jail in which Dusky Crutchfield, Gene Harrington, and Johnie Moore were confined—a squalid little hellhole, reeking of despair and contempt—sat just behind the handsome new courthouse with the six massive Corinthian columns. Like much else in Harris County, it had a reputation. William Turner, the Atlanta transfer jailer who picked up prisoners around the state, described for the Atlanta Constitution the wretched conditions he’d witnessed—including prisoners sleeping with vermin and snakes. Turner said “the Harris County jail is the worst in the state” and accused the unnamed jailer, then Sheriff Ben Williams, of starving prisoners.
Soon afterward Williams was elected to the Georgia House, then the Senate. In both bodies he served a total of seven terms on the Penitentiary Committees, overseeing a massively corrupt convict labor system through which Lost Cause heroes like General John B. Gordon became millionaires. Sheriffs and other law officials all over the South were corrupted and enriched; freed slaves were reenslaved and their sons newly enslaved into a system that sentenced them, often for minor offenses, to draconian terms and almost certain death or dismemberment to provide free labor to Georgia’s growing industries.
It had been a short three months since last October’s grand jury took Sheriff Middlebrooks to task for the jail’s broken plumbing and general filth. It called for repairs to “turn wind or rain,” and a janitor for both jail and courthouse. Old Alfred Williams had been hired to keep them clean, but nothing else had been done. The grand jury had estimated that new plumbing alone would cost two hundred dollars, and white citizens of the county recoiled at any taxes, especially those spent on prisoners.
If there were ever any legal documents detailing how the three suspects were handled in custody, they have long since gone missing. It is unclear whether an actual arrest was ever made, whether charges were brought, and whether a preliminary trial, usually held by a justice of the peace in a store or his house, had occurred. The man in that post, Norman Hadley’s uncle, was likely too aggrieved to perform his duties or too angry to be objective. His backup was Laney Hargett, with kinship ties to Gordons. Under law, until due diligence was performed and sufficient grounds for arrest were found, the detainees could be held for only seven days. This detail, if they understood it, may have given them a modicum of courage despite their desperate circumstances.
With no records available, only speculation is possible. One fact remains: no mention was ever made by the new sheriff, Buddie Hadley, or other law officials as to an actual murder charge against any of the three being held.
The prisoners’ first night was a long one, with no heat and few blankets. They knew that in the morning the sheriff would board the early train for Columbus to ask the judge for a speedy trial. I can only speculate as to their state of mind in these early hours. They sat in the cold and the damp, possibly packed together with other prisoners. Since Dusky was being held as a witness, she was kept separate from the men, but there were only two cells and they were tight. The scattered thoughts of the three, when not focused on the mob members stationed outside and the fierce words they’d uttered at the fork of the road, would have been of their families: a husband, a wife, a fiancé, eight children among them. They’d seen enough to know that when mob thinking took hold, few distinctions were made as to guilt or innocence. They’d have known it was not uncommon for law officers to intimidate spouses and children to obtain needed evidence. Crutchfield was said to be a witness, while Harrington’s role remained publicly undisclosed.
So far only young Moore was being named publicly as Norman’s actual killer. His extended mulatto family had firsthand knowledge of both mobs and the court system, and knew how they often worked in tandem to produce guilty sentences. If he could think clearly in these tense hours, he’d know there were only a couple of ways things could go, none of them good.
Two years earlier, Eugene Harrington’s name appeared on a subpoena as a witness to Johnie’s mother Lula’s attack on her landlord, J. G. Truett, though by grand jury time he had for some reason been removed. It’s likely the prosecutor found him unreliable for some reason. Whatever the case, his refusal or inability to assist in shipping Lula Moore off to the state farm would possibly create enough white animosity to now deny him their support.
Dusky Crutchfield had seen enough of Harris County justice in her day to know she could go from witness to conspirator to murderer in a heartbeat; thus she likely entertained thoughts of possible white protectors, men like former sheriff Mitch Huling, whose grandfather had owned hers and who was married to Norman’s mother’s sister. It wasn’t uncommon for sons of slave owners to stick up for sons and daughters of folks they’d enslaved. Perhaps she’d heard of letters that powerful white men wrote to the governor or the parole board when they wanted a black man or woman set loose, talking about how good the old black mammy was to their family and how they’d known this son or daughter since they were children together. But in those cases the Negro involved was usually the subservient sort, what white folks called “old-time darkies.” Dusky was her own person. It would later come to light that she was a straight-talking woman, a deeply dangerous thing to be in those days. Rumors would soon circulate that she’d spoken too loosely of a matter involving a Mobley.
Federal census returns list her occupation as “none,” a rarity among poor black women in that day. Her black women neighbors were listed as “farm laborer,” “cook,” “housekeeper,” and “laundry.” Dusky worked, but she worked at making moonshine, taking care of her kids (including a foster girl at one point), and running a juke on her own premises now and then, like many black folks in the district. These were all things which, in Harris County at least, were not enumerated on census forms. Many white men expected black folks to provide the fruits of these activities but were quick to call them “sorry niggers” when trouble arose.
Should it come to her needing white allies, Dusky Crutchfield’s hopes wouldn’t have been quite as thin as Johnie Moore’s. She was, at this juncture, not a suspect. She’d lived on the Gordon place at least a decade, tended their stills, sometimes picked their crops, mostly entertained their men. She knew that Norman’s mother, “Miss Josie,” cared about her and knew Dusky wouldn’t do a mean thing to her precious boy. She knew “Mr. Mitch,” former sheriff Huling, Norman’s uncle, could be devious and unpredictable but wouldn’t be outright evil and kill or imprison someone he knew was innocent.
There was but a slim chance that Mitch Huling, with all that pressure on him to avenge the family honor, would stand up for her if the need came about. Besides, they were counting hard on her testifying against Johnie Moore, and she knew damn well that if she didn’t, there’d be no white man on God’s green earth to lean on.
There were lots of good white folks in Mountain Hill—some had helped pay for and even build St. James A.M.E., the church the four prisoners attended—but most of them were women without any power at times like this, mad about all the race-mixing and moonshine to boot. Also, almost every white man, woman, and child in the neighborhood and beyond was in some way related to the Gordons.
If she could calm down enough to draw back and take the long view of her neighborhood, she’d recognize it was almost entirely peopled by the big moonshine chieftains: Mr. Sam Teel and Mr. Lum Teel and the Kennons and the Cannons, the Hargetts, the Huckabys, the Brawners, and Norman’s Gordon uncles, all kinfolk. Then there was Mr. O. K. “Kenny” Land, kinfolk, who hated moonshine but could be dangerous to them for just that reason. She’d know these men were mixed within themselves, kind as Lord Jesus one day and mean as cottonmouth rattlesnakes the next. But once they all got together on one thing, there’d be no stopping them.
Dusky Crutchfield had never seen a lynching, but she’d heard plenty about how inflamed men’s minds became, how bonfires got set in their bellies and they were possessed like “haints.” Nothing could stop them then.
CHAPTER NINE
Vendettas
Beginning on that January night of Norman’s murder, whites’ memories would be reshaped by this fresh outrage. Previously unconnected incidents slowly, steadily rearranged themselves into an obvious and long-running “Negro conspiracy.”
Added to Milford Moore’s 1900 murder of the white Coon Narramore was the 1907 killing of Narramore’s half brother Dozier Huckaby, also a Hadley-Moore cousin, by another black man, Gene Bryant. The murder occurred at Bryant’s parents’ place, where Huckaby and a white friend, Jule Howard, had gone looking for liquor and frolic. Before the sun came up Huckaby lay dead: shot, stabbed, and brutally beaten with a gnarled cudgel, his loyal dog beside him.
Bryant went missing and was captured by Norman Hadley’s uncle Sambo Gordon, who pocketed a handsome hundred-dollar bounty for his trouble. Soon afterward, Jule Howard was also arrested, much to the dismay of many whites who cringed at the rare fact of a white man and a Negro being tried for the same crime, as well as the thought of a white man joining a black man to so viciously bludgeon a fellow white. Separate trials resulted in a life sentence for the black man and twelve years for the white. The following year, however, after much harassment of his parents, the imprisoned Bryant signed a deposition testifying to Howard’s innocence. It took another three years, however, for lawyers to obtain a pardon, and in early 1911 Howard was released.
Feelings about this case were reignited by Howard’s homecoming, and the ongoing eye-for-eye calculations currently under way noted that not only was the black Bryant’s dead victim white and a kinsman of the Hadley-Moore family, but worse (despite some skepticism that the confession had been voluntary), Bryant’s silence had kept a white man in prison for four unnecessary years. In all these many ways, dots were being connected.
None of this was news, but somehow, with Norman having been murdered, it all began to look different—more purposeful, more conspiratorial, more racial. It had taken them this long to see it, so closely intertwined they were to the black folks, often failing even to see them as black, so many of them being only barely so. Until now they’d categorized the killings as part of the “moonshine wars” that erupted periodically throughout the tangled undergrowth along the riverbank. All these men had been partners in crime. In 1903 Sambo Gordon, Jule Howard, Gene Bryant, Josh Caldwell, and Dozier Huckaby, along with other kinfolk, were arrested en masse, hauled into U.S. District Court, forced to pay fines, and released back to their businesses.
In addition to this mountain of “evidence” of a Negro conspiracy, ancient resentments still simmered in those with especially sharp memories, memories of blacks who’d slipped the net so many years ago. There was the slave named Spence in Whitesville who’d beheaded his own child to keep the white owner from punishing him, then beheaded the owner, then disappeared. There was Alex Moss, who’d mortally wounded a young white man at a Negro party in 1889. Newspapers predicted a lynching each time, but nothing happened, likely because powerful white allies of both men prevailed, a common occurrence in what many called “the gray system” that reigned in this and many parts of the South. It was also in the year 1889 that the black cook Mary David was tried for the poisoning death of her white employer and two of his friends. David got only jail time because some white folks wrote to the newspapers that she could have done it mistakenly. Those were the days when mitigating circumstances made a difference in black folks’ cases. In light of the current situation, they wouldn’t count for much.
When these vendettas first began out by the river in 1900, nothing racial was made of them. Everyone knew they were in-house, as we’d say today. But one major and mostly unmentioned factor fueling racism and increasing segregation was the reality of black-white intimacy and the political need for whites to deny and distance themselves from it. In adjacent counties, when blacks got out of line, they were lynched. But here, some began to notice, they were either killed or got off scot-free like white men. Those with their mouths set on vengeance against black men had often been let down. The greatest letdown of all had come in 1903, when Miss Berta’s cousin, John Cash—a bachelor living with his mother—had “stampeded” a Negro church at Blue Springs. Drunk, he demanded the congregants shut up and get out. Their singing, clapping, and praising was said to have irritated him. The pastor pleaded for mercy, but many of the worshippers whipped o
ut their guns and mowed him down on the altar. Newspapers reported five hundred shots were fired. Though Cash died, no charges were brought. No revenge was sought. Until, perhaps, now.
Many of these men never had had any respect for the court system, preferring their own ways, but now even previously law-abiding men were feeling put out by the difficulty, if not impossibility, of putting criminals to death or even keeping them in jail for long. In 1908 Tom Spence, a black man, was tried for rape of a black woman; no black man had been charged with raping a white woman in Harris County since Boy George at the start of the Civil War. Spence was sentenced to hang, but the Georgia Supreme Court gave him a new trial and found him innocent. The week before, clumps of white men had sat around the jailhouse waiting for him to swing and had now been let down by the decision. The fact was that only one person had ever gone to the gallows legally in Harris County. That person was Hilliard Brooks, a black man executed in 1899 for the murder of a black businessman. On the other hand, when Henry Mobley, James Monroe’s son, was tried and quickly acquitted that same year for killing Cooper Truett in a “sensational shooting affray” inside the City Drug Store, nobody but the dead man’s family blinked.
Perhaps it was the pass that most white men got for committing crimes and the uneasiness it had to cause, within themselves and the larger community, that led government officials to focus so intensely on black crime. Also, I believe a widespread fear of blacks by whites, produced by their unpunished crimes against them, also served to increase whites’ focus on “black criminality.” We understand better today how unconscious or unaddressed perceptions of individuals and groups can be projected onto others in harmful ways. I found only one man, a fearless Columbus newspaper editor named Julian Harris, who once, in the 1920s, used this idea to explain KKK behavior.
