by Karen Branan
In addition, a change of governors was slated in a week. Acting Governor Jack Slaton would be replaced by former governor Joe Brown, a man who’d used militias frequently during his last two terms, delivered numerous speeches, and wrote several articles denouncing both labor unrest and lynch mobs. Best to get this thing settled down one way or the other before he came to power.
Gilbert also knew that the hotheads of Harris County were not confined to Mountain Hill; he knew there were a dozen or more Mobley and Williams men in their twenties and thirties living in Hamilton, many with a history of being quick on the trigger. He also knew that jailer Zeke Robinson was Ben Williams, Jr.’s brother-in-law, a young man recently married with a new baby. Williams now sat before a judge who’d recently lost his friend the jailer to a lynch mob. Would words from Williams be required? In addition, it was Gilbert himself who’d demanded that they build a new courthouse and now surely he would not insist that accused black killers of the sheriff’s nephew be protected there under armed guard by militiamen likely to be their own kinfolk. The men had not been able to imagine that someone so intimately connected to their village might create a situation that could very well result in another jailer’s death and a brothers’ war smack in the middle of the Hamilton square. They also knew that Gilbert, despite his tough talk and many opportunities, had actually never called militia out to protect prisoners.
Though he’d never fought a battle, Price Gilbert was a military man to the core. For years he served as captain of the Columbus Guard and he currently sat on the State Board of Military Advisors. In 1896 he’d seen the damage this kind of duty could do to a militia company. He knew as well as any that these men joined for history, for society, for careers, for glory, to please old veteran parents and grandparents, to meet well-situated young women, to play baseball at the park for cheering crowds, not to protect Negro criminals.
Another argument against using the militia to curtail lynch mobs was that it rarely worked and sometimes caused more trouble than it solved. When troops were rushed to Statesboro (a city outside Gilbert’s jurisdiction) in 1904, the sheriff had thrown his prisoners to the mob and the militia captain had stood by as one was lynched in full view of him and his troops. After that, still in the presence of militia, a mob of fifty drunken men had rioted for days, killing and whipping innocent blacks. The Methodist minister had expelled two of the mobsters from his congregation and twenty-five others withdrew in protest over that. He’d testified in court against the militia captain, who was court-martialed. The whole business had torn the town apart. Just recently the captain had been pardoned by then-governor Hoke Smith. No one sitting in these chambers this morning wanted any of that for Hamilton. Gilbert had no reason to believe that Sheriff Hadley, in that circumstance, would not do exactly as the Statesboro sheriff had and hand off the defendants to the mob. He had no desire to put either the still-grieving sheriff and his family nor Columbus troops, men whose families he knew well, in such a position. So the fiercest of all the antilynching judges in Georgia decided to believe the three when they vowed that no trouble was expected.
In case any of them had harbored doubts as to what the judge’s position would be, they needed only read that morning’s Daily Enquirer. Though the Superior Court judgeship was much coveted by many able members of the bar, given Gilbert’s popularity none had yet dared contest for it. As of this morning, that had changed. Eugene Wynn, a popular lawyer and former Recorder Court judge had thrown his hat into the ring, announcing he’d run for Gilbert’s Superior Court seat in the May election. Wynn had a strong following among Harris County residents. Though Georgia Methodists had praised Gilbert in 1910 for imposing heavy sentences on violators of the prohibition law, his sentences were not draconian enough for the Anti-Saloon League, which might now throw its considerable weight behind Wynn.
Before becoming solicitor general, Price Gilbert had served as a state legislator. He left because he hated politics, but Georgia’s system of electing judges kept him mired in that world. His life’s ambition was to sit on the Georgia Supreme Court. This required a gubernatorial appointment. To place a governor in the position of calling out the militia, in this case, would not be a popular call. A longtime militia man himself, Gilbert knew the havoc such decisions caused, both at high levels and within the ranks.
Gilbert would have known well where this Norman Hadley trouble began and he knew well the whiskey men who ruled the county’s western district. Though Democrats like himself, they were wool-hat men who’d flirted with populism, had close ties with “negro desperadoes,” moonshiners like themselves, and smelled too much of whiskey and anarchy for this silk-hat Democrat’s refined tastes. Inside that lethal mix were also former law enforcement men—bailiffs, jail guards, constables, deputies, a sheriff. None of them had liked him calling on the Columbus sheriff and jailer to meet a mob with gunfire. Across the state, law officials had protested that order; some viewed it as kowtowing to federal agents who’d earlier warned of a lawsuit if federal prisoners housed in the Columbus jail were harmed.
Compounding his woes, the Anti-Saloon League was on his back. He often spoke out voraciously from the bench against saloons and brothels—including the fact that powerful Columbus men owned many of these places—but that wasn’t enough. Rev. Solomon’s (“if you’re not for us, you’re against us”) zealots wanted blood; they wanted Gilbert to sign oaths promising draconian sentences to wrongdoers. Gilbert said no to their demands and they’d declared they’d unseat him. It’s likely he’d heard rumors that Norman Hadley’s uncle Mitch Huling, now living in Columbus, was considering a run for the Muscogee County sheriff’s office. Already it was known that Brewster Land, with blood ties to most of Mountain Hill, would seek the spot; it was Land who’d handed over a prisoner to a lynch mob back in 1901.
These and other potential costs of standing on principle surely weighed upon Gilbert’s mind in the hours leading up to this meeting. Those principles would be at war with the realities of his life. He’d often told grand juries that the sensibilities of family and friends should play no part in the execution of the law. He gave speeches in which he spoke of the necessity for judges and legislators to eschew politics when it came to making and executing the law.
There was also the possibility of an unmentioned factor: dynamite. In the wake of the 1896 Columbus lynching, the Atlanta Constitution had proffered a reason the mob had been practically given a welcome mat to the courtroom and the jail. Some men in the mob worked in the granite quarry near the site of the alleged rape; they had access to dynamite and a threat to use it had been made. Perhaps fearing copycat events, Columbus papers did not mention dynamite. If it had been a factor, the high-toned judge would still hold that memory and see it as a real possibility. Perhaps the trio even made some mention of it.
Given what they knew, the men who came hat in hand to Gilbert’s chambers that morning of January 17, 1912, had good reason to believe Price Gilbert would not exercise his prerogatives to call out the militia or attempt to remove the prisoners from the jail to a safer location. Details of the discussion would not have been part of the public record. All we have is what the sheriff told the press in its aftermath, what the Ledger reported that evening, and the written record of the judge’s decision to call a grand jury forty days hence to empanel a petit jury to try unnamed persons in the murder of Norman Hadley.
Outside the courthouse, Sheriff Hadley explained to the press in his earnest manner that the prisoners would not be moved, for fear they would be mobbed by people watching the jail, but neither would they be lynched, because the mob had given their promise. They would be tried in special court, where he would show evidence that all three were either culprits or accomplices in the murder of his nephew. By now, it seemed, Dusky Crutchfield had joined the two men as a suspect.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Die Is Cast
On the following morning, Marion Madison “Buddie” Hadley and his son Douglas stood in Judge Cooper W
illiams’s office in Hamilton. Douglas, a handsome twenty-one-year-old newlywed who’d until now been driving a taxi in Columbus and had just become his father’s only deputy, placed his hand on the Bible and swore the oath his father had earlier sworn, to “in all things well and truly without malice or partiality perform the duties of the office of deputy sheriff of Harris County, Georgia.” State laws gave sheriffs primary responsibility for the safety of prisoners. On that day the man who would become my grandfather swore to God that he would protect the three held in jail. After that, father and son took the sheriff’s horse and buggy back out to Mountain Hill to pick up a fourth prisoner. That morning’s Daily Enquirer had informed its readers that Sheriff Hadley “does not doubt in the least that he has the guilty parties,” but it had failed to mention he did not have them all in hand.
The fourth man, Burrell Hardaway, was a preacher, but not the sort the black folks at Friendship Baptist enjoyed, not a man like Reverend Forbes, whose only job was to shepherd his flock. Hardaway was a self-proclaimed preacher, struck holy in a Mountain Hill cornfield where he still worked as a tenant farmer except on Sundays and Wednesday nights, when he preached at the almost brand-new St. James A.M.E. church, which white folks of the neighborhood had helped to build. Some fancy black ministers called men like him “shirt-tail” or “jack-leg” preachers, and distanced themselves for various reasons. In the case of Burrell Hardaway, the distancing began the second some heard he’d been preaching from the pulpit against Norman Hadley and other white womanizers of black women and girls. It was an unwritten rule among the white-approved black Methodist and Baptist churches of Columbus and Harris County that ministers did not say things to agitate race relations. After his arrest, the whites would call Hardaway a “so-called preacher,” if they mentioned his vocation at all.
It’s not known when Burrell Hardaway’s misdeeds leaked out, possibly through the questioning that went on in those jail cells, possibly through widespread intimidation of other Mountain Hill black people by dozens of self-appointed white law enforcers eager to bring someone to justice. Back then it was common for whites to plant black spies in places they could not go, always needing to know what blacks were up to, so perhaps a paid informant rushed the news to authorities at the first mention of Norman’s death.
Hardaway’s subversive preaching would certainly have brought to mind another fiery black man, one named Jackson, who’d come to Mountain Hill in the 1880s and opened a school. Word spread that Jackson bragged of having a white wife and urged blacks to insist on social equality with whites. He’d been run out of town and his school was torched. Most likely it was Jackson who inspired the preacher in Arthur Hardy’s Clutch of Circumstance. The fictional preacher rants endlessly about the white planters who impregnate black women and suggests to his black parishioners they pay them back in kind. Hardy’s fictional preacher had also told his congregation to stand by their guns.
By now the phrase “Negro conspiracy” was being used. The sheriff himself had referred to it when speaking to reporters. Rumors raced through the county that “Before Day Clubs” were back. This figment of white imaginations, the idea that blacks organized to slaughter whites “before day,” surfaced throughout Georgia whenever white men sought a pretext for large-scale mayhem against blacks. In 1904 the specter had been falsely raised when the Atlanta Constitution reported that Harris County blacks in the western district held secret meetings to plan widespread depredations targeting two white farmers for death. Something similar happened in 1895 when the sheriff wrote the governor about plans for a Negro uprising. That news traveled swiftly to newspapers across the country, some as far away as Pennsylvania, announcing “race war” in Harris County. The embarrassed sheriff quickly admitted a mistake and retracted his story.
It’s possible that Burrell Hardaway took several pages from Hardy’s book, in particular those about the black preacher railing against miscegeny and the white ones denouncing numerous other evils. One can only imagine the horrors he had witnessed and heard about that drove him to such taboo boldness against white men’s predations.
Shortly after Hardy’s book came out, an outspoken preacher was lynched in nearby Talbotton. It had been a little over a year since former governor Northen had visited that town, long a Populist stronghold, to form one of his Law and Order Committees. One day an elderly, blind, black preacher, whose name was never revealed, stepped off the train wearing a black silk coat, red vest with a gold watch chain, red top hat, diamond ring, and gold-tipped cane. Needless to say, he made an impression.
The preacher took a room with William Carreker, a well-off black farmer, and soon the white planters noticed a “bad attitude” on the part of their “hands.” They’d never really relaxed from the scare of the racially volatile 1890s and so put their black spies to work on the problem. Rumors spread that the preacher was telling blacks they were still enslaved and must declare their independence. That way they could wear a gold watch and a diamond ring like his.
Corrective measures were called for. A “Committee of the People” formed on the grounds of the Methodist Church just after services on a Sunday afternoon. Fifty men on horseback galloped over to the farmer’s house and demanded the preacher be produced for a flogging. He would then be run out of the county, they explained.
When the mob leader, a wealthy planter named Will Leonard, persisted and beckoned the mob to move in, a shotgun blast from inside the door sent him to the ground. His head was blown entirely off. The committee made a quick retreat and law officers later found Leonard’s body at Carreker’s front door, hogs feeding on his brains. Carreker turned himself in to the sheriff immediately and was taken from jail by a mob that night. The next morning townspeople gathered to gaze at his dead body as it swung from the cross arm of a telephone pole in the town square. The old preacher was found four days later in Big Lazer Creek, his bound body weighted with rocks and mangled by bullets, his gold watch and diamond ring nowhere to be found.
These incidents and others had embedded themselves in both blacks and whites in next-door Harris County. They had not, however, hindered the crusade of Preacher Hardaway. They had indeed perhaps galvanized it.
It was on the third day of the imprisonment of Crutchfield, Moore, and Harrington that their preacher arrived in handcuffs, the door locked behind him. And now the Hamilton jail contained four black people, one a fearless preacher, and another, as it would turn out, a fearless woman.
By now rumors were flying around the county that, during the time her husband was in prison, Dusky Crutchfield had gone about calling herself “Miz Mobley.” It may or may not have become common knowledge that Henry Mobley, the son of James Monroe Mobley, had paid bail for a moonshiner arrested in 1910 with Dusky’s husband, Jim. The man went free, likely due to testifying against Jim. With Jim in prison, Dusky moved near Henry Mobley’s place and had all Jim’s letters from prison sent to the nearby Cataula post office, where Norman Hadley’s mother was postmistress.
Whether any of that would have disqualified her to testify against the other men or whether Preacher Hardaway got to her with his Bible and his ire, we’ll probably never know. It could be she just got sick of white folks’ lies and empty promises. If they came at her with that conspiracy line, acting like they knew she’d been part of it, that would have done it. This wasn’t a woman to be accused of a crime, especially if she knew a white man had done it. If she did, she’d no doubt have said so and that would have been a death sentence in itself. Especially if that white man was yet another kinsman of the sheriff, a high probability given the widespread kinship connections of the crowd Norman traveled with.
The combination of those four—Johnie, the sheriff’s cousin; Dusky, the concubine of a leading citizen; Burrell, the preacher who would not be hushed; and Gene Harrington—father of Bertha, the object of Norman Hadley’s hot pursuit at the time that he was murdered—was not ideal for a trial certain to be publicized as a drama akin to Thomas Dixon’s Sins of the Fathe
rs, which had recently drawn record crowds at the Springer Opera House in Columbus. Already the story of Norman Hadley’s “murder by Negroes” was receiving national, even international, attention. With its potential for testimony about predatory white men, their young Negro prey, a Hamilton Mobley and his sassy black mistress, and a black preacher telling it like it was, this would be a trial made in heaven for the likes of Du Bois, Wells-Barnett, and Baker, and one made in hell for Hadleys and Mobleys and their extended families.
Even the Atlanta Constitution, eager to profit from the growing public taste for real-life scandal, had recently published a lurid book about Edgar Stripling, called Georgia Jekyll and Hyde, which was selling like hotcakes, bringing far more attention to reticent Hamilton than it preferred. So far, no article had hinted at Norman’s black womanizing ways; no mention had been made of the fact that all three men were suspected because of their ties to the fourteen-year-old Bertha, whom the thirty-four-year-old Norman Hadley was chasing. The whites in the family and the whites in the county would want to keep it that way.
It may be difficult for modern readers to understand just how fundamentally white supremacy was undermined by interracial sex between white men and black woman or to fathom the depth and strength of the denial. Opening this thing up to the world about Bertha Lee Harrington and Norman Hadley would mean, in their minds, the unraveling of the entire foundation that undergirded their sad and disillusioned lives. Like churlish children who, being forced awake from a starry dream, lash out violently at the one who awakens them, they had to do something, they had to punish someone. When questioned, Dusky Crutchfield refused to name any of the three men as Hadley’s killers. The preacher and Johnie Moore continued to accuse each other, or so it was said. Regardless, Solicitor General George Palmer, whose duty it was to prosecute one or more of them, would have realized early on that he had no case. Once he learned that the name of Mobley was being bandied about by this woman and just what her connection was, that folks had begun to call her “the concubine,” the prosecutor would have no question that this woman, willing or not, wasn’t the sort of witness this case required.
