The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  Three “negroes,” he said, had all been buried in one grave, near the place they died. The preacher’s body was taken by relatives. No one asked about the well-being of the dead folks’ families, if they had children, and how this might affect them. That was never done in any lynching. No big deal was made over the fact that a woman—the first in Georgia—had been lynched. Omitted from Robinson’s reports was the most electric item: Dusky’s heroic refusal. That would remain a secret among a handful of whites. Revealing it would only raise more questions about the innocence of the three men and would give local blacks, and some whites, a martyr.

  The same day something happened to suggest that the mob had not only ordered my great-grandfather to leave town but was also responsible for keeping the victims’ remains dangling ignominiously for half a night and an entire day. Message was a key ingredient in southern lynchings and they intended this one to be heard near and far. Let black folks get a good look at what happens when they go afoul of white folks. Perhaps the sheriff reasoned it might make his job easier in months and years to come, but was he conscious of how very impotent and even complicit this made him appear?

  With the bodies gone and the crowds cleared, the blood now dry and mostly soaked into the ground, the white man who owned the magnificent water oak went out with friends and began to chop it down. On returning from lunch, they found a note: Cut down this tree and you’ll swing from the next. And so the Hanging Tree would remain another decade, haunting the town until its owner, finally sensing safety, had it cut down into logs and sold to the Bronco Wood Products Company in Wilmington, Delaware.

  Any fears of culpability the sheriff or judge might have had were resolved by Columbus newspapers the day after the lynching. Both stuck largely by the official story. They had performed their duties as required by law—the sheriff in asking for a special court and the judge in granting it. The papers, longtime fans of Gilbert, gave him extra accolades for being “always anxious . . . to prevent mob violence.”

  A subheadline proclaimed that Hadley, “fearing no lynching,” had been in Columbus during the incident, despite the fact that Hamilton started filling up with country men at least three hours before anything happened. The jailer, the paper recounted, was home in bed and had had no choice but to hand over keys. Reporters were told he had no force with which to protect the prisoners. The jail had been unprotected. Reporters did not seem to think this strange. Nor did they question the sheriff when he told them members of the mob were not known to the people of Hamilton.

  The whereabouts of the deputy sheriff went unmentioned. Hamilton’s law enforcement establishment had done everything but put out a welcome mat, yet the paper reported their side of the story as if it were utter truth. They reported with the straightest of faces the town’s awareness that something was building all day and the sheriff’s statement that “no trouble was expected,” just as they’d reported of the 1896 lynching in Columbus.

  For the time being, it seemed the judge, the sheriff, and the jailer were home free. There’d be no Walton County–like carping about culpability. The “Hamilton Avengers” were depicted as a nameless, faceless force, almost militarily precise, quiet, and organized. But those who read beyond that first day’s headlines found a smaller article on the Daily Enquirer’s front page that signaled a crack in the façade by hinting at the “innocence” of some of those lynched.

  The next day the Constitution revealed a startling new fact. “The four negroes upon whom the mob wreaked its fury had been arrested and held merely as suspects. Proof to convict had not been secured.” The paper went on to display either its ignorance of the lynching’s cause or its long-held policy of refusing to speak of miscegeny by stating: “The crime that supplied the provocation was of such nature that testimony concerning it could have been presented in open court without embarrassment or censorship; beyond a doubt the accused would have been given fair trial, and their guilt even reasonably established, legal execution would quickly have followed.”

  At the same time, two northern newspapers were letting the miscegenation cat out of the bag. On January 24, Wilmington, Delaware’s Morning News and the New York Evening Post—both white Republican newspapers, one with ties to the NAACP—exposed Norman Hadley as having forced his attentions on a black girl just before he was killed.

  Incorrectly assuming that the woman hanged was the girl whom “the very popular and unmarried planter was infatuated with,” the Evening News reported that Hadley had gone to her home that day “to persuade her to come out and meet him.” While there, he was shot by a man who “had sought to marry the girl . . . who was only twenty years old and comely.” This, some feared, would make things worse in the eyes of whites: not only was Norman seeking to satisfy his lust, he was ‘infatuated’ with her. She was not simply a black girl to be used at will but “a comely woman.” This was shaping up to be the sort of Hardyesque novel that had both titillated and horrified the local citizenry over the past two years. Some surely wondered whether Arthur Hardy would now write a sequel or would an even better-known writer step forward to scoop up this tantalizing tale.

  In these papers Johnie Moore became not a black man with a rent dispute, but a black man “in love with the girl,” defending his girlfriend from a white man; still, they deemed him guilty. This love-angle version of the story began showing up in Associated Press stories around the country; but while southern papers ran AP on the Hamilton lynching generally, this particular information was removed.

  While AP got “the girl’s” last name wrong, calling her Hathaway instead of Harrington, this confusing of the victims’ names occurred throughout the press. Dusky Crutchfield was called Belle Hathaway. Burrell Hardaway was called Dusty Crutchfield. White newspapers preferred to characterize lynch victims as strangers or “sorry negroes.” They tended to reveal nothing of their lives and loves, successes and failures, hopes and dreams, anything that would humanize them. Neither white nor black papers mentioned the fact Dusky’s tongue was pierced by bullets.

  I do not know who in the black community leaked the true story to the northern press. The young and “comely” Bertha Harrington—saddled no doubt, as women usually were, with a wrongheaded sense of culpability for the deaths of her fiancé, father, and preacher—made no recorded statements and left no public record. Most of the victims’ families deserted the neighborhood sometime after that night. My years-long efforts to locate descendants have come up empty. The closest I came was an African American librarian living near me in Maryland whose Harris County Hardaway family oral history included the story of a relative who was lynched for “going with a white woman”: her family left the county two years after the 1912 lynching. She is a genealogist and wanted proof of their connection to Burrell, the preacher, which I could not provide.

  In early February, the miscegenation motive for Hadley’s murder showed up in an unlikely place. Previously, the only white papers to reveal it were owned by progressives associated with the NAACP. Now the Advance, a summary of white religious weeklies from all over the country, revealed in an editorial that “[at least] two and probably four innocent persons were put to death.” It told the tale of Hadley’s “unwanted attentions” to the “negro girl.” The story had seeped into the sort of papers that the “good people” of Hamilton read and hairs were standing up on countless necks.

  What few black publications still existed in Georgia omitted any hint of white male predation at the heart of this lynching. The reason, perhaps, was that in November, the black editor of a fraternal newspaper in Georgia had reprinted an article from the Chicago Defender claiming a black man recently hanged in Washington, Georgia, had killed a white farmer because the man had sexually assaulted his wife. The article was blunter than blunt. The editor was arrested for libel and jailed. The local author of the “scurrilous article”—a black man, everyone assumed—was being actively sought by law officers.

  The Defender was the black newspaper feared most by white Georgia
ns. Its editor, Robert Abbott, was a native Georgian who campaigned furiously for blacks to leave the South, and filled his papers with white-on-black southern crime. Large bundles of Defenders were smuggled aboard southbound trains by black porters, who tossed them out at prearranged spots in the news-starved black countryside. Some states or local jurisdictions had made possession of the Defender a crime and at least one southern sheriff had traveled to Chicago to personally threaten the editor with arrest.

  Inexplicably the Defender failed to note the sex angle in the lynching, instead sticking to the white party line that the victims’ motive in killing Hadley was a rent dispute. Instead he lambasted Georgia’s blacks. Likening them to “guinea pigs,” he excoriated their desire for money and security over the safety of their women.

  I can only imagine the ire among Hamilton’s strong black church elite, men whose parents or who themselves were enslaved by the Williams-Mobley-Hudson-Copeland clan. They had worked hard to build the region-wide Calvary Baptist Association, which collected a dollar each year from its many members to maintain the Hamilton Academy, a school that trained young men for the pulpit and the classroom. Some of these same men had formed that 1889 posse to track down the prominent white planter who’d raped one of their own children. But they were old men now and the younger ones had not tasted the strong promise of Reconstruction. They had their own Hamilton Academy now to consider. Besides, these four had been—or so they were told—the very sort of moonshine folk they preached against, the woman “the concubine” they abjured in the pulpit. How would it look to risk life and limb and longtime gains for something like this? They’d seen what happened to blacks who even mumbled a word against these massacres.

  No doubt, blacks and some whites of the region took comfort when the Columbus Daily Enquirer and even Governor Joseph M. Brown promised investigations.

  By March, newspapers across the county had gone silent on the subject. Only the March issue of the Crisis and the Twentieth Century, a Boston-based white literary magazine, continued the discussion of Hamilton’s lynching and its causes, which they did with searing honesty, moral outrage, and calls for action. The Twentieth Century dealt a stinging rebuke in an editorial which stated, “The latest indictment of our despicable Caucasian cowardice comes from Hamilton, Ga., where the murder of Norman Hadley led to the lynching of three negroes and a mulatto girl . . .”

  Next to that ran another editorial, titled “Limits of Negro Endurance,” approvingly quoting black leader Reverdy Ransom, who’d spoken recently beside former Governor Northen at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, where he declared: “The only way to win respect is to mete out the white man’s measure.” One way to solve the problem posed by the true facts of the Hamilton lynching, the editorial suggested, would be to adopt federal laws that would force white men to support their racially mixed children. “Nothing else,” they stated, “will arouse the cowardly white woman to a revolt against the pusillanimity of the white ravisher of negresses, the thin-blooded degenerate of a once-proud race, an adulterous race which still boasts naively that every colored woman is susceptible.” Words of this nature would sit and simmer in some region of the Ladies of Hamilton’s brains for a decade before something would start to change.

  Any fears that the NAACP would send down an investigator were dispelled with the March issue of the Crisis. An article titled “The Terrorists” contained snippets of the most trenchant statements about the Hamilton lynching from black and white newspapers nationwide. An editorial by Du Bois, “Divine Rights,” spelled out Norman Hadley’s predatory behavior toward Bertha Lee Harrington, condemning white men for their three-hundred-year-old “jealously guarded” right to seduce black women with impunity. Neither did he spare white southern women of the best families, who “helped maintain this . . . custom.” However, Du Bois, like many editors, black and white, stuck to the story of Johnie Moore’s guilt. And because he and other leaders of the antilynching movement wanted black men to protect black women against white men’s aggression, Moore and the other men lynched served this narrative as much-needed heroes and martyrs.

  For some whites who followed the black press, these words caused alarm. But the nascent NAACP, swamped with more lynching, more crusades, and now with a black martyr story none cared to unravel, quickly turned away from Hamilton, and the powerful families of the hamlet breathed deep sighs of relief.

  As for the Columbus Daily Enquirer’s promised investigation, it never materialized. Instead they published a blistering editorial accusing Harris County of endangering commerce and investment in Columbus and “the entire South” through its “barbarism” and “the massacre . . . permitted in the shadow of its courthouse.” As for whether the new governor had put his attorney general on the case, that would have to wait for the April grand jury.

  The florid rhetoric with which the Harris County Journal covered the lynching was recognizable as pure Arthur Hardy, but with a distinct difference from his novel. There he’d written of “men who became monsters before one another’s eyes.” Those characters were black. The flesh and blood monsters he spoke of in his understated, philosophical front-page article three days later were men he knew well, men he’d represented in court or who were potential clients, whose goodwill he relied upon on many levels. So his tone was lofty—regretful but understanding. Countless articles had now appeared exposing true motives and victim innocence, yet Hardy omitted any mention of that. He described the quiet and orderly way the mob conducted itself. In his article as elsewhere, Dusky Crutchfield’s screams were silenced. So also were her final words.

  “While we do not seek justification for the terrible act,” he wrote, “yet we ask that the cold arbiter, public opinion, in making up a verdict, take into consideration the fact of the killing of two white men, kinsmen from the same community, in close succession, by negroes—the race feeling with some in the section having been more or less estranged for a much longer period—take into account the proneness of the human heart to quickly gratify the element of revenge that will not down. Yet law, and law only, must e’er be the standard for which to strive.”

  Neither he nor any other editor would mention the fact that the judge, the sheriff, and the jailer had, by leaving the prisoners unprotected, made way for the lynching and broken the law. Nor did he mention that this law, at least, could be upheld, along with the potential for charges of murder against mob leaders.

  I began this journey believing myself to be an unflinching investigative reporter and a nonracist. Just as I’d “overlooked” the fact that one of the lynching victims was a Moore, I clung way beyond reason, and despite mounting evidence to the contrary, to the possibility that Buddie Hadley had done everything in his power to save those four people he held in his jail. I told myself I was just trying to be fair, but in hindsight I realize that I was simply unable to face the fact that he, Judge Gilbert and others had set the whole thing up in a way that would leave him largely unscathed.

  All my life I’d heard, even from black Hamiltonians, that my grandfather Douglas Hadley was “one of the better sheriffs.” And given Buddie’s initial attempt to hold off the mob, I wanted to think that he, too, belonged in that category. A new book had come out in 2007, mentioning this lynching and relying upon old press reports that let Buddie Hadley off the hook. That book occupied a prominent place in the homes of some of my relatives, who found solace, even pride, in that version. When I learned the truth, knowing what happened to bearers of bad news I dreaded to tell it.

  Facing the fact that both my grandfather and his father were an essential part of this “massacre,” whether on the scene or not, has been an intense experience for me. Beyond forcing me to acknowledge the darkness in family history, this process has also pushed me to confront my own inherited prejudices. You don’t spend your first twenty years of life in a system defined by racial segregation and white supremacist ideas without damage. That stuff lodges inside you and it’s hard to get out. While I have spent the past fifty y
ears working for racial justice, I still found myself making biased assumptions about African Americans, judging them as a race more than I judged white people as a race.

  I have had to make a conscious effort to learn the many ways our system is still rigged against African Americans. I can’t say how this happened, but not until I forced myself to confront the evil done by many of my ancestors to black people (and Native Americans), to sit with that harsh knowledge and the pain it caused and still causes, could I look clearly at my own racism. One aspect of that is a tendency to make quick judgments without prior investigation of the facts, something I believe us whites do to blacks far more often than to other whites. “I don’t want to know about them,” my mother said, referring to black people, and, knowing what I now know about our family history, I definitely see why. It’s just that fear of knowing, however, that continues to keep blacks and whites divided. In the early years of my visits to Harris County, I would become so overwhelmed by what I encountered during my research in dark basements and on sunny front porches that—almost in a blackout state—I would find myself on the road speeding north toward my sister’s house in Atlanta, unable to bear more. Slowly I learned I would not only have to stay put and do the work, but I would have to face that torment, look it in the face, and accept it as a part of my family’s, my region’s, and my country’s past.

  In mid-March 1912 the steady rains turned torrential, flooding houses, stores, and farmland, and unleashing landslides along the Chattahoochee. Cyclones tore up parts of the county, barely missing Hamilton. The multitude of preachers along the banks of the raging river spoke of God’s fury and the sinful ways of His people and pleaded with parishioners to come to Christ.