The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  On March 22, exactly two months after the lynching, Josie Gordon Beers, Norman Hadley’s fifty-five-year-old mother, died. She was buried beside Norman in the Gordon cemetery.

  Here in Hamilton, none of the most basic measures were being taken to determine and apprehend the killers behind the lynching. The sheriff could have asked the governor to post a reward for information on the mob members, but he didn’t. The governor could have done so on his own, but he didn’t. Perhaps, knowing how another governor’s reward had led to Edgar Stripling’s murder of Billy Cornett, they decided to forgo that option. Hadley would know well that anyone who tried to collect a reward wouldn’t live long enough to spend it. Besides, he wasn’t a man given to pretense. He knew who did it and everyone else knew he knew who did it. No investigations were made. No detectives were hired.

  Black or white, everyone knew that no man would come to trial for what happened that night. As far as could be recalled, Edgar Stripling was the only white man to have ever been found guilty of murder in Harris County. Besides, just recently Yankees up in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, had refused to punish a group of white men for lynching. Why would it be any different in Hamilton?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Parties Unknown

  But for the fact that farmers to the west of Hamilton were slower than ever to plant their fields this year, life mostly went on as usual. Six weeks after the lynching, Deputy Sheriff Hadley and his wife, Berta, conceived their first child, my mother-to-be.

  On the fourth day of April, Judge Price Gilbert settled himself onto the Hamilton bench. Facing the grand jurors—several of my relatives and his friends among them—he told them the January lynching “overshadows all other burdens of the court this session.”

  Launching briefly into one of his cherished themes, the citizen’s responsibility for the prevalence of crime, he hinted at the social status of mob members, saying, “The indictment of a Negro or a friendless white man is easy, but it takes backbone to comply with the law when the offender is an old friend or the only fellow who is any good in his community.” Though he didn’t dodge the issue, his normally icy mien under such circumstance seemed to have melted. Perhaps he was tired or simply resigned. The white primary was four weeks away and his opponent was putting up a good fight.

  Meanwhile the region was in the grip of an unseasonable cold spell and the grand jury was shivering in its unheated meeting room. An oil stove dragged in for the occasion didn’t bring much comfort. Faced with an unusually heavy schedule—four murders, one rape, two white vagrancies, and a stubbornly fought land case, in addition to the lynching—and eager to get the entire mess behind them, the grand jury plowed through without delay.

  While they deliberated, black newspapers nationwide were broadcasting a call from the NAACP for churches to hold Easter mass for the souls of lynching victims. The Chicago Defender’s front page on Easter morning bore a grim drawing of three men, wearing crowns of thorns, hanging from the branch of a tree.

  On Easter morning, President William Howard Taft stood at the pulpit of the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church near the White House and spoke out against lynching, but failed to call a federal law against it. This did not surprise NAACP leaders who’d met with the president a year earlier and were told this matter rested with the states and they should lobby at that level.

  On that same day in Hamilton, the young musician Alex Copeland and his mother held their annual Easter egg hunt. This year the fete was different: instead of the usual Sunbeam Band church group, “every child in town” was invited, according to the Journal. Either this referred to every white child in town, or this was an interracial event. These were not atypical during the slavery period when blacks and whites attended church together, but they were highly unusual in this era. A short time later, black and white young people in Mountain Hill would—even more uncharacteristically—participate in a joint baptismal ceremony.

  Four days after Easter, on April 11, the grand jurors in the Hamilton courthouse brought forth eight true bills on the criminal matters. Their remarks on the lynching, typed on onion-skin, read: “We regret and condemn the Lynching that took place in our county, and have used our best efforts to find the perpetrators but have been unable to find out anything about it.” These notes appear at the end of the page of presentments. Far more space was allotted to the sad state of bathrooms in the courthouse, the filthy and unsanitary condition of the jail, and the need to pay the sheriff fifty cents per diem to take proper care of it.

  Once again in Georgia, no white man would be tried for a lynching.

  On April 14, the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk, carrying with it over 1,500 people. It was an occasion tailored to the tastes of Arthur Hardy. Aching for heroes in these days of beastly behavior, he sat down and wrote a poem for The Golden Age, which also ran in the Journal.

  They conquered self and died to save the weak—

  would Christ have called upon them to do more!

  And though above them now the waters break

  There’s added music in the Ocean’s roar.”

  Meanwhile, later that week, Douglas Hadley led Johnie Moore’s mother, Lula, to the filthy jail and locked her in the place her son had recently occupied. She had been hauled before Harris County grand juries twice in the past two years. First she was accused of attempted murder of a white man; then she was accused of manslaughter of a black woman. Both of her victims were neighbors. Each time she had pleaded “not guilty” and the grand jury had failed to indict her. This time, however, the manslaughter charge was changed to murder and she pleaded guilty.

  Her jury of “twelve good and lawful men” was composed entirely of white men from the western district where she lived, including two white Moores, a Huling, and a Land. These were men all tightly tangled in relations among black and white in that benighted place, men likely to have been a part of the January mob.

  This time she was convicted and sentenced by Judge Gilbert to twelve years at hard labor on the state prison farm at Milledgeville. She was known to be a volatile woman and now, with her only son dead at the hands of a lynch mob, she’d have surely spelled trouble. I suspect some just wanted to get her out of the way. Her guilty plea at this point suggests to me that she was somehow “encouraged” to submit. Or perhaps her white neighbors’ recent macabre demonstration of their ability to eliminate enemies and the searing fact of her innocent son’s fate was enough to win her cooperation. She’d not be the only relative of a lynching victim to be imprisoned that year. In the upcoming October court session, Dusky Crutchfield’s husband, Jim, would be sentenced to ten years for burglary.

  On April 19, the day Lula Moore was found guilty, Buddie Hadley announced another run for sheriff. The January election had been a special one because so many officeholders had retired, died, or simply quit; empty spaces needed filling. On May 1, the white primary was scheduled. Most contenders for other offices had long since announced. Perhaps Hadley was waiting to see how the grand jury would rule. If there was an uproar over his failure to produce suspects, or if the prosecutor did indeed find culprits and they turned out to be a passel of his kinfolk, he needn’t bother to run.

  Many contradictory things had begun to happen in the county after that cursed night. More black men killed black women than ever in the past. More white men killed other white men. More black men were sentenced to die, while at the same time, more white men launched costly campaigns to free black men from prison or to see sentences reduced.

  In the wake of the lynching, many Mountain Hill residents also took it upon themselves to write letters on prisoners’ behalf.

  The continued killing of black women would not be confined to black men or even to Harris County. No sooner had Dusky Crutchfield gone into the record as the first black woman lynched in Georgia when, in June 1912, sixty-year-old Anne Bostwick, a hundred miles away in Pinehurst, became the second. Longtime housemaid to a prominent white fami
ly, she’d been diagnosed as mentally ill, but the state asylum was overcrowded and would not admit her. She continued to work. One day she and her employer had an argument and she waited outside for her, behind a column on the veranda. When the woman came outside, Bostwick lunged at her with a knife, nearly severing her head. She then went and found the woman’s husband and told him what she had done.

  Newspapers reported that great crowds watched Bostwick seated in a convertible, a rope hanging from a tree placed around her neck. The car was then accelerated at high speed and as she was hanged her body was riddled with so many bullets it was cut in two.

  An Ohio paper reported that despite the usual “parties unknown” ruling of the coroner’s jury, the car used in the lynching was known to belong to “prominent citizens.” This was unusual in that the ruling ideology of the day was that prominent whites were black folks’ benevolent guardians, and that only “rednecks” resorted to lynching. Some papers also defied precedent by detailing the sterling reputation of Bostwick’s family.

  In the matter of Anne Bostwick, President William Henry Taft spoke out for the first time against a specific lynching. Taft was under pressure from lynching opponents, spearheaded by the NAACP, to support federal antilynching laws. This he refused to do, and in 1911 he had told black leaders asking for help that “federal authorities are not authorized to intervene unless it be for the purpose of protecting a citizen in the exercise of rights which he possesses by virtue of the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

  To Taft’s proclamation, the May Crisis responded: “Well, in the name of justice, what rights does an American possess ‘by virtue of the Constitution and laws of the United States,’ if it is not the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law as the Fifth Amendment guarantees?”

  In the same issue, the Crisis revisited the Hamilton lynching and wondered who would be next, predicting that it would be children. Sadly, the prediction came true. More Georgia lynchings would occur that summer, though none more savage than that of a fourteen-year-old black boy in Columbus named T. Z. McElheney, in August.

  In August, McElheney accidentally shot his friend Cleo Land, son of Brewster Land’s brother Will. Such accidents were, unfortunately, not uncommon. No charges were even contemplated and papers extended sympathy to both families. But when the shooter was black and the victim the white son of the powerful Land family, with its ties to past lynchings, there would be no mutual sympathy.

  In the days preceding the trial, lynch threats hung about the Columbus courthouse like flies in the thick heat of August. The dead boy’s father visited Sheriff Jessie Beard and told him that if the verdict was less than murder, there might be trouble.

  The boy was tried and found guilty of unlawful manslaughter. Barefoot and wearing shorts, he pleaded for leniency, weeping, “I am just a little black nigger.” Gilbert sentenced him to three years in prison.

  Despite the January lynching and the current lynch threats, Judge Gilbert ordered no extra guard and the sheriff appeared in court without his pistol. When Gilbert issued the sentence, he scurried quickly from the courtroom, heading up Broadway toward home for lunch. “Look out for the music!” someone shouted, a signal to the mob to make their move. When men began to converge on the boy with pistols drawn, the sheriff slipped into his office, where he remained until the prisoner was out of the building. He later claimed he went to get his gun. A bailiff managed to disappear as well. Another was kicked in the stomach. Before it was over, forty men—none wearing masks—had amassed to drag the boy, begging and screaming, onto a streetcar.

  When the car crossed the city line into Sheriff Beard’s county territory, the mob took its prey into a wooded lot on the edge of an upper-class neighborhood and pumped the fourteen-year-old full of lead. Hundreds came to stare at the mutilated body, which lay unclaimed on the ground until midnight, when a black undertaker found the courage to collect it. It was the boy’s accidental shot to an eye that had killed his friend, and so T. Z. McElheney’s killers had fired bullets through both the young boy’s eyes.

  Reactions to this new lynching in Columbus were mixed. The Lands were well-known. They had many friends who believed the boy deserved the death penalty and that a lynching was justified. But, for the first time in Georgia history, another crowd vociferously and publicly disagreed. Preachers spoke out from the pulpit and Columbus clubwomen circulated cards declaring their opposition to mob law. Newspapers published the names. Among the signatories was my great-uncle Tom Williams’s wife, Erie, a proud member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and two of Dr. Charles Williams’s daughters; the Daily Enquirer published their statement and their names. The signing of such a petition by these women might seem a simple act, but in that era of ironclad silence on the subject, it would set a new standard, one that would bear fruit in Hamilton in another two decades.

  Judge Gilbert had now seen fourteen occasions of lynching on his watch. He had lectured repeatedly on the need to bring mob members to justice but had never seen any brought to trial. This time he got his wish.

  Having won the white primary but still facing general election, he reminded the grand jury that trials are at the foundation of our system of government and that the safety of both person and property is dependent upon enforcement of the law “without fear or favor.” Wishing to remove matters from the torrid arena of race, he told them “the negro is an incident in the circumstances.”

  This time things took a different course. For the first time in the history of the Chattahoochee Valley Judicial Circuit, the grand jury returned three true bills in lynching against white men Brewster Land, his cousin Ed Land, the dead boy’s uncle, and Lee Lynn, a mill worker, plus four bills against Will Land, the boy’s father. They expressed regret that they’d not found evidence to indict more men.

  Unlike the Harris County grand jury in April, which ignored law officers’ roles in that lynching altogether, this one took the sheriff and his men to task. Still, the Land men were never actually arrested. Sheriff Beard claimed they could not be found. Arrogant men, they sent word they had a long train trip they wanted to take and would show up in November for trial. “It was summer and too hot in the jail,” one later said.

  They arrived as promised, backed by a team of the best lawyers Columbus had to offer. Brewster Land, a stern bull of a man, was asked where they’d been. “That is another matter, but a regiment of soldiers could not have brought me to town had I not wanted to come,” he replied.

  Leading the defense team was Judge Gilbert’s recent opponent, Eugene Wynn. Assisting him was fellow native Harris County resident and Williams brother-in-law Henry C. Cameron. Not so long before that, Cameron had been willing to reveal publicly the identity of mob leader, Edgar Stripling, to help another client. Now, representing mob leaders, he and his colleagues used a loophole in the law to allow their clients to offer only unsworn testimony, which could not be cross-examined.

  By the rules agreed upon in advance by all parties, the jury was required to find the men guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, or nothing; and the sheriff had presented no evidence to that effect. As for witness testimony that the defendants used violence against law officers in the courtroom and had even warned the sheriff beforehand of possible trouble, the defense used it as evidence of their clients’ efforts to protect the officers from the real culprits.

  The jury adjourned for exactly twenty-nine minutes and returned to pronounce the four men “not guilty” on all counts. Shortly thereafter, one of the bailiffs admitted that he and other officers were warned in unsigned letters, before the trial, that it would be wise for them to be careful about discussing the lynching. At that point Prosecutor George Palmer had a clear case for appealing the verdicts on grounds of witness tampering. Aware of the minuscule chances of any white jury convicting any white man for any crime against a black man, he chose not to.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “. . . Died with Their B
oots On”

  Several things happened in Harris County as a result of the 1912 lynching. For one thing, whites in their county became sensitive about its reputation. Toward the end of January, an Atlanta Journal columnist rubbed salt into the wounds by revisiting a series of nefarious 1906 white-on-white, all-in-the-family murders, and comparing the county to Kentucky’s Breathitt County, home of the Hatfields and McCoys. The local elites discussed a lawsuit for libel and the Columbus Daily Enquirer, which had reprinted the story, apologized. The sheriff, also sensitive to the stain on his own honor, set about to polish his image. His determination to mend his tattered reputation would be sorely tested. After the “Hamilton Avengers”—or murderers, as some took to calling them—were let off the hook, a crime wave unlike any other washed over the county. By the time the April 1913 court session rolled around, Buddie Hadley—who, with Judge Gilbert and Solicitor General Palmer, had won reelection—would present one hundred criminal cases to the grand jury.

  Throughout the year and into the next and the next, Harris County lynch mobs—emboldened by the Avengers’ escape from justice—would again form or threaten. Each time, the sheriff, backed by the judge and a grand jury, moved the defendant to the safety of Columbus or Atlanta. Twice the trials were held in Atlanta. In one of these, a mob of Mountain Hill area moonshine men packed the courtroom to glower at the jury.

  Meanwhile, in Columbus, powerful white men continued to mount black church podiums to instruct blacks on how to live. In 1913, a superior court judge told St. James A.M.E. members they were to look to the church and to white men, not to the courts for their salvation. Negroes, as he called them, were simply unable to uphold oaths.

  On a national level, President Woodrow Wilson was quickly disappointing any hopes that black Americans had for him as he set about to accelerate the segregation of federal jobs, removing blacks from decent employment unavailable to them elsewhere in the country.