by Karen Branan
By the time Doug was in office, the Ku Klux Klan was in full flourish. With close connections to the city police and headquarters above their offices, as well as the full backing of the Columbus Ledger, they staged showy parades down Broadway and kept the city on edge. At one point, furious over the hiring of a “Yankee” city manager, they billy-clubbed the man senseless on a downtown sidewalk and dynamited the mayor’s house.
An extraordinary journalist couple named Julian and Julia Harris had bought the Daily Enquirer and used it to take on the Klan. “These night riders must be run to earth,” wrote Julian Harris in a call for a federal antilynching law. His exposés appeared in the New York World. In 1922 and 1926 the Daily Enquirer won Pulitzer Prizes for Harris’s crusade and, by 1926, the Klan in Georgia would be still alive, but limping, ranking only ninth in the country in membership, with six northern states boasting more members.
In 1926, the Columbus Klan disbanded. Every Klan-backed candidate was defeated at the polls that year. Julian Harris was credited for not only driving them out of Columbus, but driving down their numbers throughout the South. Some would note, prematurely, that the state that spawned the Klan was the first to crush it, and Julian Harris would get the lion’s share of credit. By 1930 its numbers had shrunk from an estimated five million to some 30,000 nationally and from 156,000 in Georgia to 1,400.
It was sometime during this raucous decade that Miss Lula Mobley and her Methodist Missionary Society women said, Enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Ladies’ Ultimatum
When I first returned to Harris County to research this story in the early 1990s, I had no idea where to begin. On a sunny Sunday afternoon I took a drive out toward Mountain Hill, looking for old folks. It was there that I first encountered C. D. Marshall hoeing his tiny cornfield. He wore a pair of faded overalls over a crisp white shirt emblazoned with large black musical notes. Off to his left was the neat L-shaped log cabin in which he lived. He told me it had once housed slaves and that his family had always lived on that land. “It’s the last one left,” he said.
He was born in 1926. I asked him if he knew about the lynching of the woman and the three men.
“Lynching was the law back then,” he said. “They wuh always stealin’ somebody outa his bed. . . .” He went on about this and that and then he stopped abruptly, dramatically. He bent down close to my face and said with a huge bright smile, “But they stopped it! Sho did, stopped it just like that. Uh-huh.” His face glowed with pride.
“Who stopped it?” I asked. He looked at me like I was born yesterday. Shook his head. “You don’t know?!” he said, and then he hollered triumphantly, like it happened yesterday: “The ladies! The ladies! The ladies done stopped it!” And in case I still didn’t understand, he added, even louder: “The church ladies up in Hamilton! Them white ladies!” Nowhere is this recorded. Not in Louise Barfield’s History of Harris County, Georgia. Not in the book of oral histories the Hamilton High students produced back in the 1970s, which I found in the Library of Congress. Not in any newspaper accounts. Not in any church histories I have been able to find. But I believe C. D. Marshall’s oral history, passed down through generations of black, not white, Harris County folk. After some historical research, it all began to make great sense.
“How did they stop it?” I asked him.
“They called they mens into the church and they says ‘Y’all better stop spinnin’ all these haints or we gone move to Columbus.’ Yes’m, that’s what they said. And they meant it. And they mens knowed they meant it. That’s when the ladies got their Voice. We got our Voice, too, but that took a while. So they said, ‘Stop the killin’, stop stealin’ folks out’n their beds.’ ”
He had to be talking about “the Ladies” of the Ladies Memorial Association, of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, of the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society. In short, he was referring to Miss Lula and her large following of strong white women, most of them relatives.
What these women did took a lot of guts. They knew they couldn’t bluff. They had to mean it. And that was hard because they loved that little village. There’d been six generations of Williamses, Henrys, Mobleys, and Hudsons living there by now. Their family money—blood money, some would later say—had helped build the courthouse and many of the stores, schools, and churches, had bought the Confederate statue and the courthouse clock. And they were proud of the result. Their ancestors rested beneath this ground. They liked a small town where everyone knew everybody and everyone watched over everyone else. Or so it had seemed, until the women began to wake up.
At some point in the 1920s they could no longer continue to ignore the clash between their Christian beliefs and their kinsmen’s social practices—the slaughter of innocents and the untimely deaths of loved ones, what some still believed was Dusky’s ghost tormenting her killers and others knew was the lifestyle that had brought them such disgrace. Making matters worse was their daily witnessing of friends and family in the grips of drug addictions. Many of these had been deeply affected by that lynching—people like Arthur Hardy’s wife, Irene, Berta Hadley, and the jailer’s wife, and more lately the beloved Rev. Alex Copeland.
Through their church missionary work, Miss Lula and her “Ladies” had been subject to antilynching messages during the decade following the 1912 lynching. In 1913, a vast majority of the twenty thousand white southern women at a conference in Birmingham, Alabama, had voted for a resolution against lynching.
In that same year, Lily Hammond, head of the Georgia Methodist Women’s Missionary Society, published a book titled In Black and White, in which she decried both lynchers and “we who could prevent it.” She told of an unnamed town disgraced by mob violence that held a public assembly to confess its shame and pledge to see the law uphold henceforth. It’s conceivable that Miss Lula’s “Ladies” convened that public assembly in 1913, though I find no record of it but wherever it occurred, it could have inspired what C. D. Marshall described as an amazing convocation that stopped the killing “sometime in the 20s.” It was in the early 1920s that the killings peaked, then stopped dramatically.
Given the deep religious feelings of Lula Mobley and her large following, coupled with their longtime political struggles in the temperance wars, where rough men blew smoke in their faces and sang bawdy songs, it would have come naturally—though not without great difficulty—for them to make this brave move. Long ago they’d learned to say to their men: You won’t protect us from the liquor evils; we’ll protect ourselves, thank you. They knew they were joined by thousands of white southern women elsewhere who had finally awakened to the ruse of the “black rapist” defense, saying Not in our names, mister. This doesn’t make us safer.
Over the next decade, the southern white women of the Methodist church would stiffen their spines, inspired by the antilynching movement of black church and club women and perhaps by the whispered-about heroism of Dusky Crutchfield.
Miss Lula and her now-grown Juvenile Missionary Society girls may not have known it but it was, in part, their distant cousin Anna Julia Cooper’s early and ongoing efforts at consciousness-raising and organizing among black women that was having this effect. As early as 1895, Cooper had begun urging church women to organize themselves at every level for the protection and improvement of their race and gender. While Miss Lula had been influencing her nieces and cousins, Anna Julia had been influencing a generation of young black women writers eager to fight lynching and other racial violence with the weapon of literature.
Angelina Weld Grimké, the niece of Cooper’s close friends Rev. Francis and Charlotte Grimké, was among the first. In 1913 she wrote Rachel, a lynching play, which was circulated and produced in 1920. Grimké taught English at Washington, D.C.’s M Street School during the period that she was writing her plays. Anna Julia Cooper, former principal of M Street, had been fired in 1906 for trivialities. The real reason, everyone agreed, was that she refused to dumb down a curriculum that was send
ing an impressive number of graduates to Ivy League colleges at a time when whites and large numbers of Booker T. Washington–oriented blacks wanted black schools to emphasize the industrial and manual arts. The ousted Cooper, ever determined to uplift her people, then went on to found a night college for working black adults. For a time it operated out of her elegant home on T Street.
In 1910 she returned to M Street to teach Latin, becoming a colleague of the younger Grimké. Grimké’s lynching dramas influenced a number of other black women and, in this way, the nation was introduced through literature to the inner lives of those faceless victims hanging from trees all over the South, as well as their nameless friends and families. Grimké wrote in 1920 that she sought a way to reach white southern women through the heart, through motherhood. She wrote of black women so traumatized by the lynching of their men and of pregnant women—their fetuses cut from the womb—that they refused to bear children.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, black antilynching activism mushroomed and bonds starting forming between black women’s clubs and church groups and the white southern women of the Methodist Church South, especially those of the Women’s Missionary Society. No one was more active in that organization than Miss Lula Mobley. Women she knew well were writing of the sinfulness of white southern men and the need for women to step in and stamp out violence against blacks and white women. The little Juvenile Missionary Society girls she’d tutored as children were now young women as active as she in the church. Louise Williams, Brit’s daughter, a nine-year-old when Dusky Crutchfield’s screams shattered her sleep that night, now traveled far and wide with Miss Lula to Women’s Missionary Society conventions. The 1918 convention held in Tennessee made history when it voted to align itself with “colored women.”
Miss Lula had been her father’s daughter until his death in 1903. By now, however, she was a strong, independent businesswoman, selling and buying mules in Columbus, overseeing a large farm, and acting as matriarch, hostess, counselor, and inspiration for dozens of relatives and neighbors. By now women had shortened their hems and bobbed their hair. Her own nieces and cousins were rolling cigarettes, driving flivvers, and dancing a fancy buckwing at the Field Rock Club. They’d never formed a suffragist club in Hamilton, but Columbusites Augusta Howard and her sisters had brought the first chapter to Georgia in 1895 and the second convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association (featuring Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt) to Atlanta. Columbus papers were filled with feminist news for them to read and contemplate.
Through the WCTU and the church, through Hamilton Female College and its successor, West Georgia Agricultural and Mechanical, women learned to “point an argument,” how to twist arms and argue principles as well as, if not better than, any man. At Methodist conferences they met black women much like themselves—middle class, educated, deeply Christian, with strong social consciences. While their notions of white supremacy were still largely intact, some began to question old notions about blacks’ innate inferiority.
I do not know whether the Hamilton foremothers knew that Anna Julia Cooper had cofounded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, though that news had appeared in Atlanta papers, or that ideas from those groups were shaping their own. Anna Julia and Lula, each one a devout and active Christian, were both in their early sixties. Both had graduated from college at very young ages. By this time Cooper was defending her doctoral dissertation on slavery and the French Revolutionists at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was written in French. How the Hamilton “Ladies” would have negotiated a conversation with this sophisticated, worldly cousin is hard to imagine. It is equally hard to imagine Cooper relating to the Dusky Crutchfields of the day, poor and powerless, the kind of women she advocated for but rarely associated with. It was these women who represented the battle under way between the sexes, and who exemplified the deep class and cultural divisions that so weakened their cause. Working together without the debilitating divisions of race and class, the Miss Lulas, the Dr. Coopers, and the Duskys would doubtless have accomplished more change more quickly.
In 1920 a group of black women had started the Anti-Lynching Crusaders through the NAACP. To publicize their cause, they’d produced a pamphlet in which Dusky Crutchfield was highlighted as the first woman lynched in Georgia. They invited thousands of prominent white southern women to join. Few replied. They preferred their own organizations. Yet increasingly, white women of the South were opening their eyes to the fact that what they’d so long called “the Negro problem” was, instead, “the Anglo-Saxon problem.”
Emboldened no doubt by the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave them the vote, in the early 1920s Methodist Women’s Missionary Society groups were sending speakers out to country towns in mountains, swamps, and the Black Belt, in fervid attempts to prevent lynching. They passed out pamphlets created by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, describing the mistakes mobs made and the “framed up” lies that had caused the deaths of innocent men and women. In 1921, amid the battles over who killed Dock Williams, Dock’s brother Brit was elected to represent the county in the Georgia House of Representatives. There Brit sat in the august chambers listening to Governor Hugh Dorsey’s astounding Inaugural Address.
Of all the pressing issues before them, the new governor said, the immediate passage of stringent antilynching laws was the most important, and without it no progress could be made. He read the names of more than one hundred Negroes lynched in the past two years—including the four from Hamilton—and noted those who were innocent. Despite the fact that many newspapers had by now decided they were innocent, Crutchfield, Harrington, Hardaway, and Moore were not among those names. It would not be until the 1930s that the white man who killed Norman Hadley made his deathbed confession, so it’s likely few knew the truth at this juncture. Speaking angrily of innocent Negro blood on the hands of white Georgians and Georgia’s “black eye” in the northern press, the new governor also called for one thousand dollars in compensation to lynching victims’ families.
But the centerpiece of his proposal was the creation of a state police force. Local jurisdictions, he declared, had long since proved that they would not or could not mete out justice to mob members. He emphasized, in addition, that until a bill was passed that would give governors the right to discharge local law officers who did not act fearlessly and responsibly to protect prisoners from mobs, there’d be no end to lynching. Dorsey had earlier traveled around the state telling the press that lynchings were caused by white men and women who “got down on the same level with black people,” then, when things went wrong, rose up and equated themselves with the law.
Thereafter, Dorsey did nothing of substance to end lynching or ameliorate race relations and accomplished none of the measures he’d called for in his address. But the fact that he took a stand may have made a difference. During his term, five white Georgia men received prison sentences—albeit, short ones—for lynching in the years 1922 and 1926. The number of people lynched in Georgia between 1923 and 1927 dropped to ten. From 1927 through 1929, there were no lynchings at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Curse Continues
Nineteen twenty-nine would be a grueling year for the nation as a whole. It was the year the banks collapsed. The Great Depression was just around the corner. It was also the year that sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Hadley, called Betty, would discover her mother’s drug habit. The girl who would later become my mother came home from school early one day to find her mother and her friends giving one another needle injections. These were the wives of highly placed men who held jobs in law enforcement or were lawyers. My grandfather was not yet sheriff, but soon would be. I envision half-filled glasses of iced tea, half-eaten tomatoes stuffed with tuna salad, nervous, girlish laughter, and my mother’s frozen face. Before the women noticed young Betty, she turned silently and left, her face burning with shame. It was never discussed, but Betty thought differently about her mother after that. She held her bac
k ramrod straight, her head a full inch higher, and determined that nothing, not even this shameful thing, would bow it.
It was also in 1929 that the last of the “boots on” killings occurred. Verna Green, in her pink wraparound and Nikes, told me she knew who did the 1912 lynching. “It was a Mobley,” she said. “He was the Klansman. He lived down there, ran a sawmill right down the road there down 27 on the Mulberry Creek.”
Verna took me down the Hamilton Road to the Mulberry Creek, near the Big House, where my grandfather Will Williams had lived with his family, a short walk from where as children on our Sunday outings to Hamilton we stopped in Nana’s DeSoto to pick up her laundry, and where we children had sneaked sips of old Mamie’s muscadine wine. Verna showed me where John B. “Bud” Mobley was living back then, when she was “just starting to date.” Bud Mobley’s father, Henry, was said to have been involved with Dusky Crutchfield, but he’d also been the one who’d presided over the coroner’s jury that peered up at the four shredded bodies and pronounced they had died at “the hands of parties unknown.”
By now he had moved to Florida, perhaps to escape the eerie howls he’d sworn he heard at every full moon since January 22, 1912. Verna thought it was Henry who’d heard a ghostly howling at his window that night, but it was his son, Bud, who picked up his pistol and went after a black neighbor he suspected of tricking him. The black man—Ernest Farley—grabbed Mobley’s weapon and shot him dead. Farley’s brothers helped him escape. They were later found and, with their wives, jailed for questioning. Nothing ever came of it, no threats of lynching, no arrests, no claims of beatings, no convictions. The motive provided by newspapers was the same false one provided for Norman Hadley’s: a dispute over money. Ernest Farley was never again seen. “I know his brother,” Verna told me. “He’s a good friend of mine. We don’t never talk about it. He ain’t never said a word about it all these years.”
