by Karen Branan
The following year, 1930, my future mother graduated from high school. Betty Hadley had been named valedictorian of her tiny class but felt “too shy” to make the commencement address, so she passed it along to the salutatorian, a young man desperate to marry the pretty young flapper with bedroom eyes. His chances, however, were nil. Her heart and life were promised to the soon-to-be Dr. Ben Williams, off at medical school. Like her, he had already been deeply wounded by life. He was but an impressionable twelve when his father’s harassment of Louis “Sugar Bear” Murray on the gallows made front-page news. Much later he’d tell me his father was a “sadist.” He never explained this and would redden with instant anger each time I mentioned Papa Will. He told me a story of how he and his brother, as children, had put a cat in the well to see if it would swim and the cat had drowned. That night Papa Will stood outside their bedroom, scratching at the door and making cat howls as they trembled beneath their sheets.
Was my Williams grandfather at the 1912 lynching? I do not know for sure, but there were many reasons he might have had for going. Norman’s mother, Josie, was the postmaster at Cataula, where he lived; he was the postal deliveryman. His brothers Dock and Ben were close friends with Norman. Dusky Crutchfield was his cousin Henry Mobley’s concubine. Until shortly before the lynching, she’d lived on his place a half mile away from my grandfather’s, a piece of backwoods grandly called Kingsboro. His brother Dock was Mitch Huling’s best friend. If for no other reason, he’d have gone to make sure Dock didn’t go wild with his gun after the lynching. And it was not only Dusky and her “Miz Mobley” outrage he had to worry about but another black woman, also one just a stone’s throw away, who had recently borne the child of one of his brothers. He’d have perhaps relished the idea of sending a loud message to both silence blacks on the subject and warn white men away from these liaisons. My educated guess is that he was there and that his drinking escalated after that. When in 1974 I told Big Mamma, his widow, that I was divorced, she shook her head slowly, a pained look gathered on her sad old face, and she said, “I should have done that. There was too much pain in that marriage.”
Sometime during adolescence, Ben had come to believe that he himself had killed a young black woman. This was the “secret” my father revealed to my sister and me on Clubview Drive when I was eleven and asked him to stop drinking. I do not know how that connects to the enmity between him and his father, but it happened at roughly the same time that my father got that dread notion in his head and that hostility forced him to leave home. He moved in to the Beall-Mobley-Williams house on the square with his uncle Brit and aunt Matilda. Soon after that he was shipped off to Georgia Military Academy. Upon graduation he left for Kirksville College of Osteopathy in Missouri. Before leaving, he placed a ring upon Betty Hadley’s finger (the one I wear today) and she waited impatiently for his return.
In 1934, newly minted Dr. Ben Williams returned home from Missouri by bus with more than a degree in osteopathy. On one arm he was holding a much older Native American wife, Rose, and on the other, her ten-year-old daughter. This was Ben, great-great-grandson of General Elias Beall, who drove hundreds of Creek Indians from their Chattahoochee lands. This was the man whose engagement ring Betty Hadley wore, the man who’d give her a fine house, a country club membership, beautiful children, and fancy cars. Ben claimed he’d married Rose in a drunken blackout and asked his mother by mail to inform his fiancée of the situation before his return. My mother-to-be removed her engagement ring, picked up the family Bible, and took to her room for three days, where she cried and prayed.
After that, she and my father’s mother hatched a plot to break up this unholy arrangement and send yet two more Indians packing west. It seemed the family was finding more civilized ways of ridding itself of inconvenient women. Apparently, as my father later recounted, Rose had hastened the process by throwing knives at him across the dining room table one night. Soon after the bus pulled out, and a quick divorce was procured, my parents were wed. Still, my father never forgot the little girl. He’d apparently promised her birth father back in Missouri that should the union collapse, he’d return the child to him directly, so he put her on a bus alone to a distant place. He never knew what happened to her and into his old age expressed remorse.
By the time they were married, Ben and Betty Williams had each been pretty badly damaged by the tiny, tumultuous world that spawned them. As children they’d heard endless stories of murder and melee. Betty had watched her mother slip into a needle addiction and knew her revered grandfather, the former sheriff, had turned to bootlegging in his retirement. Her mother was a talker and talked all the more when morphine was calming her nerves. Did she tell Betty that her cousin John Cash walked into a Negro church one Sunday morning, raised a ruckus, and was fatally wounded? Did she tell her that a great-uncle had shot and killed his father, her great grandfather?
While she would spend much of her adult life convincing herself that the heinous 1912 lynching never occurred, her new groom would spend the rest of his life convinced he had killed a young black woman who did not die. What chance did these two ever have—the sheriff’s daughter wearing her own little shiny, invisible badge, and the “sadist’s” son, condemned in his own mind to live a life of self-flagellation?
Perhaps they thought a new brick ranch house across from the Columbus Country Club and a shiny black Packard would wash away both the bloodstained stories they’d heard and the firsthand cruelties they’d witnessed.
Buddie Hadley had died of a heart attack in 1931. He was in his buggy on the way to the Columbus Farmers’ Market with a load of collards and yams and, likely buried beneath them, moonshine, my mother told me. He’d gone into the business himself after he lost the sheriff’s race. Years later, a great-granddaughter opened Buddie’s Bible to discover a news clipping by a farmer who wrote of the need for cooperation among poor farmers, black and white.
Two years later, my grandfather Douglas Hadley was elected high sheriff of Harris County, a post he’d hold for the next twenty-four years. There’d be no public lynchings on his watch and fewer murders. Black and white alike would tell me that he was, more or less, a good sheriff. However, the dip in violence was not entirely his handiwork. Beginning in the 1930s, societal shifts and political change wielded a strong influence. Since the turn of the century, two hundred antilynching bills had been introduced in Congress and failed. While ongoing efforts by the NAACP continued to meet defeat, in 1939 a Civil Rights Section was created within the Justice Department in order to bring civil charges against law officers who surrendered prisoners to mobs.
Even before that, small changes were cropping up in Georgia. In 1930, two white men had been sentenced to prison for lynching two black men who were about to testify against a white rapist. Throughout the 1930s, thousands of Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) members, aided by local Methodist Missionary Society women, began making regular calls on sheriffs to remind them of their oaths and laws regarding lynch mobs. They would call on ministers and other prominent citizens to help them prevent lynching. Into the 1940s, they strong-armed sheriffs into signing pledges and publicized the names of those who refused. Law officers were being warned by these uppity but respected women of the adverse publicity that would result from any mob violence in their jurisdictions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dad Doug
On June 5, 1941, I was born into a world engulfed by chaos. A madman named Adolf Hitler and his deluded countrymen were destroying democracies across Europe while millions of people, including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, and blacks, were being herded into concentration camps and incinerated. Six months and one day after my birth, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II. In the background of my formative years occurred cataclysmic events I would only later have words for: Holocaust, Hiroshima, Atom Bomb, Nazi.
The war brought indescribable upheaval to the world, the nati
on, and the South. A massive base of black veterans were returning home and expecting to share equally in a democracy they’d risked their lives to defend. This dissonance laid the groundwork for a new American Revolution that would be known as the civil rights movement.
At home in Columbus, Georgia, two black men found their own way to fight white supremacy and created a tool that would enable the upcoming civil rights movement to succeed. In 1943, when I was two years old, a black Columbus barber and his physician friend, Dr. Thomas Brewer, head of the local NAACP, courageously took the state’s white primary system to court and won. Along with a Supreme Court decision the following year that ruled that the U.S. Constitution guaranteed the right to vote in primary elections, regardless of race, this created a radical shift for blacks throughout the United States and set the stage for the emergence of the civil rights movement.
In the meantime, however, most white Georgians were not about to surrender their cherished notions of superiority and the right to mistreat black people, even black soldiers in uniform. In Harris County, some of the old die-hards, newly returned from “whuppin’ Hitler’s butt,” found themselves identifying with his white supremacy ideology and expressed reservations that they’d fought him. There were vile rumors of black men, home from a taste of French wine and women, who were now in hot pursuit of white girlfriends. More, however, seemed inclined to pursue the precious right to vote.
It was in this atmosphere that Sheriff Marion Douglas Hadley began his second decade as chief law enforcement officer of Harris County. By now my grandfather had been sheriff for ten years. He was elected in 1933, a year in which lynchings spiked in the South; they continued into the decade. Not so in my grandfather’s jurisdiction. But for a murder by law officers within the jail, Harris County saw no more. In addition, the murder rate decreased and no one was sentenced to death. My grandfather was a man congenitally averse to conflict. His experience as a new deputy in 1912 and during the years that saw the mob members murdering one another—including several of his cousins—had no doubt strengthened that aversion.
More recently, he’d seen his friend Mitch die a disgraced and broken man, the result of his blazing-pistols approach to law enforcement. An ongoing factor would also be Berta’s frail condition, and her addiction to drugs, which may or may not have been the result of the traumas she suffered as a witness to the lynched bodies and from the bomb threats, the murder trial, and the spate of bad publicity she and her husband had endured while he worked for Mitch in Columbus.
The work begun by the ASWPL continued to reap local rewards. In 1941, a group of Harris County white women, schooled in the ideas and tactics of the ASWPL and possibly including some of Miss Lula’s “Enough” club, physically intervened to stop a lynching in progress. The newspapers, long enamored of reporting successful lynchings, decided to keep mum on this particular success. By the 1940s the Georgia press had chosen to turn down the thermometer on “race” stories.
I do not know how my Hadley grandfather felt about black rights or white supremacy, but I do know that he was a politician through and through, acutely aware of which way the wind was blowing. In 1943, Herman Talmadge was defeated by a moderate Ellis Arnall. Though Arnall didn’t subscribe to social equality, he did abolish the poll tax and chain gangs, revoke the KKK charter, and support the prosecution of thirty-eight Atlanta police officers for Klan membership.
Another moderating influence on my grandfather and Harris County came in the form of two rich and powerful white men: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cason J. Callaway. In the early 1930s Roosevelt began regular sojourns in nearby Warm Springs to seek relief from the effects of polio. During the Depression, Callaway scooped up thousands of acres of rolling woodland, including that of my Hadley family, at rock-bottom prices, and over the next twenty years developed experimental farms and a paradise for nature lovers and sportsmen. This area was referred to by locals as “the Gardens.” In the 1935, Roosevelt created the Pine Mountain Valley Community, one of several experiments in communal farming that brought poor urban whites to rural areas to build their own houses and farm their own crops. With such largesse under way in this long-benighted land, it behooved the sheriff to keep a close eye on county affairs.
In 1946, black voter rights efforts were at a peak, spurred on by President Roosevelt’s New Deal projects to support black professionals, who would in turn serve poor blacks. These programs drew thousands of African Americans from rural Georgia to Atlanta. Seven thousand black voters were registered during this time, and reports of senseless murders of black men began once again to fill front pages.
In July 1946, the last lynching in Georgia was carried out, in Walton County. In broad daylight, two dozen white men executed two young black men, one just home from war, and their wives. As with Hamilton’s 1912 lynching and so many others, miscegenation was a major factor, though most papers remained silent on the subject.
For the first time in Georgia, large numbers of prominent whites stood up and spoke out. One was my grandfather Will Williams’s son-in-law Dr. Hoyt Trimble, who served on the board of an anti-Klan organization outside Atlanta. In 1946 the group publicly protested the Walton County lynching. They used Bible verses and newspaper ads to try to persuade nearby Monroe’s “best people” to reveal the lynchers’ names, but to no avail.
There would be no justice for the families of the two men and two women lynched in Walton County. Because they’d been in the sheriff’s custody just prior to the killings, the FBI had grounds to investigate, but Director J. Edgar Hoover’s men got nowhere. Federal efforts to track down and convict the Walton County lynchers had come up empty. Hoover grumbled that he’d never seen such arrogance as he encountered among the whites in that county, nor so much fear of “negroes.”
That summer, my father’s alcoholism and womanizing culminated in my parents’ divorce, and my sister and I were tucked away safely in the harbor of G’mamma and Dad Doug’s home. I believe it was that year when I sat on the grassy bank along Railroad Street in front of my grandparents’ house and watched a ragtag Klan parade shuffle past their house and turn into the pasture behind John Ivey Mobley’s house, on the other side of my aunt Evelyn’s. I’d later learn that John Ivey Mobley, grandson of James Monroe Mobley, was a Klan leader. He was also my grandfather’s chief backer, as his father had been my grandfather’s chief backer. I did not know at the time that, on my father’s side, he was also a cousin.
We returned to my grandparents the next summer, blessedly oblivious to the fact that bloodlust over “biggity niggers” had arrived in Hamilton before we did. In May of that year, a well-off black farmer and Most Worshipful Master of a black Masonic chapter, Henry “Peg” Gilbert, was locked in the Hamilton jail on charges of harboring a fugitive. In a land where black cooperation with the law was crucial to social control, the appearance of refusal was sheer heresy. Nothing so enraged most white men in those days as the mere suggestion of blacks helping blacks against whites, the way Dusky Crutchfield did, her story now legend, at least among whites. Gilbert’s other heresy was his success, affirming Ida Wells-Barnett’s investigations decades earlier that identified black success as a common motive for lynching.
The cause of this new scandal was that a black man had killed a white farmer from the same county and then fled, allegedly hiding out at Peg Gilbert’s farm. Because the murder had taken place in Harris County, Gilbert and his entire family were arrested in their own Troup County by an unnamed Harris County justice of the peace, with a warrant that was honored by Troup’s sheriff. The children were reportedly whipped in front of their father. When this failed to produce the desired confession, they were released with their mother.
Practical and politically astute as Grandpa Hadley was, he couldn’t, or at least didn’t, prevent what happened next. On May 23, 1947, Henry Gilbert was reported dead by the Hamilton police chief, who claimed he’d fired in self-defense when the prisoner came at him with a chair and “tried to gouge [his] eye
s out.” No charges were brought, but a black newspaper in Atlanta protested so loudly that the U.S. Justice Department launched its own investigation. According to C. D. Marshall, the black man I discovered in his corn patch, the “Ladies” had stepped in before the black people got their voice. This would be the first time that the voice of the oppressed was being heard.
The NAACP had been pressuring the FBI to investigate Hamilton, but the bureau’s experience in Walton County had left it fearful of on-the-ground investigations. It did not help that Hoover was a racist who considered blacks to be easy dupes of the hated commies. So when Hamilton turned up on his radar and he smelled left-leaning activists behind the bullhorn, he was in no mood to nail this case. He would not send agents to town to sniff out trouble and return empty-handed, to be laughed at in restaurants and taunted on sidewalks. This time Hoover would handle matters over the telephone.
At the time, the NAACP was leading a strong national charge for a federal antilynching law and prospects looked good. In addition, Dan Duke, a Klan-busting former assistant state district attorney, was representing Gilbert’s wife, Caroline. The Pittsburgh Courier and other black newspapers used the Gilbert case to underscore the need for “immediate passage” of antilynching legislation. Others warned it would do no good so long as local sheriffs, judges, and juries controlled prosecutions. President Roosevelt refused to support it on the grounds that it would lose him his southern support in Congress, which was vital to his New Deal programs.
