by Karen Branan
Cornelius Bugg was seventy-three when I first met him. He had lived through a lot and his memory was sharp. The first time we spoke, he asked to remain anonymous. He told me about how hard it had been for black men to buy farmland in the county and that he had as much as he did because his wife’s family had inherited it from their slave owner. He still lived in the old plantation house that once belonged to his wife’s white grandfather. A beautiful portrait of her grandmother graced the wide entry hall.
Bugg told me about the shooting of his friend Peg Gilbert. Word had come down at the time from the black undertakers who embalmed Gilbert’s body that several of his wounds had occurred days before he died, and that he appeared to have been systematically beaten over a period of time. His friends and family came to the conclusion that he had finally snapped and lunged at the police chief. That’s when he was shot.
The police chief was Willie Buchanan, the man with pasty calves, a Jesus fan, and a Coke whom I remember seated peacefully on the bench across from the square. Again and again throughout my research, these findings cast my halcyon childhood summers in an entirely different light, amounting to a belated and harrowing coming-of-age experience. A few years earlier I’d remembered Dad Doug as the adored grandfather who opened up the courtroom for his children’s Sunday play, then suddenly I see him hiding a jailhouse murder from the FBI.
None of the massive damage to Peg Gilbert’s body was reported in the FBI finding, nor was it commented upon by Hoover. The federal investigators did not bother to explain why Gilbert’s leg was broken, nor why his face was pulverized, nor why it took six bullets to subdue an unarmed man with a broken leg.
When an FBI agent asked my grandfather why the entire family was incarcerated, he responded that “they seemed glad to be here rather than at home where they were in danger.” He also stated that they had considered releasing Gilbert after a week, but “when this was mentioned to him, he stated he did not want to go back home because he was scared of what might happen to him.” I can imagine that same line of reasoning being used by him and his father thirty-five years earlier, in 1912.
The FBI chose to exonerate everyone, including my grandfather, who told the investigators that his wife had been seriously ill the afternoon of the killing that led to Gilbert’s arrest. That day, she was taken to the hospital, where she stayed for three weeks. He claimed he had taken no part in the investigation of the murder during that time. Though his name was on the warrant used to arrest Gilbert, he had not signed it; it was common practice, he said, for others to sign his name in such matters. No bond had been set because the prisoner never asked for one. No commitment hearing was held, since, again, none had been requested. That, my grandfather told the FBI man, was common practice in the county. If he was asked about his whereabouts in the days leading up to Gilbert’s death, as common sense would dictate, his answer was not made a part of the record.
Director Hoover closed the case, concluding that Chief Buchanan alone had killed Peg Gilbert in self-defense.
Eventually, the Communist Party got involved in the case of Peg Gilbert’s murder. In 1951, Peg’s wife and daughters, along with a number of other black Georgians victimized by police brutality, flew to New York and joined entertainer-activist Paul Robeson to present a petition to the secretary-general of the United Nations. At the same time, a copy was being presented to the fifth session of the UN General Assembly at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. The report detailed the depth of racist violence in the United States, calling it “genocide,” and describing Henry “Peg” Gilbert’s vicious murder in the Hamilton jail.
As his own father had done in 1912, my grandfather had talked his way out of prosecution even though it was the sheriff’s duty under the law to ensure the protection of prisoners in the jail. I can say confidently that this man—whom I considered infallible—did not sit beside my grandmother’s sickbed during that entire time. I was with her many times while growing up when she was infirm, at home or in the hospital. It was her daughters and her ever-present maid, Hopie, who tended her, not her husband. I do not believe he’d have taken part in the attack on Gilbert, but I do think that he would have known about the abuse taking place in his jail prior to his wife’s illness, if indeed there was an illness. He was not the sort of sheriff who’d turn his back on the jail regardless of family circumstances (unless, of course, he was warned away, as his father had been warned away on that fateful night in 1912). But I expect he was the sort of man who’d lie to J. Edgar Hoover about matters that might send his friend the police chief and his staff to prison. Yet, as Cornelius Bugg told me, “It happened on his watch. He bears some responsibility.” I concur and add: “more than just ‘some’ responsibility.” I would learn from a descendant of the white man allegedly killed by the black man Peg Gilbert allegedly sheltered that even that suspect was not guilty.
Racial troubles confronted Bugg into the 1960s. He and others had tried to build a black farmers’ cooperative. It had failed, he said, because white farmers didn’t want it to succeed. On our first visit, he requested anonymity. The second time, eight years later, he said, “Go ahead and use my name. I’m eighty-one years old. What can they do to me now?”
The shooting of Peg Gilbert by Chief Buchanan was one of the very few times in my grandfather’s twenty-three years as sheriff that racial violence in Harris County was made public, and even then, not by Columbus or Hamilton newspapers. But I do not doubt there were numerous instances of unrecorded police brutality. Cornelius Bugg spoke of many black men driving alone at night who were stopped by “deputies” and beaten for no reason. A Williams cousin who grew up in Hamilton and still lived there at the time of my research in the county told me that his own father, an abusive, tormented man in later life, “did the sheriff’s dirty work.” He said that Sheriff Hadley never wanted to make anyone mad, so that when “someone had to be locked up,” he’d call on deputies, county policemen, or his father to do it. Sheriff Sam Jones, who succeeded Hadley, called him “the best politician this county has ever seen.”
Whether these “deputies” did their deviltry with my grandfather’s blessing is a mystery and flies in the face of how I saw him up until the day he died, when I was sixteen years old. Based on what I now know about Harris County during those Jim Crow years when Sheriff Hadley ruled, I must admit it’s a strong possibility.
Accepting all of this is difficult for me, because as a child, Dad Doug was the only adult male figure in my family I felt I could look up to and trust. I have very few actual memories of him—I do remember being at the farm with my cousins, at Mr. Shorty’s getting ice cream, playing in the courtroom on a Sunday while he worked. I also remember him teaching me and my sister how to take our thumbs to an ear of feed corn for the cows. And my sister remembers how he explained to her that when our horse kicked back and almost hit her that she was most likely flicking at a fly, not aiming deliberately at her. We did not spend a lot of time together, but the times we did were peaceful and mostly without incident. I suppose that in a family characterized by anxiety and outburst, it was his quiet that drew me to him.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s—during my storybook summers when I splashed in the Mulberry Creek and picked blackberries across the railroad tracks, oblivious to what the grown-ups were doing—two potentially inflammatory situations would put Dad Doug’s political acumen to the test. Both involved “race-mixing,” still a felony in Georgia at that time. It was a matter the 1912 mob had hoped to put to rest, but one that—human nature being what it is—would not even play dead. Long after it occurred, the “two-family families” my mother mentioned would abound throughout the county. Each of these new cases involved a Williams, one black, one white. And because they came to public attention, he could not ignore them.
May Brit Cramer was the daughter of Louise, the daughter of my great uncle Brit. Louise was one of the little Juvenile Missionary Society girls living along the line of march of the lynch mob. Louise grew to adulthood in
a time of great ferment over race, and especially lynching, within the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society. She had married Charles Cramer, a Pennsylvania-born educator who was superintendent of the Mountain Hill elementary school. Their daughter May Brit had been an impressionable child growing up on Hamilton square when her cousin Curtis Dixon was publicly pilloried by Governor Eugene Talmadge, who fired Dixon and other University of Georgia chancellors for being “integrationists.” For many years Dixon, a white man, served as southeast director of the Rosenwald Fund, as well as Superintendent of Negro Schools.
In the mid 1940s, the Cramers moved to Baltimore. At Eastern High, a girls’ public high school attended by May Brit and her sister, the principal told students about the dangers to society that the newly created atom bomb posed and the concurrent need for racial equality. While there, the Cramer girls would likely have heard news of both the Peg Gilbert killing and the Walton County lynching. When May Brit, a beautiful, petite blonde with blue eyes, graduated from college, she returned to Hamilton and took a teaching position at a black school. Today, a cousin still living in Hamilton refers to May Brit as “the first white person to teach in black schools.”
A few also refer to her affair with a black man, a man with whom she openly consorted in his home, her car “shamelessly” parked outside. I remember, as a child, hearing the whispers on my grandmother’s porch: “ran her out of town,” “shot him in the knees.” May Brit left town, never to return, taking with her a Bible that once belonged to Uncle Brit, the bachelor slave owner. She had become every white Hamilton family’s worst nightmare. Her lover was Square Copeland, a member of one of the oldest, most respected black families, related to the white Rev. Alex Copeland. Square was reportedly beaten up by “thugs,” but he stayed on to live a long and respected life in the county.
I spoke with several of the black man’s cousins, one of whom told me that his wife, still living, did not like to talk about this old history. In 2013, my cousin Doug McLaughlin, who grew up in Hamilton and knew Square Copeland, urged my sister to tell me not to use his name, fearing he might still be alive. “He was a good man,” my cousin, also a good man, said. “I wouldn’t want any harm to come to him.”
It was during the 1930s and 1940s that an audacious and brilliant white Georgia writer named Lillian Smith began publishing books and articles that articulated the thoughts of women like May Brit, and likely even her mother. An integrationist, Smith wrote boldly of the ways white men used race and sex to instill fear and maintain power. Her novel Strange Fruit depicted the lynching of a black man involved in a dispute with a prominent white man having an affair with a black woman. The book made its controversial appearance in 1944 and enjoyed wide circulation, often in brown paper bags, throughout small towns in Georgia.
I do not know if May Brit’s mother ever crossed paths with Smith or her partner, Paula Snelling, but both Louise and Snelling graduated from Georgia State College for Women and taught in high schools around Georgia. Smith and Snelling ran a girls camp in north Georgia, which many Columbus girls attended. Both Louise Williams and Paula Snelling were girls in 1912, when black women were lynched in their respective hometowns. Like both Snelling and Smith, Louise Williams, and later her daughter, chafed against the puritanical demands that white southern men placed upon white women. Louise and Charles’s wedding took place in the Hamilton mayor’s office. His family attended; hers did not. I do not know why, but I figure the bride’s obvious pregnancy had something to do with their desire to turn away from trouble, an old Williams trait as well as an old white southerner trait.
My grandfather’s role in May Brit’s exile and her lover’s beating is unknown. Given that both May Brit’s powerful grandfather and her great-aunt Lula Mobley still lived on the square, combined with Douglas Hadley’s recent brush with the FBI, I doubt he needed counsel as to the quiet methods required. No news reports of the scandal were ever filed in Columbus papers.
In 1952, Sheriff Hadley encountered more miscegeny. This time a married descendant of formerly enslaved Williamses was involved with a married white woman. She’d had several children with him. The fiancé of the woman’s white daughter decided to call in the law on them and one afternoon Sheriff Hadley pulled up at the black man’s house with a convoy of “friends.” He told the man’s wife that he’d be back that evening, a clear signal that the man should hightail it out of Harris County. I don’t know what else he told her, but I later learned that some white “Masons” drove him to a bus and bought him a ticket to Birmingham. The woman’s husband, who was Hispanic, sued for divorce and custody of their children. The judge granted him that and ordered the “illegitimate” children by the black Williams man put up for adoption. About a decade ago, one of them showed up a reunion of her African American half-siblings, looking for some answers.
I want to see this story as a tale of rescue. I see Dad Doug cannily satisfying his Klan friends with the threat at the black man’s house, hoping to head off another lynching. But I was not there and cannot know. And I have to wonder if I’m not just, once again, hoping for a hero. In all my years of visiting Hamilton on Sundays and in summers, I cannot recall hearing Dad Doug use racially offensive language or behave meanly toward anyone, black or white. My cousin Doug McLaughlin, who grew up next door to him and followed him everywhere, agreed. This was not, however, true of my own father, a polished, educated physician.
In 1954, when I was thirteen, my father took my sister and me on a ferry to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. He was living near Savannah at the time and his medical practice consisted partially of black patients, many of whom paid him in wild game and greens. A new black church had recently been built and named Williams Memorial in his honor. The still-pristine Hilton Head was about to be developed, and he had a chance to buy cheap land. We were the only white people on a ferry filled with black workmen. My father, a heavy smoker, was coughing and a black man started coughing. For some reason I’ll never understand, I said, “That nigrah is mocking you, Daddy.” And from his pocket my father drew a switchblade, which he snapped open, held against his leg, and said, “Tell me which one.” I knew he had been drinking. I froze on the spot and refused to answer. Years later, learning of young Emmett Till, so swiftly executed on the careless word of a white woman at about the time of my ferry experience, I realized with a chill what landmines we were all navigating in those days.
Caught up in being a teenager—dating, dancing, dressing up, hanging out with my girlfriends at Dinglewood Pharmacy—I was barely aware that a revolution called the civil rights movement was churning around me. I did, however, know that a black doctor named Dr. Thomas Brewer was killed by a dime store owner whose son was a classmate of mine. I knew that the minister at First Presbyterian was sent away for suggesting it was time for blacks and whites to work on race issues together. I knew that my mother was antsier than ever on the subject of race, and that she stopped shopping at the downtown open-air market because the black vendors were now refusing to be bartered down.
Dr. Brewer, head of the local NAACP, had joined a black Columbus barber named Primus King in a lawsuit that ended with Georgia’s white primary system being declared unconstitutional and laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement. At the time of his murder, Brewer was challenging segregated schools, and the KKK had threatened his life. Solicitor John H. Land, the son of Brewster Land, who stood trial in 1912 for the lynching of fourteen-year-old T. Z. McElheney, declined to bring charges.
There was no black uprising over Brewer’s murder. While bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins spread throughout the South, they never came to Columbus. Over the years, a sizable black middle class had emerged. Its leadership, schooled in the old Booker T. Washington ways by the city’s white leaders, didn’t relish conflict. Unlike nearby Albany, there was no black student body to be organized. The YMCA, built to keep blacks in their place, still stood at the center of “Negro life.” As in Columbus, the more activist element of the civil righ
ts movement never set foot in Harris County, a relief to all my white relatives and many of the older blacks.
In 1961, as other southern cities were erupting in violence over black students’ attempts to integrate bus stations, Rev. J. W. Hurley, the pastor of Columbus’s St. James A.M.E. Church, which had refused Martin Luther King’s request to speak in the late 1950s, announced that he and his Columbus Youth Movement had accomplished a speedy and peaceful desegregation of city buses. Meanwhile, Rev. Hurley explained to city officials how they could avoid a city-wide boycott. All this happened after local NAACP officials refused to support black students arrested earlier for attempts to desegregate buses. NAACP leaders from elsewhere attempted to step in, but were rebuffed by the local leaders, long accustomed to accommodating whites in exchange for privileges. This history, plus the assassination of Dr. Brewer, had clearly left its mark.
On April 30, 1957, a few weeks after my grandfather won his seventh election, he pulled into our driveway in a brand-new Ford, a gift for my mother. All his life he’d lived in a small country house, always driving old cars. Throughout his entire marriage, he and his wife had taken but one vacation. Now here he was with this brand-new car. It was so out of character that I think we all feared something was amiss. We were right. He died the next day of a heart attack at the age of sixty-seven. The church filled up with weeping people, most of them white, while Rev. Alex Copeland sang “The Old Rugged Cross” in a quavering contralto and played the organ as if his heart would burst from his tiny body.
There was no more lynching in Harris County, but Georgia’s criminal justice system was still badly broken. Just as Georgia had for many years led the South in lynching, it has often led the nation in death sentences, and the Chattahoochee Valley Judicial Circuit has led the state. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme court invalidated state death penalty statutes nationwide for a time. Georgia was at the top of the list for executions—with 80 percent of those executed being black, and the vast majority of whom had allegedly murdered whites—and played a strong role in the justices’ decision.
