by Karen Branan
“always anxious . . . to prevent mob violence”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, January 23, 1912, 4.
“fearing no lynching”: Macon Telegraph, January 23, 2012, 1.
“Proof to convict had not been secured”: Atlanta Constitution, January 24, 1912.
“and comely”: New York Evening News, January 23, 1912, 1.
“Advance”: February 15, 1912.
“unwanted attentions” to the “negro girl”: The Crisis, March 1912.
“guinea pigs”: Chicago Defender, January 27, 1912, 1.
“promised investigations”: Governor Joseph M. Brown letter to William Henry Fleming, March 13, 1912, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow. An African American, E. D. Rosewood, wrote President Taft requesting an intervention in the Hamilton lynching. Assistant Attorney General Harr replied that the federal government was “without power” to intervene.” Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York University Press, 2012), 153.
“Limits of Negro Endurance”: The Twentieth Century, March 1912.
“only way to win respect”: The Twentieth Century, March 1912.
“cowardly white woman”: Ibid.
“Divine Rights”: The Crisis, March 1912.
“heroes and martyrs”: An editorial in the March 1912 issue of The Crisis called upon black men to “kill lecherous white invaders of their homes and then take their lynching gladly like men.” The issue included an oath for black men to swear to defend black women against insults and injury by any man, black or white; the oath was reprinted in countless black publications.
“the massacre . . . permitted in the shadow of its courthouse”: Columbus Ledger, January 26, 1912, 4.
“justification for the terrible act”: Harris County Journal, January 25, 1912, 1.
“A new book”: David Rose’s The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice (New Press, 2007). His account was taken from William Winn’s series on Columbus-area lynchings in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, January 25 through January 31, 1987.
Chapter Eighteen: Parties Unknown
“overshadows all other burdens of the court this session”: Harris County Journal, April 4, 1913.
“indictment of a Negro”: Ibid.
“every child in town”: Harris County Journal, April 11, 1912.
“We regret and condemn the Lynching”: Grand Jury Presentment to Superior Court, April Term 1912, Harris County Courthouse.
“They conquered self”: Harris County Journal, July 10, 1912.
“Johnie Moore’s mother, Lula”: The State vs. Lula Moore, Murder, Minutes, Harris County Superior Court, April Term 1912, Harris County Courthouse.
“prominent citizens”: The Crisis, July 1912.
Taft speaks out: Springfield (Mass.) Daily News, June 27, 1912, 12.
“just a little black nigger”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, August 14, 1912, 1.
“the negro is an incident in the circumstances”: Macon Telegraph, August 16, 1912.
Chapter Nineteen: “. . . Died with Their Boots On”
“Hatfields and McCoys”: Columbus Ledger, January 28, 1912.
The Bible verse from 1 Samuel: “And I tell him that I am about to punish his house for ever, for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.”
“strung on a trot line like a fish”: Columbus Ledger, July 16, 1915.
“Moonshine Mafia”: Interview with Horace Gordon, Columbus, GA, October 7, 1997.
triple hanging: Columbus Daily Enquirer, October 17, 1915.
“River Killing”: Columbus Ledger, July 6 and 7, 1915; Columbus Daily Enquirer, July 2 and 3, 1915. Anonymous letter courtesy of members of victims’ family.
Chapter Twenty: Roaring Twenties
Tip Top: State of Georgia vs. Louis Murray, Governor—Convict and Fugitive Records—Applications for clemency, 1858–1942, Louis Murray, 1921, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow; State of Georgia vs. Cecil Cook, Court Documents, Harris County Courthouse.
Whitehead information: “Tragedy over Negress,” Columbus Ledger, August 24, 1921, 1; “White Man Loses Life over Negress,” Columbus Daily Enquirer, August 25, 1921.
“miniature Bat Masterson”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, May 8, 1921.
killing of bootlegger: Columbus Ledger, May 30, September 10, and November 22, 1922.
Information on Julian Harris: Gregory Lisby and William F. Mugleston, Someone Had to Be Hated: Julian LaRose Harris: A Biography (Carolina Academic Press, 2004); Papers of Julian LaRose Harris and Julia Harris, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
Information on Ku Klux Klan in Columbus: At the time of the Harrises’ stint, there were about five hundred Klansmen in the city. The organization was endorsed by the chief of police and the mayor, and it was permitted the use of the armory at police headquarters for its meetings. “Defying the Klan,” Thomas Boyd, The Forum, July 1926.
Chapter Twenty-One: The Ladies’ Ultimatum
“we who could prevent it”: Lily Hardy Hammond, In Black and White: An Interpretation of the South (University of Georgia Press, 2008). Hammond also wrote columns for the Atlanta Journal in 1913.
background on black and white women’s political work: Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2011).
Anti-Lynching Crusaders pamphlet: Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, NAACP Papers.
“Governor Hugh Dorsey’s Inaugural Address”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, June 26, 1921, 5.
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Curse Continues
Ernest Farley kills Bud Mobley: “Mobley Slayer Still at Large,” Columbus Daily Enquirer, February 5, 1929; Macon Telegraph, February 7, 1929.
“In 1934 . . . Native American wife”: The year my mother and grandmother helped run off my father’s Indian wife and stepchild, Anna Julia Cooper engaged a lawyer to obtain information about her paternity. Ernest Haywood, the nephew of Cooper’s father, “Wash” Haywood, and the grandson of my great-uncle Albert Williams, replied candidly but curtly that “Wash had one child by his slave Hannah without benefit of Clergy,” confirming what Cooper had long known. Among Cooper’s papers at Howard University’s Spingarn Library is a copy of the obituary for her grandmother Eliza Eagles Asaph Williams Haywood. It was Eliza who wondered in her journal whether women and Negroes might not be as smart as men, given equal opportunity. Anna Julia Cooper Collection, Spingarn Library, Howard University.
Elias Beall in Alabama: John T. Ellisor, The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 215.
“Cousin John Cash”: “A White Man Shot in a Negro Church,” Columbus Daily Enquirer, June 30, 1903.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Dad Doug
ASWPL: Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (Columbia University Press, 1993).
FBI in Walton County: Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (Scribner, 2003).
“the first white person”: It is likely that May Brit Cramer was inspired to teach in a black school by her cousin J. Curtis Dixon, who was superintendent of Negro schools in Georgia for many years. Dixon was a director of the Rosenwald Fund and the Rockefeller General Education Board, both of which funded much of black education in Georgia for the first half of the twentieth century. When Cramer was a young girl in Hamilton, Dixon made headlines when Governor Eugene Talmadge kicked him and others off the Board of Chancellors of the University of Georgia for allegedly supporting integration and intermarriage. “Reminiscences of J. Curtis Dixon,” 1967, Oral History Collection, Columbia University.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Guilt and Innoce
nce
“cut the baby right out of her belly”: Interview with A. J. Murphy, Hamilton, GA, November 30, 2003.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Enslaved by History
Albert Curry execution: State of Georgia vs. Albert Curry, October Term, Superior Court, 1958; Macon Telegraph, July 20, 1958, 2.
Definitive account of Columbus serial murders: David Rose, The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice (New Press, 2007).
“Perhaps it was distant cousin Anna Julia”: At the age of one hundred Cooper published a poem entitled “Grapes from Thorns,” asking to be remembered as “somebody’s teacher on vacation . . . resting for the Fall opening.” She died six years later. Born into slavery, she lived to see Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington. Louise Daniel Hutchison, Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982).
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