Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America Read Online Free

hands and sharecroppers of Big Creek knew enough to get out of sight. Lummus was second-in-command, and so it fell to him to dismount and pound on doors, demanding that one family after another come out into the yard and speak with the sheriff.
    By sunrise on Saturday, September 7th, Reid and Lummus had arrested and jailed a teenager named Toney Howell, along with four other men held as accomplices: Isaiah Pirkle, Joe Rogers, Fate Chester, and Johnny Bates. Howell was the nephew of two of Cumming’s most respected black residents, Morgan and Harriet Strickland, and was staying on the farm they owned in Big Creek, to provide some much-needed help during the fall harvest. What the other prisoners had in common was that they were unmarried, illiterate black men who happened to live near the scene of the “dastardly assault.” The Macon Telegraph hinted at the arbitrary nature of their arrests when a reporter wrote that the posse had ridden out to Big Creek and “rounded up suspects.”
    Toney Howell also stood out for having been raised not in Forsyth but in neighboring Milton County. Much like Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, forty-three years later, this made him conspicuous as the stranger in the group, and one of the few black faces in Big Creek unknown to Reid and Lummus. The Atlanta Georgian would later admit that the evidence against Howell was entirely circumstantial, and in 1912 the very definitions of words like “assault” and “rape” were kept deliberately vague and used to describe almost any incident involving black men and white women.

    Sheriff Bill Reid and Deputy Gay Lummus, c. 1912
    This means that once Toney Howell stood accused of having entered Ellen Grice’s bedroom, he was widely regarded as being guilty of some kind of sexual “assault,” whether or not he had actually been there, and whether or not he had ever touched Grice. “If a lynching takes place,” said one journalist, “Toney Howell will probably be the victim.” In the Jim Crow South, this was the kind of reporting that functioned not just as a prediction but as a directive to potential lynchers.
    By lunchtime that Saturday, the town of Cumming was bustling with families from outlying sections, making their weekly trip to market. With Howell and four other black men locked in the Forsyth County Jail, talk of Ellen Grice was on everyone’s lips. But “no excitement prevailed,” according to the Georgian , until Grice’s father, Joseph Brooks, arrived in town, bringing word that his daughter was in “critical condition” from the alleged attack out inBig Creek. This news had an electrifying effect on the crowd, and soon a group of whites gathered around the little brick jailhouse on Maple Street and demanded that the prisoners be brought out. As more and more people arrived at the square, the town buzzed with what one reporter called “a determined spirit of speedy vengeance.”
    PICKING HIS WAY through that crowd, the Reverend Grant Smith must have looked like any other “hired man” in Forsyth. At forty-eight, he was part of the county’s poor black underclass, a group that, though they represented 10 percent of the total population, were almost totally disenfranchised by the Jim Crow laws of Georgia. While emancipated slaves had been guaranteed the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, the Georgia legislature countered by adopting the nation’s first cumulative poll tax in 1877, then established one of the first “white primary” systems in 1898. The result—in a place where the vast majority of African Americans could not afford the poll tax, and where Democratic primary winners were, almost without fail, elected to office—was that men like Grant Smith had no chance of representation in the local government and virtually no power to resist the will of the white majority.
    Smith earned his living picking corn and cotton in the rolling, terraced fields of the county, and it’s likely that on the