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

morning of the “excitement” he was helping bring an employer’s harvested crops to market. But to black churchgoers, he was also well known as a preacher, and as the son of Reverend Silas Smith, one of the area’s leading clergymen, whose ornate signature had graced the bottom of “colored” marriage certificates during Reconstruction. Silas and Joanna Smith’s oldest son, Grant had been conceived in the chaotic war year of 1863 and was part of the very last generation of African Americans born into slavery. Though he was too young to remember it, Grant Smith was the only one of his nine siblings who began life as the legal property of a white man.
    But having been born on the eve of emancipation also meant that Smith’s earliest memories included going to one of the freedmen’s schools that sprang up all over Georgia after the Civil War, when northern aid societies and the federal government succeeded in establishing a right to education for Georgia’s former slaves. As a result, unlike his younger brothers and sisters, who came of age after the end of congressional Reconstruction—and after the colored school system was dismantled in north Georgia—Smith could read and write. There was no outward sign of it as he shouldered his way past farmers, tradesmen, and merchants hawking their wares on the Cumming square, but during that brief window of hope in the early 1870s, Grant Smith had become something white Georgians feared almost as much as a black rapist: an outspoken, educated black man.
    WHEN HE LEARNED that Morgan Strickland’s nephew Toney had been accused of rape, and heard white men all around him whipping themselves up into a lynch mob, at some point Reverend Smith turned to someone in the crowd and said exactly what he thought. It was a shame, he said, that so much trouble was being caused on account of a “sorry white woman.”
    The words were barely out of Smith’s mouth before white men all around him froze mid-sentence, stared at each other in disbelief, then tightened their fists around the buggy whips and leather crops with which they’d driven into town. Unable to reach the prisoners inside the jail, and outraged by the alleged attack on Grice, they now saw a target much closer to hand: the book-smart, headstrong, “uppity” black preacher, who had dared to question a white woman’s worth. “News of what he had said spread,” according to one witness, and “like a flash . . . the infuriated mob was upon him.”
    The first crack of leather brought people from every direction, eager to push their way into the ring of men surroundingSmith, who was now being whipped, kicked, and punched by every fist that could reach him. Estimates put the size of the mob at three hundred, and those on the outskirts could barely hear Smith’s grunts and cries over the cheering and shouting. When one group of sweat-soaked men tired, they gave way to others, who moved in and took their turn. Witnesses said the preacher was beaten “nearly to death” and that others started gathering scraps of wood for a bonfire, on which they planned to burn Grant Smith alive.
    Before they could, Sheriff Reid and Deputy Lummus muscled their way through the crowd and somehow managed to wrest Smith away. They carried him to the courthouse, where he was at first locked inside a huge basement vault—not so much to keep him in as to keep potential lynchers out. After hearing Smith’s moans, Reid finally agreed to move “the prisoner” upstairs, where a doctor was summoned to treat and dress his wounds.
    It was around this time—as the bloody, half-naked body of the preacher was carried past his office door, and as a crowd of hundreds bellowed for Smith to be handed over—that Mayor Charlie Harris realized he needed help. If he wanted to save Grant Smith and the five black men in the Cumming jail from a lynch party that was growing larger and more determined by the minute, Harris knew he would need more than a skinny