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

deputy like Gay Lummus and a glad-handing, good ol’ boy sheriff like Bill Reid. Rising from his chair, Cumming’s mayor tapped the little brass lever of a telephone on his desk and told the operator to commandeer all outside lines for an urgent call to Governor Joseph Mackey Brown, in Atlanta. As Harris pressed the receiver to his ear and waited, Sheriff Reid stood nearby, scanning the faces in the mob—and finding among them, no doubt, a great many men who would soon join him in the Sawnee Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan.
    AT THIRTY-NINE, MAYOR Charlie Harris was in the midst of his own climb up the social ladder. Like Reid, he was the son of a dirt farmer, but Harris had gone from plowing his father’s fields as a teenager to enrolling at North Georgia Agricultural College in the mid-1890s. After college, Harris distinguished himself as a law student at the University of Georgia. And he seems to have made some valuable friends there, for in March of 1908 his name was added to a corporate charter issued by the state of Georgia, granting Harris and his partners the right to build a new railroad—the Atlanta Northeastern, which was to run due north from the state capitol and terminate in the little town of Cumming.
    The plan could hardly have been more ambitious or potentially lucrative, given that the hill country of Forsyth had proved remarkably resistant to development after the Civil War, even as nearby cities like Gainesville grew, helped by their location along the Chattahoochee River. Cumming, by contrast, was too far west to use the river for transport and had been bypassed by both the Southern Railway, which followed the river valley, and by the Atlanta, Knoxville & Northern, which passed through Canton, to the west.
    County leaders had been courting railroad entrepreneurs since the earliest days of the Gilded Age, and in 1871 a group of citizens had convened a “mass meeting” and appointed a committee to try to persuade the Southern Railway to open a station in Cumming. But while locals predicted the “stupendous results in adding to our county wealth and population,” the board of the railroad remained unconvinced. In 1872, that same committee made a public pledge to “tender right of way to the first company that will build a road through the county,” and twenty years later, in 1891, Forsyth was still struggling to convince the Richmond and Danville Railroad that Cumming was the ideal terminus for a new branch. Local businessmen had grown so desperate that they offered “to donateto the company the sum of $20,000.” The recurrence of such pledges across a fifty-year span attests to the aching desire many residents felt for a rail link, and their frustration as one company after another bypassed Forsyth.
    All of this means that when he hung out his shingle on the Cumming square, Charles L. Harris, Esq., arrived with a rare combination of talents. He was an ambitious young lawyer and entrepreneur, yet had the common touch of a local farm boy made good. And during his time in law school he had made connections with powerful men in Atlanta, who could finally put Cumming on the transportation map of the South.
    Plans for the Atlanta Northeastern received final approval in 1908, and a stock sale raised $50,000, to be used for preliminary land purchases and the construction of power plants along the route. Once completed, a rail station promised to transform Forsyth’s agrarian economy, bringing it once and for all out of the dark days of Reconstruction. “The line which is to be built from Atlanta to Cumming,” said the Constitution , “will prove one of the greatest developers of a great section. . . . When that time comes millions of dollars will be added to the taxable values of Georgia, and hundreds of thousands of people to north Georgia.”
    Unmentioned in such sunny predictions was the fact that, despite its proximity to the state capitol, Forsyth was still something of a backwater. It could boast