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

of a handful of wealthy planters and progressive leaders but was home to a much larger population of poor, illiterate whites, who were more worried than excited by talk of rail passengers arriving from Atlanta. Though such a line would bring business opportunities to rich and powerful men in town, it would also put Forsyth in contact with all the competition and the dizzying diversity of the city. To many of the county’s wary hill people, such radical change was something to be fended off, not welcomed.
    But in the summer of 1912, Charlie Harris had a vision of afuture in which gleaming locomotives would roll into Cumming Station—bringing wealth, technology, and all the benefits of the new century right into the heart of Forsyth County. As Harris and his partners spread out their crisp maps and pictured the towering bridges and breathtaking tunnels of the Atlanta Northeastern, it must have seemed like a sure thing. It must have seemed like nothing in the world could stop them.

    Charlie Harris, 1912
    ON THE SAME MORNING that Grant Smith was horsewhipped on the Cumming square, the black congregations of the county were gathering at the Colored Methodist Campground, just outside of town, preparing for their annual picnic and barbecue. The event brought together hundreds of parishioners from the African American community’s many small rural churches—Mt. Fair, Shiloh Baptist, Stoney Point, Backband Church, and Shakerag Churchwere all there—and was traditionally held just as the harvest began in September. It was a time when even the poorest in the community could partake in one of the great pleasures of farm life: the heaps of roasted corn, black-eyed peas, butter beans, and biscuits, and the whole hogs that had been roasting on spits all night.
    But this year, as the first families arrived, they learned that five young men had been arrested out in Big Creek. Word spread that Morgan and Harriet Strickland’s nephew Toney had been accused of rape, and when someone coming from the square reported that whites there were threatening to lynch Grant Smith, many in the crowd could stand by no longer. A group of men who had planned to spend the day tending the barbecue pits instead started walking toward town, knowing that Reverend Smith was not much safer in the custody of Bill Reid than he had been in the hands of the mob.
    In 1912, the African American community of Forsyth County was largely made up of illiterate sharecroppers and field hands. But there was a smaller group of educated blacks with close ties to prominent whites, and many of them were leaders of the black churches. Among the crowd at that Saturday picnic were men like Joseph Kellogg, who had helped found the Colored Methodist Campground in 1897, and whose two-hundred-acre farm near Sawnee Mountain was the largest black-owned property in the county.
    Another attendee was Levi Greenlee Jr., whose recently deceased father, Levi Sr., had been the pastor at Shiloh Baptist for many years, and left to his children more than 120 acres inside the Cumming city limits. Greenlee was so well liked that in the 1890s he was invited to join the Hightower Association, a gathering of white clergymen from around north Georgia, and was inducted as the group’s first and only black member.
    In surviving church minutes from Shiloh, we can still hear Reverend Greenlee’s voice on a typical Sunday, thanking those in attendance “for their donations of $6.36.” When Greenlee acceptedthe collection plates and looked out over the congregation, he saw the benches filled not only with familiar black faces but also a number of white visitors. Greenlee thanked everyone for their generosity, “and especially our white friends . . . for their 10 and 25 cent pieces.” This means that as Levi Greenlee Jr. and other men from the church picnic walked anxiously toward town, they had reason to hope that, scattered among a sea of enraged faces outside the county courthouse, they might find at