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

least a few sympathetic white allies.

    Joseph Kellogg, date unknown
    AT THAT SAME MOMENT , hundreds of whites from outlying areas were loading their rifles and shotguns and heading toward Cumming, drawn by a rumor that spread like wildfire: an army of blackmen had been spotted leaving the Colored Campground, people said, infuriated by the attack on Grant Smith. Black rebels, the story went, had filled a wagon with explosives and were planning to “dynamite the town . . . without sparing women and children.”
    One witness reported that whites “on horseback, in buggies, in automobiles and afoot . . . streamed into town and loitered about the courthouse,” as the square became “a mecca for armed men . . . [where] the protruding coat above the hip told that they were armed for war.” For anyone who arrived unprepared, enterprising gun dealers had set up tables on the courthouse lawn and spread out their inventory of rifles, shotguns, pistols, and wooden crates filled with ammunition.
    If the tale of Ellen Grice’s rape represented one of the most vivid fantasies of southern whites, this new rumor was fueled by another: the vision of crazed black men rising up and taking vengeance on their former masters. That fear had recently been stoked by reports of a full-scale “race war” in the north Georgia mountains. Only a month before, in July 1912, headlines all over the state had warned that a “pitched battle between the races” had broken out in the little town of Plainville, sixty miles west of Cumming.
    The Plainville incident began innocently enough, with a black girl and a white boy picking peaches in the same orchard. At some point the boy, Ivey Miller, was struck by a rock he said was thrown by the girl, Minnie Heard. But when Heard’s father went to town the next day, hoping to explain the misunderstanding and make peace with the Millers, he was set upon and beaten by whites, who warned him never to come back. According to the Macon Telegraph , Minnie Heard’s father stayed away, but her uncle had the audacity to appear in Plainville the following morning. As soon as they saw him, whites accused Heard’s uncle and three other black men of “forming a plot to burn the town.” They were lined up against a wall and whipped, until one of the black men saw his chance toescape and took off, firing a pistol over his shoulder as he and the other men ran, pursued by whites who returned fire. As the Southern Railway’s afternoon train arrived from Chattanooga, first-class passengers glanced out the windows of a dining car and saw one of their oldest and deepest fears sprung to life: a raging gun battle between whites and armed black men.
    Hiding in the woods, wounded and bleeding, the four black men took stock of their situation and quickly came to a desperate conclusion. Having dared to defend themselves against a mob, they now faced the prospect of either being lynched once they were captured or legally hung when they were tried by an all-white jury that was likely to include friends and relatives of the men they had shot. As they peered through the leaves and saw a posse approaching, they decided it was better to be killed in a gunfight than surrender to the kind of white men who regularly tortured, shot, castrated, and burned African Americans alive—often for far less than what these men had already done.
    After making it to the cabin of a local black family, the men barricaded themselves inside, took up positions at the windows, and stared out at the gathering mob. Some accounts say the gunfight lasted all night, others that it was over in an hour. By the time the smoke cleared, three prominent whites had been wounded, including the sheriff of Gordon County. Ten black men and two black women were also shot, though their names went unrecorded, and there is no report as to whether they lived or died. The Macon Telegraph said “the battle was maintained until the negroes ran out of ammunition, [then] they were