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

beaten into insensibility by whites who crowded into the cabin . . . [and] a lynching was only prevented by officers who pulled their revolvers and stood guard.” Newspapers as far away as San Francisco and New York portrayed the event not as a case of black men defending themselves against lynchers but as an “ambush” of white law officers by “a band of negroes.”
    IN SEPTEMBER OF 1912 , the Plainville “race war” was still fresh in the minds of the white citizens of Forsyth. As they spun the cylinders of Colt revolvers, oiled the bolts of old Winchesters, and thumbed shells into the barrels of shotguns broken over their knees, the lesson must have seemed crystal clear: whites in Plainville had allowed their own sheriff to be gunned down, and only the brave deeds of a posse had stopped a black insurrection. Milling around the impromptu gun market that had sprung up outside the courthouse, whites became convinced that they were now the ones in terrible danger. Everyone had heard that a black army was rolling down Tolbert Street, trailing behind it a wagonload of dynamite. The town of Cumming, whites believed, would soon be under siege. And as the sun climbed high over the square, they prepared to defend it with every weapon they could find.

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    RIOT, ROUT, TUMULT
    C umming mayor Charlie Harris was among the most moderate voices in the white community, but even he was so anxious after the Plainville “race war” that he gave his wife shooting lessons, in case she needed to defend the house while he was away. Harris’s eight-year-old daughter, Isabella, remembered an urgent telephone call her father made on the morning Grant Smith was horsewhipped, telling his wife, Deasie, that it was time to load the rifle.
In the face of [the] excitement and terror . . . the men downtown heard that a crowd of negroes was assembling near Sawnee Mountain. Their intention presumably was to invade the town, commit robbery, perhaps murder, and intimidate citizens. Father had trained Mother how to shoot . . . and told her to take the gun, loaded but not cocked, to the front porch and have the children around her. If she saw a group of men coming up the grove, she was to fire the gun into the air to frighten them. . . .
[But] while we were sitting there the telephone rang again [and] Leon, my oldest brother, went in to answer it. He came back with the information that no danger threatened us or anybody else. The rumor had started when two colored boys were seen near Sawnee . . . hunting squirrels.
    Although Isabella’s mother got that second call before she fired a shot, all over the county whites like her were on edge, watching the horizon with guns at the ready. Such was the level of hysteria, even among upper-class whites like Deasie Harris, that two boys out hunting squirrels—presumably because their families were poor and hungry—could be mistaken for a bloodthirsty black invasion force, intent on “robbery [and] perhaps murder.”
    AS THEY WALKED from the Colored Methodist Campground, the men from the church picnic must have sensed that kind of fear and hysteria rising to a fever pitch all around them. Whatever urgency and determination they’d felt as they set out, when the group rounded a corner and finally arrived downtown, they were stopped in their tracks by the scene on the square. One witness reported that “fully 500 white men came into Cumming from surrounding areas” and “many arms and munitions were [being] sold to citizens preparing to protect their homes.” Another observer said that “old rifles, shotguns ancient and modern, and every variety of pistol possible [was] being loaded and held in readiness.”
    Everywhere the men looked, whites were strapping holsters to their belts, stuffing their coat pockets with bullets and shotgun shells, and readying themselves for battle. Facing impossible odds against such a force, they abandoned all hope of saving Reverend Smith, Toney Howell, and the other prisoners