Free Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips

adjusted his hat, and walked out through the packed square, with no explanation but for the occasional nod to friends and relatives as he passed.
    By leaving Lummus in charge at the moment of greatest crisis, Reid neatly sidestepped what was, for him, a political train wreck—and thrust his rival directly into its path. If the young deputy failed to hold off the lynchers, it was now his head that would roll when the governor called from Atlanta. And if Lummus somehow succeeded in repelling the lynch party, it was he who would be remembered, come election time, as a “nigger lover” who’d stopped the white men of Forsyth from avenging a dying girl.
    AS HE AMBLED home down Castleberry Road, Reid couldn’t have failed to understand the dire situation in which he’d left Gay Lummus and Rob Edwards. In 1912, in Georgia, mobs regularly stormed county jails and abducted black prisoners—and it had happened many times before in Cumming. Fifty years earlier, in 1862, the Daily Constitutionalist had reported that a “negro boy belonging to Judge E. Lewis, of Forsyth County, was taken out of the Cumming jail and hung on last Saturday night by four men, for improper advances toward a lady. The men were relatives of the lady, and at home on furlough at the time the deed was committed.” The matter-of-fact tone of the report suggests just how unremarkable it was for a black man to be taken from police custody and lynched in the public square: “[There has been] no excitement among the people on the subject.”
    In 1870, the Chicago Tribune reported that three other black residents of Forsyth were “summarily hung one morning by the roadside, in front of their own dwelling . . . old man Hutchins suspended to the limb of a tree by an old ox chain . . . and his two sons by green withes cut from the bushes.” Sixteen years later, in1886, a Forsyth man named Pete Holmes was accused of raping a ten-year-old white girl and was locked up in the Cumming jail. The Atlanta Constitution called Holmes “a jet black, greasy negro, just fifteen years of age,” and reported that “when intelligence of the crime began to spread, the friends of the [girl’s] family became terribly stirred up, and before night a strong mob had been organized to lynch Holmes.” Even when, the next day, he was sentenced to fifteen years in the penitentiary, “people did not think the sentence sufficient,” and Holmes was only saved from a lynch mob when the county sheriff spirited him out the back of the jail and rushed him to safety in the Fulton Tower.
    Such scenes were common enough in post-emancipation Forsyth that in 1897 Judge George Gober made a special trip from Atlanta to Cumming in order to try a man named Charley Ward, who stood accused of raping a prominent famer’s fifteen-year-old daughter. “Gober gave him the limit allowed by law, twenty years,” said the Macon Telegraph , and “a speedy trial was had to prevent a case of lynching, which had been planned to take place Christmas day.”
    These earlier lynchings and near lynchings suggest that rather than yielding to a sudden, irresistible passion—as lynchings were usually portrayed—the men pounding on the door of the Cumming jail on Tuesday, September 10th, 1912, were taking part in a time-honored ritual. Many would have heard tales of past lynchings from their fathers and grandfathers, and when Rob Edwards was arrested on suspicion of rape, they saw their chance to finally join that grand tradition: to show that they, too, were men of honor, and no less committed to the defense of white womanhood.
    IF REID’S SOLUTION to the problem of a lynch mob was to pretend it did not exist, his strategy worked, at least in the short term. According to one witness, Lummus “stood his ground bravely against the assault and was warned to get back and save himself.” Hearing the shoutsand curses of hundreds of men who now viewed him as nothing but an obstacle to be overcome or passed through,