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

Lummus reportedly “locked the doors of the jail and put the heavy bars in place.” He positioned himself between his prisoner and the mob, and through the barred door he pleaded with mob leaders to settle down, go back home, and let the Blue Ridge Circuit court take care of Big Rob Edwards.
    But outside a murmur was passing through the crowd, and soon a man who’d been sent to a nearby blacksmith’s shop was ushered to the front—a long crowbar clenched in one hand, a sledgehammer in the other. As the front door creaked and splintered under the first blow of the sledge, Lummus drew his pistol, spread his arms, and backed toward the row of cells. At the second blow, daylight streamed through a gash in the wooden planks, and just like that, the Georgian said, “the mob came on.” A reporter told how
farmers known to all the countryside were in front of the band, which advanced in broad daylight, without a mask, without the slightest fear of what the future might bring. The barred doors . . . gave way under a few heavy blows and the leaders rushed in, followed by as many men as could crowd into the corridors.
    Having risked his life to protect Edwards, Lummus was shoved aside as dozens of men stomped over the wreckage of the door and headed straight for the row of cells at the rear of the building. Inside one of them stood Big Rob Edwards, his back against the red brick wall.
    WHEN LEADERS OF the mob emerged from the jail with a black man, they were cheered by thousands of whites who had rushed into town in hopes of witnessing exactly such a spectacle. “Out into the sunshine came the negro,” said the Georgian , “gray in his terror, his eyes rolling in abject fear.” Edwards “muttered prayers and supplications to the mob,” one reporter noted,
but these were soon drowned in the rain of blows which fell upon him. A rope was brought from a nearby store and a noose dropped around the negro’s neck. The mob was fighting for a chance to get at its victim, and only the certainty of wounding or killing a friend kept the drawn pistols silent.
Across the street and up to the public square hurried the mob, its victim at the fore. The negro had lost his feet by this time and was being dragged by the rope, his body bumping over the stones. At the corner of the square a telephone post and its cross-arm offered a convenient gallows. The end of the rope was tossed over the arm, a dozen hands grasped it and the negro, perhaps already dead, was drawn high into the air.
    After a week of frustration, the abduction and killing took only minutes. There is no way to know whether Edwards died from a gunshot wound, a crowbar to the skull, or strangulation as he was dragged around the Cumming square—but when his limp, blood-slick body finally rose into view high over the crowd, thousands of people joined in. As they loaded their weapons and took aim, rebel yells and howls of celebration rose from the crowd. “Pistols and rifles cracked,” a witness said, “and the corpse was mangled into something hardly resembling a human form.”
    The Marietta Journal claimed that “as soon as the guns of those composing the mob were empty the crowd quietly dispersed and returned to their work,” but other accounts suggest that many in the crowd looked up at Edwards’s corpse and felt not satisfied but more hungry than ever. They had finally killed one of the accused rapists, and now their thoughts turned to the five young men arrested in connection with the Grice assault. Those prisoners were only forty miles south in Marietta, and even as people stood gawking at Edwards’s body, leaders of the mob waved men into cars boundfor the Marietta jail—where they hoped to do to Grant Smith and Toney Howell exactly what they’d just done to Rob Edwards.

    Charlie Hale, Lawrenceville, Georgia, 1911. Hale died twenty miles south of Cumming and, like Rob Edwards, was abducted from the local jail and hung from a telephone pole on the town square