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

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    SHERIFF REID EMERGED only once “the excitement” was over—when he could claim to have had no idea that Rob Edwards wasn’t still asleep in his cell. Having left Lummus in command, Reid could now shake his head and tell reporters he didn’t know who’dbroken down the jailhouse door, who’d fired the first shot, or how exactly his young deputy had failed to protect the prisoner. After learning that some of the lynchers were speeding out of town, Reid made a phone call to Judge Newt Morris in Marietta, warning him that “the mountaineers were threatening to come . . . and storm the jail there.” In response, Morris ordered Cobb County Sheriff J. H. Kincaid to move the Grice prisoners yet again, this time to the one jail in the area that could stop any mob: Atlanta’s Fulton Tower, where the night before Ernest Knox had been sent for safekeeping.
    In the end, the cars from Forsyth turned around just outside Marietta, when a local farmer told them that the Grice prisoners had already been transferred to the Tower. Pulling back into the Cumming square after dark, they rolled slowly past the splintered door frame that just a few hours before had been ripped to pieces with sledges and crowbars. On a corner near the courthouse, they passed the mutilated, almost unrecognizable corpse of Rob Edwards, still hanging from the yardarm of a telephone pole. A reporter for the Georgian took a last glance at the scene before heading back south to Atlanta. “[Edwards’s] body swings there to this hour,” he wrote, “riddled with bullets, dangling in the wind as a warning to frightened negroes, who are hurrying from the town.”
    As the last of the crowd drifted toward home, Reid ordered Lummus to cut Edwards down and drag him to the lawn of the Forsyth County Courthouse. There, the North Georgian said, “his body lay [out] all night, without a guard, and it was not touched.” The next morning, county coroner W. R. Barnett knelt over the stiff corpse, examining the lacerations on Edwards’s swollen neck, the hundreds of holes from bullets and buckshot, and the deep impact wounds in his skull. Barnett’s report concluded that the twenty-four-year-old black man had suffered multiple gunshots and blunt trauma to the head. Despite eyewitness accounts saying that “farmers known to all the countryside” had come “unmasked [and] threwoff all attempt at concealment,” Barnett wrote that Rob Edwards died at the hands of “parties unknown.”

    West Canton Street, Cumming, c. 1912
    In the days that followed, Georgia newspapers were quick to declare that the bloody ritual had been an end, not a beginning, to Forsyth’s “race trouble.” “The provocation of the people of Forsyth was great,” said the Cherokee Advance , “and they simply did what Anglo-Saxons have done North, South, East and West . . . where negroes have outraged white women. They formed a mob and took the law into their own hands.”
    The Atlanta Journal agreed that, as gruesome as the killing was, whites had now exhausted their rage and “no further trouble was expected” at Cumming. An editorial in the Gainesville Times went further, congratulating the white mobs of Forsyth for having done no worse, and for having lynched no more. “Two criminal assaults in one week wrought up the people to a high pitch,” the editors said, “[and] they controlled themselves with remarkable self-restraint.”

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    A STRAW IN THE WHIRLWIND
    W hile the public whipping of Grant Smith had put the entire black community on edge, the sight of Rob Edwards’s corpse hanging over the public square sent whole wagon trains of refugees out onto the roads of the county; they fled south toward Atlanta, east toward Gainesville, and west toward Canton. African Americans in Forsyth knew that nothing they said or did was likely to convince Bill Reid to pursue those who had murdered Rob Edwards. And if anyone still held out hope that, in the wake of the killing, whites might leave