LYNCHING: In Toombs

One night last week a man was standing in front of a drug store in Lyons, Ga. It was twilight, and this man, of middle age, strongly built, in a dark suit with a soft hat pulled over one eye, delayed a minute on the pavement in front of the drug store, smoking a cigar and looking at nothing at all, perhaps, but the dusk rising out of the ground, or perhaps at three touring cars, filled with men, which drew up across the street. The men got out of the cars. They knocked down the man with the cigar. There was no commotion. They threw him into the back seat of one of the cars and drove away.

Jellybeans† who observed this incident from the window of the drug store, discussed it with a bantering uneasiness. They knew the man—Wimberly E. Brown, an attorney. He had assisted at the prosecution of five men, allegedly members of a hooded gang who shot one Willie Wilson to death one night because he was supposed to have stolen some syrup. Attorney Brown did his best to have the men convicted of murder. They were all acquitted. Nobody in Toombs County cared to change shoes with Attorney Brown after that. Something would happen to him, sure, and what interested the jellybeans was merely the question of whether the men in the touring cars were the same men who murdered Willie Wilson. The murderers of Wilson were said to have been Klansmen, but whereas the men in the cars had flour bags over their heads and “K. K. K.” painted on their chests, everyone knew that that was not the Klan uniform.

The jellybeans waited. After about an hour there was a roar down the road and the cars reappeared. Nearing the drug store, one of them slowed down; a door opened, and the man they had taken away fell out onto the pavement. He was alive but he could not talk. His wrists were bitten where a rope had held them; his coat was gone, and across his back, under his shirt, showed the forked red ridges left by a flogging.

“Mobs with heads covered with flour sacks shall not rule Georgia. . . . If the regular processes of the courts fail to curb these outrages I will declare martial law. . . . $1,000 for the first conviction.” Thus Gov. Clifford M. Walker when he heard of the flogging of Mr. Brown.

To say that such hooded mobs rule Georgia is an exaggeration. To say that they rule Toombs County is almost true. For many months that county has been haunted by a horror. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, called the flogging of Lawyer Brown “an unspeakable outrage,” said that the perpetrators were “imitation Klansmen.” Well schooled to their role, the floggers could hardly have been told from authentic members. Recent reports tell of the following knockings on the doors of lonely houses in Toombs County:

W. T. Simon, carpenter, was warming a pan of broth in the kitchen of a frame house. His wife was sick upstairs; he had come home twice that day from work to give her food. He was expecting the doctor, and hearing a knock on the door he started forward. The sound of more than one pair of boots on the porch made him look out of the window. His yard was full of men. In long white robes they writhed with dismal laughter in the moonlight. They called to him “Come out, Simon.” ‘My wife’s sick,” he shouted through the window. A volley of revolver bullets spattered against the front door. Six men in white robes came after the bullets. They took Simon away and beat him.

Cliff Collins, farmer, went to bed early that night. His house, with every window dark, stood at the edge of some cottonwoods. His daughter, a thin girl of 20 who had cooked for him since his wife died, slept in the next room; his son slept downstairs with his boots on;; his dog slept in the woodshed.

Cars stopped in the road; the long white figures got out. “Come down Cliff,” hailed a voice. Stubborn and terrified, Farmer Collins would not open the door. The men broke it down. They took Mr. Collins off to the wood, and finding the trembling girl and the heavy eyed boy, took them along as well—flogged father, son and daughter.

Mrs. Beulah Lewis, widow, living alone, read the Atlanta Constitution until she got sleepy and then went up to bed, taking the cat with her. She was half undressed when the gentlemen in white began breaking down her front door. They roared when, having shot their way into the bedroom, the cat confronted them, licking nervous chops, on the top of a bedpost. One man fired from the hip; the cat tumbled off the post. The woman had fainted but they revived her. Then they stripped her, beat her unconscious.

Mrs. Ophelia Harrison was visited last May by a hooded company. Her way of living was not liked. They took her away in an automobile, stripped her, beat her until her body was livid with stripes, left her to walk home—six miles.

R. E. Smith, a storekeeper, heard the doorbell ring that night. He was taken away in a car and beaten with straps.

Willie Wilson stayed up late one night. He and his wife took turns walking up and down the floor with a sick baby. They heard automobiles stop in front of the house. Mr. Wilson got down his gun. Eight masked men came into the bedroom where the baby was wailing and Mr. Wilson was standing in the dark. They threw flashlight beams into his face and fired twice, killing him.

A Negro was visited a night later. Hooded men tied his hands and feet together; where his hands and feet came to a point behind his back they fastened another rope, took a turn around the rear axle of an automobile and started off at full speed down the road. The dragged body was torn beyond recognition. He had been accused of stealing turnip seed.

And the question is: are the men who flogged Lawyer Brown and these other Toombs County dwellers real or spurious Klansmen? Grand Dragon Forrest, of course, says they are not. He adds another $500 reward to Governor Walker’s $1,000 for the arrest and conviction of the leader of the floggers. Governor Walker, too, is a “proud and noble” Klansman. Hence, the reward offers of these two gentlemen may either be taken as gestures of righteous indignation or as a means of diverting suspicion from guilty fellow-Klansmen. Judge R. E. Hardeman of the Toombs circuit did not hush up such a suspicion when he told the press last week: “It is generally known that between 40 and 50 persons attired in official Ku Klux Klan regalia paraded through Lyons shortly before Brown was seized and hurried out of town. Brown himself stated to me that there was absolutely no doubt but that the mob members wore the official robes with official insignia.”

Georgia is often listed as the centre of the flogging and lynching belt; Atlanta is the home of the K.K.K.; many of the state’s politicians, from Governor Walker and Representative “Willie” Upshaw down, are Klansmen.

So much for lynch-floggings. Last week Robert R. Moton, head of Tuskegee Institute, published a report on lynch-killings. In 1925 there were 16 lynchings. In 1926 there were 29 lynchings. This is exclusive of a lynching which took place in Florida on Dec. 27. Some men with acetylene torches bored through the lock of the county jail at Waldo, Fla., found a Negro, George Buddington, 55, in the corner of a cell. A white woman had owed Buddington money for a long time, Recently, intoxicated, he tried to collect it with a pistol in his hand . . . “or something shiny, something that looked just like a pistol,” the woman declared whenshe had him arrested. The masked men took him several miles out of town and shot him to death.

†Southern small town loafers