Following the Color Line Part 26

_Character of the Negro Population_

About 40 per cent. of the population of the county consists of Negroes.

Here as elsewhere there are to be found two very distinct kinds of Negroes--as distinct as the cla.s.ses of white men. The first of these is the self-respecting, resident Negro. Sometimes he is a land-owner, more often a renter; he is known to the white people, employed by them, and trusted by them. In Statesboro, as in most of the South, a large proportion of the Negroes are of this better cla.s.s. On the other hand, one finds everywhere many of the so-called "worthless Negroes," perhaps a growing cla.s.s, who float from town to town, doing rough work, having no permanent place of abode, not known to the white population generally. The turpentine industry has brought many such Negroes to the neighbourhood of Statesboro. Living in the forest near the turpentine-stills, and usually ignorant and lazy, they and all their kind, both in the country districts and in the city, are doubly unfortunate in coming into contact chiefly with the poorer cla.s.s of white people, whom they often meet as industrial compet.i.tors.

_Danger from the Floating Negro_

In all the towns I visited, South as well as North, I found that this floating, worthless Negro caused most of the trouble. He prowls the roads by day and by night; he steals; he makes it unsafe for women to travel alone. Sometimes he has gone to school long enough to enable him to read a little and to write his name, enough education to make him hate the hard work of the fields and aspire to better things, without giving him the determination to earn them. He has little or no regard for the family relations or home life, and when he commits a crime or is tired of one locality, he sets out, unenc.u.mbered, to seek new fields, leaving his wife and children without the slightest compunction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAUL REED

WILL CATO

Negroes lynched by being burned alive at Statesboro, Georgia]

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEGROES OF THE CRIMINAL TYPE

Pictures taken in the Atlanta Jail

Will Johnson, arrested, charged with the Camp a.s.sault.

Lucius Frazier, who entered a home in the residence district of Atlanta.]

About six miles from the city of Statesboro lived Henry Hodges, a well-to-do planter. He had a good farm, he ran three ploughs, as they say in the cotton country, and rumour reported that he had money laid by.

Coming of an old family, he was widely related in Bullock County, and his friendliness and kindness had given him and his family a large circle of acquaintances. Family ties and friends.h.i.+ps, in old-settled communities like those in the South, are influences of much greater importance in fixing public opinion and deciding political and social questions than they are in the new and heterogeneous communities of the North.

The South is still, so far as the white population is concerned, a spa.r.s.ely settled country. The farmers often live far apart; the roads are none too good. The Hodges home was in a lonely place, the nearest neighbours being Negroes, nearly half a mile distant. No white people lived within three-quarters of a mile. Hodges had been brought up among Negroes, he employed them, he was kind to them. To one of the Negroes suspected of complicity in the subsequent murder, he had loaned his shot-gun; another, afterward lynched, called at his home the very night before the murder, intending then to rob him, and Hodges gave him a bottle of turpentine to cure a "snake-graze."

_Story of the Murder_

On the afternoon of July 29, 1904, Mr. Hodges drove to a neighbour's house to bring his nine-year-old girl home from school. No Southern white farmer, especially in thinly settled regions like Bulloch County, dares permit any woman or girl of his family to go out anywhere alone, for fear of the criminal Negro.

"You don't know and you can't know," a Georgian said to me, "what it means down here to live in constant fear lest your wife or daughter be attacked on the road, or even in her home. Many women in the city of Statesboro dare not go into their backyards after dark. Every white planter knows that there is always danger for his daughters to visit even the nearest neighbour, or for his wife to go to church without a man to protect her."

It is absolutely necessary to understand this point of view before one can form a true judgment upon conditions in the South.

When Hodges arrived at his home that night, it was already dark. The little girl ran to join her mother; the father drove to the barn. Two Negroes--perhaps more--met him there and beat his brains out with a stone and a buggy brace. Hearing the noise, Mrs. Hodges ran out with a lamp and set it on the gate-post. The Negroes crept up--as nearly as can be gathered from the contradictory stories and confessions--and murdered her there in her doorway with peculiar brutality. Many of the crimes committed by Negroes are marked with almost animal-like ferocity. Once aroused to murderous rage, the Negro does not stop with mere killing; he bruises and batters his victim out of all semblance to humanity. For the moment, under stress of pa.s.sion, he seems to revert wholly to savagery.

The Negroes went into the house and ransacked it for money. The little girl, who must have been terror-stricken beyond belief, hid behind a trunk; the two younger children, one a child of two years, the other a mere baby, lay on the bed. Finding no money, the Negroes returned to their homes. Here they evidently began to dread the consequences of their deed, for toward midnight they returned to the Hodges home. During all this time the little girl had been hiding there in darkness, with the bodies of her father and mother in the doorway. When the Negroes appeared, she either came out voluntarily, hoping that friends had arrived, or she was dragged out.

"Where's the money?" demanded the Negroes.

The child got out all she had, a precious five-cent piece, and offered it to them on condition that they would not hurt her. One of them seized her and beat her to death.

I make no excuse for telling these details; they _must be told_, else we shall not see the depths or the lengths of this problem.

_Burning of the Hodges Home_

The Negroes then dragged the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hodges into their home and set the house afire. As nearly as can be made out from the subsequent confessions, the two younger children were burned alive.

When the neighbours reached the scene of the crime, the house was wholly consumed, only the great end chimney left standing, and the lamp still burning on the gate-post.

Well, these Southerners are warm-hearted, home-loving people. Everybody knew and respected the Hodges--their friends in the church, their many relatives in the county--and the effect of this frightful crime described in all its details, may possibly be imagined by Northern people living quietly and peacefully in their homes. When two of the prominent citizens of the town told me, weeks afterward, of the death of the little girl, they could not keep back their tears.

The murder took place on Friday night; on Sat.u.r.day the Negroes, Paul Reed and Will Cato, were arrested with several other suspects, including two Negro preachers. Both Reed and Cato were of the illiterate cla.s.s; both had been turpentine workers, living in the forest, far from contact with white people. Cato was a floater from South Carolina. Reed was born in the county, but he was a good type of the worthless and densely ignorant Negro.

It is a somewhat common impression that a whole town loses itself in a pa.s.sion of anarchy, and is not satisfied until the criminals are killed.

But in spite of the terrible provocation and the intense feeling, there yet existed in Statesboro exactly such a feeling for the sacredness of law, such intelligent Americanism, as exists in your town or mine. Not within the present generation had a lynching taken place in the town, and the people were deeply concerned to preserve the honour and good name of their community. In the midst of intense excitement a meeting of good citizens, both white and black, was called in the court-house. It was presided over by J. A. Brannan, one of the foremost citizens. Speeches were made by Mayor Johnstone, by the ministers of the town, and by other citizens, including a Negro, all calling for good order and the calm and proper enforcement of the law.

_Attempts to Prevent the Lynching_

And the regular machinery of justice was put in motion with commendable rapidity. Fearing a lynching, the Negroes who had been arrested were sent to Savannah and there lodged in jail. A grand jury was immediately called, indictments were found, and in two weeks--the shortest possible time under the law--the Negroes were brought back from Savannah for trial. To protect them, two military companies, one from Statesboro, one from Savannah, were called out. The proof of guilt was absolutely conclusive, and, although the Negroes were given every advantage to which they were ent.i.tled under the law, several prominent attorneys having been appointed to defend them, they were promptly convicted and sentenced to be hanged.

In the meantime great excitement prevailed. The town was crowded for days with farmers who came flocking in from every direction. The crime was discussed and magnified; it was common talk that the "n.i.g.g.e.rs of Madison County are getting too bigoty"--that they wouldn't "keep their places."

Fuel was added to the flame by the common report that the murderers of the Hodges family were members of a Negro society known as the "Before Day Club," and wild stories were told of other murders that had been planned, the names of intended victims even being reported.

On the Sunday night before the trial, two Negro women, walking down the street are said to have crowded two respectable white girls off the sidewalk. A crowd dragged the women from a church where they had gone, took them to the outskirts of the town, whipped them both violently, and ordered them to leave the county.

"Let the law take its course," urged the good citizen. "The Negroes have been sentenced to be hanged, let them be hanged legally; we want no disgrace to fall on the town."

_How the Lynchers Themselves Defend a Lynching_

But as the trial progressed and the crowd increased, there were louder and louder expressions of the belief that hanging was too good for such a crime. I heard intelligent citizens argue that a Negro criminal, in order to be a hero in the eyes of his people, does not mind being hanged!

Another distinct feeling developed--a feeling that I found in other lynching towns: that somehow the courts and the law were not to be trusted to punish the criminals properly. Although Reed and Cato were sentenced to be hanged, the crowd argued that "the lawyers would get them off," that "the case would be appealed, and they would go free."

Members of the mob tried to get Sheriff Kendrick to promise not to remove the Negroes to Savannah, fearing that in some way they would be taken beyond the reach of justice.

In other words, there existed a deep-seated conviction that justice too often miscarried in Bulloch County and that murderers commonly escaped punishment through the delays and technicalities of the law.

_A Habit of Man-killing_

And there is, unfortunately, a foundation for this belief. In every lynching town I visited I made especial inquiry as to the prevalence of crime, particularly as to the degree of certainty of punishment for crime.

In all of them property is safe; laws looking to the protection of goods and chattels are executed with a fair degree of precision; for we are a business-wors.h.i.+pping people. But I was astounded by the extraordinary prevalence in all these lynching counties, North as well as South, of crimes of violence, especially homicide, accompanied in every case by a poor enforcement of the law. Bulloch County, with barely twenty-five thousand inhabitants, had thirty-two homicides in a little more than five years before the lynching--an annual average of one to every four thousand five hundred people (the average in the entire United States being one to nine thousand). Within eight months prior to the Hodges lynching, no fewer than ten persons (including the Hodges family) were murdered in Bulloch County. In twenty-eight years, notwithstanding the high rate of homicides, only three men, all Negroes, have been legally hanged, while four men--three Negroes and one white man--have been lynched.

It is well understood that if the murderer has friends or a little money to hire lawyers, he can, especially if he happens to be white, nearly always escape with a nominal punishment. These facts are widely known and generally commented upon. In his subsequent charge to the grand jury, Judge Daley said that the mob was due in part to "delays in the execution of law and to the people becoming impatient."

I am not telling these things with any idea of excusing or palliating the crime of lynching, but with the earnest intent of setting forth all the facts, so that we may understand just what the feelings and impulses of a lynching town really are, good as well as bad. Unless we diagnose the case accurately, we cannot hope to discover effective remedies.

_Psychology of the Mob_