February 10, 2025 • 64 mins
On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War.Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that it placed before a public self-satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before.By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political exposé, Hell Put to Shame also reintroduces three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely faced punishment for violence against their Black neighbors. The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full-on war against peonage. Johnson’s lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed Black man, conducted undercover work at the scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end. And Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the statehouse as a hero of white supremacists—then redeemed himself in spectacular fashion with the “Murder Farm” affair.This is a story that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in matters of race and justice. And the 1921 case at its heart argues that the forces that so roil society today have been with us for generations. Joining me to discuss his book, HELL PUT TO SHAME: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery—Earl Swift. Follow and comment on Facebook-TRUE MURDER: The Most Shocking Killers in True Crime History https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064697978510Check out TRUE MURDER PODCAST @ truemurderpodcast.com
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Good evening. On a Sunday morning in the spring of
nineteen twenty one, a small boy made a grim discovery
as he played on a riverbank in the Cotton Country
of rural Georgia. The bodies of two drowned men, bound
together with wire and chain and weighed with one hundred
pounds sack of rocks. Within days, a third body turned
(01:04):
up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that
followed eight others, and with them a deeper horror. All
eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths.
In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead
were among thousands of black men enslaved throughout the South
(01:25):
in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War.
Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that
mass killing and of the revelations about peonage or debt slavery,
that it placed before a public self satisfied that involuntary
(01:45):
servitude had ended at appomatics more than fifty years before.
By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political expose A
hell put to shame also reintroduces three Americans who spearheaded
the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner
(02:08):
behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely
faced punishment for violence against their black neighbours. The remarkable
polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first black leader
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
marshaled the organization into a full on war against peonage.
(02:34):
Johnson's lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light skinned, fair haired,
blue eyed black man, conducted under cover work at the
scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to
throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end.
And Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the State House
(02:56):
as a hero of white supremacists, then redeemed himself in
spectacular fashion with the Murder Farm affair. This is a
story that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as
the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in
matters of race and justice, and the nineteen twenty one
(03:20):
case at its heart argues that the forces that so
royal society today have been with us for generations. The
book that we're featuring this evening is Hell Put to Shame,
the nineteen twenty one Murder Farm massacre and the Horror
of America's Second Slavery, with my special guest, longtime journalist
(03:44):
and author, Earl Swift. Welcome to the program, and thank
you very much for this interview. Earl Swift, thank you
so much, and congratulations on this book, Hell Put to Shame.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Thank you. It's it's been a long time the making.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Now you write later in the book, but I think
it's important to go and do this in the beginning.
Back in two thousand and seven, you were looking at
some newspapers on microfilm for a book on American highways,
and you came upon a front page headline from March
(04:22):
twenty seventh, nineteen twenty one New York Times. Tell us
about that headline and what it was the impetus for
I'm not sure that it was that date, but it
was certainly that month. I was trolling through microfilm of
nineteen twenty one New York Times is because, as you say,
I was working in a book about the American highway
(04:42):
system and how it came to be. I was looking
for a three line brief that I knew was somewhere
in the paper that month about the Federally Highway Actress.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Nineteen twenty one. Not exactly exciting stuff, but it was
I needed to make a point in the in the
story that I was trying to tell about how overlooked
this incredibly important piece of legislation was, and so I
needed to find this little tiny brief tucked somewhere in
the bowels of the paper. And as I went day
by day through the microfilm, I kept on running into
(05:14):
these front page stories about this murder trial that was
under the investigation at first, and then later on trial
that was underway down in Georgia. The case involved a
word that I had never seen before, that being p andage,
And as I read, I realized, just from what was
(05:35):
said in these stories that P and H was the
word from which we get the word peon, and it
is a form of slavery that managed to endure after
appomatics in the Thirteenth Amendment for generations and well into
the twentieth century, pretty much up until and including World
(05:55):
War Two. Vestes even remained with us today. But this
murder case involved the wholesale slaughter of an entire workforce
on a plantation in World Georgia. And the more I read,
the more I wanted to read. And I abandoned my
research into the Federal Aid Highway Act of nineteen twenty
(06:16):
one for the day and just started reading one story
after another, you know, successive days stories, the coverage of this,
of this investigation, and then the trial of the suspect
in the case.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
You take us, as the reader to January nineteen twenty one,
two special agents at the US Department of Justice Bureau
of Instigation, the forerunner of today's FBI. You write, we're
working when a black man named Gus Chapman walked in.
Tell us what he told agents.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Gus Chapman told agents that he had been working in
Atlanta the previous year, in nineteen nineteen, and that he
had been picked up for vagrancy. Now, vagrancy was one
of a set of laws developed by Southern states after
the Civil War, aimed almost exclusively at their young black
(07:08):
male populations. You did not see white people being picked
up her vagrancy. And the definition of the term is,
of course, you have no money in your pocket or
no job. It doesn't matter whether you're looking for a job.
But you happen to get stopped when you're penniless and
looking for work. You're a vagrant and you're going to jail.
Gus Chapman had been picked up on this vagrancy charge.
(07:30):
He had been hit with a fine that he could
not pay, and so he was looking at six months
on the chain gang. And while he pondered this fate
in walk to farmer from Jasper County, forty miles southeast
of Atlanta. This farmer said, look, you know, things are
looking pretty bleak for you. The chain gangs no fun
(07:53):
at all. Why don't you let me pay your fine
and then you can come work out your sentence with me.
I'll put you to a work, work, and then when
you know you get to the end of your term,
I'll let you go. But in the meantime, you know
it'll be it'll be like a home to you. Now.
Gus Chapman, being a young he was thirty nine years
old at the time. A young black man in the
(08:13):
South had done almost exclusively agricultural work, so this was
pretty attractive to him. So he went off with this
farmer who turned out to be the son of a
plantation owner in Jasper County, and he found out that
its charms had been oversold pretty dramatically. He was kept imprisoned.
He was locked up at night with others in the
(08:37):
same boat, other young black men who had been bailed
out of local jails. He worked at the wrong end
of a shotgun barrel. He was beaten for any infraction
real or imagine, most of them imagined, and these were
beatings with whatever was handy, bridles, trace chains, of a
lot of the stuff that would be used to haul
(08:58):
wagons and carriages. He also told the agents that he
had witnessed the white overseers of this plantation murder some
of his fellow peons before his eyes.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
He had told of escaping this farm and then being returned,
and then finally escaping once again and making his way
to Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, this was his second second attempt to get away,
and this one succeeded. The first time. He was tracked
down by fellow by some of the plantations other workers
and using dogs, and they cornered him several miles away
from the plantation and brought him back. And had things
gone the way they usually did when a piano escape,
(09:45):
he would have he would have died right there. He
would have been he would have been murdered. But he
managed to beg his way out of that with the
assurance that if he tried it again, he'd be killed
like a snake.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
The agent's whismer Brown had spoken to another worker named
James Strickland. What was the information that they garnered from him?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Well, it dovetailed almost perfectly with Gus Chapman's information. Strickland
was another escape peon from the same plantation. This is
the john S Williams plantation in Jasper County, roughly eleven
hundred acres. And like Chapman, he had been, you know,
picked up on a trifling charge and bailed out of
jail by the Williams family, brought to the plantation and
(10:30):
then put to work as a slave. And the most
important element of being a peon, I should mention, is
that you know if your life was in the hands
of the plantation owner. There was very little record keeping.
The state didn't keep track of where you were after
you left their custody. You know, these peons would be
bailed out of the jail and they vanished into the
(10:53):
void as far as the state was concerned. So the
plantation owners were who used this system were breeded do
whatever they wanted, and they had very little, very little
financial incentive to treat their people well, to even keep
them alive. In the bad old days of chattel slavery,
a plantation owner at least had that he had a
(11:15):
financial incentive to care for his slaves insofar as he
had a big investment in them, and that investment group
from year to year, and so it made no sense
to kill a slave, you know, to beat him to
the point where he was he was crippled, because you
were hurting your own investment. Whereas a plantation owner in
(11:37):
the nineteen twenties who was getting peons out of the
local jail. Whereas a plantation owner who kept peons had
only the investment of the you know, the piddling find
that he had paid and so had very little skin
in the game. Really, when you get down to it
in terms of treating anyone with even a modicum of humanity.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
You write about the Bureau of Visiting driving to Jasper
County February eighteenth, nineteen twenty one, and they went to
the john S Williams home place three hundred and twenty
five acres. Primarily, Caughton tell us about that meeting and
what do they see and what do they learn?
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Well, the executive summary is that they were told by
john S Williams that what they had been, you know,
the information that they brought with them from these two
escape peons was nonsense. That he ran a happy place,
that his quote boys end quote all wanted to be there,
were treated well fed, well housed well, and the agents
(12:40):
could see from just looking around that the field hands
did in fact appear to be well nourished and well
clothed and whatnot. But when they went on a tour
of the property with Williams, they came upon a bunk
house that was locked from the outside, and they saw
other physical evidence that in the agg or get convinced them,
(13:01):
you know, this guy's he's running a peunage operation. Now
they realized after talking attempting to talk to some of
the peans that they none of these workers would say
a word. They were terrified of Williams. And so the
agents agents Wismar and Brown realized they were going to
have to figure out a way to get these these
(13:21):
field hands away from the boss so they could speak freely.
And until then their case was kind of with sky Meet.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Well, they did speak to some people on that farm
that day until and took them for questioning separately until
John Williams arrived back at the farm.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
I mean, they did not These were very rudimentary interviews.
These were done on the fly. They caught people as
they were in the middle of work. This was not
something that you build a case around. And frankly, they
gleaned very little information from talking to those three because
they liked the other. PI said, the agents try to
(14:01):
talk to you. We're terrified.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Now you're right about The investigation is stimied until four
weeks later after agents. After the agents visit, a young
boy discovers a body and tell us about this discovery.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah. Back, of course, the agents had visited on February eighteenth,
and they drove off with a lot of work ahead
of them if they wanted to build a case. And
so it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, and so
you know, this case fell into kind of slid of
the back burner in their minds. And then the weekend
a couple weeks before eastern March of nineteen twenty one,
(14:39):
young boy is playing under a bridge on the Yellow
River in neighboring Newton County. This is fourteen miles from
the Williams place by road, and he notices something odd
in the middle of the river, a foot sticking up
out of the water. So it goes and gets some neighbors.
They take a boat out that this foot belongs to
(15:01):
a young black man who is drowned in the water,
and he's tied with wire to another young black man
also in the water, also drowned. They dragged the bodies
to the shore. There before them are two field workers,
obviously by the way they're dressed and cover alls and whatnot,
who had been wired together, what wired, you know, their hands,
(15:25):
Their hands were tied behind their backs with wire and
then that wire was tied together so they were bound
to each other, and then wrapped around their necks was
a heavy chain, a trace chain, and tied to the
trace chain was a one hundred pounds sack of rocks.
So the you know, the local some in the sheriff,
(15:46):
who in turn some of the county coroner, the local
doctor who operated as the coroner, and a corner's inquest
took place right there in the river, and they determined
that these men, who were in their twenties if not younger,
had been alive when they hit the water, and that
they had been thrown off that bridge that the little
boy had been playing under. That bridge was called Allen's Bridge,
(16:08):
and it's between Monticello and Jasper County and Jackson, the
county seat of neighboring Butts County.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Now, this story hits the papers the next day, and
also those agents in Atlanta read about the story as well.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Well, it does hit the papers. You know. One of
the really intriguing things about this case. I would love
to be able to go back in time, Dan to
just to see how this worked. But you know, this
little boy made this discovery in the Yellow River in
the middle of nowhere, and it was the middle of
nowhere back in nineteen twenty one. It remains the middle
of nowhere. Now this is at the very far tip,
(16:48):
at the southern tip of Newton County and there's just
nothing around. People have some houses on the river, but
you know they're a long ways away. This is in
this is the back of beyond. And within no time
at all after this discovery was made, two hundred people
had gathered on the riverbank. That's how many people watch
(17:11):
the Carner's inquest when it took place. And it just
boggles my mind to think that it with the communications
such as they were at the time, you know that
that a crowd like that would materialize almost instantly, you know,
at this tiny rural bridge over a over a river
that nobody gave much thought to.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
You're right that there was an occurrence in this Jasper
County in October nineteen nineteen, tell us about this incident.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
But Jasper County had a mixed reputation in terms of
racial harmony. The you know, there was a real divide
between Newton County where these bodies have been discovered in Jasper,
Jasper being almost viewed almost as like kind of a
Timbuctou of Georgia, just a place beyond civilization. That wasn't
(18:09):
helped when in October of nineteen nineteen, a school teacher
and part time preacher was lynched in Jasper. He certainly
wasn't the first lynching there, but that was unsolved at
the time that this case came to be.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
This Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Now tell us what happens. After the agents discovered that
there was more bodies thrown into the river.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
There was a third body that was discovered in the
water and a neighboring river, the South River. Man's bridge
crossing that river was about a mile away, And so
once that happened, you know, the general realization in the
state was that this, you know, the double murder in
the and the Yellow River, had not been a one off.
(19:04):
That there was something going on here. Somebody was getting
rid of these young black men. So eventually this story
wound up on the desks of agent Squismar and Brown,
who instantly saw that these bodies have been recovered from
waterways that were in the neighborhood of the john S
(19:25):
Williams Plantation in neighboring Jasper County, And they took a
trip down and found that a lot of the black
faces that they'd seen on the plantation on their first
visit appeared to be missing now to their horror, horror
realized that they may have inadvertently kicked off, kicked off
(19:46):
these deaths.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
So tell us about the rule of Governor Hugh Dorsey
in this investigation and this case.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Well, Hugh Dorsey was an international pariah when he became
governor of Georgia in nineteen seventeen. He had been the
lead prosecutor in the Leo Frank case of four years before,
and that's generally remembered as a great miscarriage of justice
in which the Jewish manager of a local pencil company
(20:20):
was put on trial for the murder and rape of
a young girl, thirteen year old girl who worked for him,
despite strong evidence that he had nothing to do with
the with her death, and in fact, despite the fact
that the state's main witness against him was most likely
the killer. In the course of getting the conviction, Dorsey
(20:43):
pulled every dirty trick in the book and debased himself
as a lawyer pretty dramatically, but was heralded as the
protector of white womanhood in the Georgia of the day
and swept into office and then one reelection in nineteen
eighteen for another two year term, and was approaching the
(21:06):
end of his second term when these events unfolded, and
you know, when the agents put two and two together
and realized that John S. Williams might have something to
do with the you know, with the appearance of these
bodies and local rivers. They also realized that Jasper County
and Newton Counties might be incapable of adequately bringing a
(21:29):
case against him. For one thing, he was cousins with
the sheriff, he had done business with the local prosecutor.
You know, there were conflicts of interest all over the place.
And layered on top of that was the fact that
he was the richest man in Jasper County by reputation
at least, and one of its largest landowners, you know,
a pillar of the community, a pillar of his church,
(21:52):
a major donor to every public cause. So this guy
was a first citizen. And so the agents worried that
these kindies were just not going to be able to
put together the political wherewithal to make a case happen,
and so they went to Hugh Dorsey. Now they knew,
of course, everybody knew Dorsey's past, and you know, the
(22:13):
fact that he had participated in what's viewed as the
worst case of judicial anti semitism in American history, didn't
you know, left them with a strong impression that he
was no friend to minorities, And he surprised them once
they described the story to him, told him what was
(22:33):
going on. He promised to devote the entire weight of
the state behind the prosecution and pretty much commandeered the
state's case against Johns Williams at that point. Now he
was former prosecutor. He knew what he was doing and
did it very well.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Who are a couple of the other people that are
important in this story in terms of getting this investigation
under way? You write about James Weldon Johnson well.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
As Dorsey began strategizing with the prosecutors and investigators working
in the case down down south. Of course, he was
in Atlanta. The case began to attract the attention of
folks elsewhere, and one of the people who paid close
attention to what was happening in Georgia was a New
(23:26):
Yorker named James Weldon Johnson, the first black leader of
the NAACP. Johnson is one of those amazing polymaths that
every American how to know about. And I'm embarrassed to
say that before I started working on this book, and
I did not know who he was. I would not
(23:47):
have recognized his name, right. I hang my head in
shame for that, because now that I know who he was,
it's impossible. It seems to me that I could have
lived so long without knowing. But anyway, he was this
remarkable black man born in Florida. He created the first
(24:08):
black high school in his state. He became the first
black person admitted to the Florida Bar. He became a
celebrated poet. He was a memoirist, a novelist. He was
a founding spirit behind the Harlem Renaissance. He and his
brother were best selling songwriters. They wrote two hundred songs
(24:32):
for the Broadway stage and had a number of really
big hits, international hits. He wrote lift every Voice and
sing since you Know, ever since labeled the black national anthem.
He was just a phenomenal, even the force of nature.
He could do it anything he put his mind to.
(24:52):
He succeeded at and he was also an early member
black member of the US Foreign Service. He served as
a consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Then he became a
columnist for The New York Age, which was Weekly, one
of the biggest black newspapers, certainly one of the most
influential in the country, and it was as a columnist
for the Age that he caught the attention of the
(25:15):
NAACP's leadership, the board of which was almost entirely white.
And we forget that the NAACP was largely founded by
by whites. The only black person directly involved in its
founding was W. E. B. Du Bois. Johnson came on
board with the organization in the mid teens as its
(25:36):
field secretary, which was basically a recruiting position, and he
put the end in the NAACP. He made it a
truly national organization and grew it from a few thousand
to several hundred thousand over the course of his five
years or so as his field secretary. And then eventually,
after the previous secretary was attacked on a visit to Austin,
(25:58):
Texas and beaten almost to death, Johnson was elevated to
the UH, the executive secretary position, which is basically the
seat the chief operating officer at the organization.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
He had written that next to lynching, there was no
greater cause of unrest than this vicious system of p
and Age.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, he sure did. A uh, and it had been
you know, P and H. One of the one of
the frustrations for the NAACP, which had recognized the evils
of p Andage of course since since its founding, was it.
It's it's a difficult crime to get your to get
a hold of, you know, to to recognize for one thing,
(26:42):
because it's subtle. You know, you're you're in the employee
of of your enslaver. On paper, it appears to be
just an kind of an employment contract, but it's anything but.
And you know, it's it unfolds what the complicity of
local law enforcement. So you know, it's it's difficult to
(27:06):
get cases identified as P and H because some of
the co defendants would be the law. It was hard
to put a face on the crime. And I think
that one of the things that immediately appealed in the
NAACP about getting involved in this case was this put
(27:27):
a public face not only on the victims, but on
the perpetry, you know, the alleged perpetrator. Because as time
was going on, it was becoming more and more apparent
that John S Williams at the very least knew about
the fact that these three bodies had wound up in
local rivers and might have had a bigger part to
(27:49):
play than just knowing about it. And then in the
next few days it became clear that there were a
lot more than three three victims, that in fact, there
were at least eleven peons who had had been murdered
just since the agents visit on February eighteen, and that
(28:10):
there might have been other killings on the plantation that
preceded those.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
One of the most disturbing elements of this book is
when you write about lynchings learned about in Memphis, and
then you have some of the descriptions of some of
these lynchings, just to demonstrate that the societal attitude of
that's at that time to pee and age, but just
to lynchings itself, Well, we.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Have a species. I guess we're a hell of a
lot more cold blooded a century ago than we are today.
I think maybe that's just wishful thinking, you know. I
introduced the subject of lynching not only to set the context.
You established the context for this pe andage case, but
also to describe the background of another person who was
(29:05):
involved in bringing this case from turning this case from
a local you know, the case of local interest into
a national cause, and that was James Weldon Johnson's protege
and assistant, a black man named Walter F. White. Walter
White was the NAACP's secret weapon in that he had
(29:31):
alabaster white skin. I mean, the guy you would never
have guessed in a million years that he was. He
was a black man. He had blue eyes, he had
blonde hair, he you know, had kind of an aquiline nose.
He by all appearances was yeah, you know, it was aryan,
(29:51):
but he was. He was. He was black. He was
because he could pass for white. He was just the
scenes of lynchings and race riots, white on black race riots,
which were shockingly common at the time. And he could
insinuate himself into a white crowd of perpetrators and get
(30:16):
the names of everybody who had been involved in the lynchings, say,
and then turn them over to the authorities. And it
being the South of nineteen, you know, in the late
teens and early twenties, none of this ever led to
any actual prosecutions. He'd turn over his reports and then
(30:38):
walk out of the office of whatever law enforcement official
he was dealing with them and that was the end
of his influence right there when he left the office.
But he was a remarkable figure and had a lot
of really close calls, terrifyingly close calls. So he was
on the scene investigating the lynchings many of the limp
(31:00):
changes that I mentioned. Of course, the absolute worst was
on Hugh Dorsey's watch in Georgia, and that was the
lynching outbreak that occurred in May of nineteen eighteen down
in the far south of the state, down on the
Florida border. The Mary Turner lynching specifically. You know, I
(31:21):
don't want to get into it here lest it disturb
your listeners too much. Yes, but the Mary Turner lynching,
I think is, you know, every lynching was an act
of such shocking brutality that it's difficult to understand today.
But the Marry Turner lynching takes that to a completely
(31:43):
new level. I can't even think about it without without squirmings.
It's just awful.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
The esus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
Just in.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Continuing for a second, the attitude that seemed to be
excusing the lynching publicly in newspapers. Could you just tell
us how they sort of excused lynching.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Well, I mean, newspapers in the South were part of
the you know, in many cases, not all, but in
many cases, and this was true, especially of small newspapers
in small communities. They're part of the problem, you know there,
they're editors, were part of the leadership of whatever town
they were in. You know, this notion that you can't
(32:31):
have any friends as a newspaper editor had had really
not taken hold there. And so the you know what
you saw in the case, for instance, after Mary Turner's lynching,
rather than to cry the fact that this young woman
had been brutalized, rather than to cry the fact that
there had been a full on atrocity in their community,
(32:55):
the newspapers down that way talked about how she had
a big mouth and should have kept it shut. You know,
her husband what got Mary Turner killed was that her
husband fell victim, was one of the victims of this
lynching outbreak that happened in Lowndes County on the Florida line.
(33:18):
When she found out her husband had been lynched, Mary
brief stricken furious, announced that if she found out who
was responsible, she was going to sik the law on them.
And the folks who had killed her husband decided to
teach her a lesson. And that was kind of the
(33:38):
gist of the newspaper coverage was the Yeah, the people
took exception to her.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Remarks in this investigation of john S Williams. How do
agents go about trying to determine the truth. They have
to have a witness, So how do they go about
trying to get a witness for this prosecution?
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Well, I mean they what the what the agents and
the local Newton County sheriff. The sheriff's name in Newton County,
by the way, was Johnson, Just to confuse things further there,
In fact, there there was a surfeit of Johnson's in
this story. So you have you really need a scorecard
if you don't use first names. What the investors did
(34:27):
that really cracked things open was interview some of the
non peons black farm hands who worked on this plantation.
And there were there were two classes of black worker
on the john S Williams plant plantation. In the room,
there was a there were a couple of families that
were interconnected in through marriage and childbirth and whatnot, cousins
(34:51):
to each other. Generally, the Freeman's and the Mannings and
uh and they they comprised the bulk of the workforce,
and and the Williamses would augment that standing force with
additional labor from local jails. That's where the peons came in.
And so they rounded up some of these family members
(35:12):
who actually lived on the farm, had been part of
the continuing, you know, continuing life at the plantation. And
one of those family members was a young field boss
named Clyde Manning who was twenty seven years old at
the time. After a lengthy interview that went into the
wee hours, Clyde Manning eventually fessed up that John S
(35:37):
Williams was involved in these killings and that he Clyde Manning,
had been coerced into helping him with all but one
of them. Things started moving at a gallop after that,
and what you wound up with was a prominent white
citizen being arrested and put on trial solely on the
(36:03):
testimony of his black workers. And that just did not
happen in the Georgia of nineteen twenty one. It was
unthinkable that it would happen. That's, you know, thanks to
Hugh Dorsey now being involved in the prosecution and pushing
it along from Atlanta thanks to the national pressure that
was created by James Weldon Johnson and Walter White and
(36:25):
others at the NAACPN and you know, and in the press,
it happened.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
These people had stayed under the thumb of john S
Williams and his sons for years. Some of these people,
how were they convinced that they would be protected from
We just talked about lynch mobs and thirty two hundred
died at the hand of lynch mobs. So how did
they profess to protect these people that were going to
(36:56):
be a witness?
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Well, you know, I think you have to take yourself
back to nineteen twenty one. I recognized that that the
black population of the South wasn't accustomed to having white
people promised them, guarantee them anything. They're almost there. Every
transaction with whites ended up badly. You know, the whites
demonstrated that they could not be trusted in a business arrangement.
(37:20):
You know, they for instance, the whole business arrangement that
turned they turned men into peance. So I'm not sure
that the witnesses in this case went into that role
convinced that they would be protected I do think that
they recognized that here was a rare, all or nothing
(37:45):
opportunity to get out of the hell that they were living.
You know that that basically said, you know, mister Johnny
john S Williams, you know, we either testify against him
or eventually we wind up the same way these pians did.
Because the state was so energized about the prosecution. I
(38:09):
think they probably were just convinced that this was their
best shot to get justice and to put together lives
that might not have been decent by any modern standards,
but at least didn't have the specter of death hanging
overhead every single day.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
You write about the material witnesses at this trial and
for their protection they were locked up for the two months,
and their treatment was criticized by the newspapers. But you
write about how they felt about.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
This, well, yeah, I mean it was standard operating procedure
at the time that you locked witnesses up in a
criminal case of this stature, and that often went to
white witnesses as well. It was always the case with
black witnesses, and and and frankly it was for safe keeping.
(39:04):
I mean, the the I don't think officials and was
worried about the witnesses fleeing. They were worried about someone
getting to the witnesses and doing them harm. And that
was a real, a very real and justified worry. So
what you what you saw was that uh, you know
the uh the witnesses when they when they were rounded
(39:25):
up and putting the uh the tower which was what
the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta was was nicknamed, and
it looked like a medieval fortress. You saw these these
folks getting ah, you know, a per diem, which witnesses did,
and you saw them getting fed in the jail. And
the Atlanta newspaper just found that to be scandalous. These
(39:47):
people were living high on the hog, better than they
had any right to expect, and it was all the
taxpayers expense. Shocking, you know, for a newspaper that was
generally pretty dog on progressive for its day. This was
a shocking failure, slip up by the Atlanta Constitution. But yeah,
(40:07):
they complained about.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
It that Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Hugh Dorsey writes something called the Negro in Georgia.
Tell us about what he writes in this Negro in
Georgia and the backlash afterwards.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Well, of course, the trial, the trial amazes everyone. It's
just it is not something one expects in the Georgia
of nineteen twenty one to see this case actually make
it a trial. But it does actually goes to trial
three times. There are three separate trials and popping you know,
that are tied up with this this mass murder case.
(40:50):
And it's important to note that in all three trials
there is only you know, only one murder of the
eleven that is actually being prosecuted. Hugh Dorsey's plan originally
because he anticipated that there would be trouble getting a conviction.
Hugh Dorsey's plan was that the state would go after
(41:10):
John S Williams and any other defendant who cropped up
on one murder, in particular the murder of Lindsay Peterson,
one of the two black men who was pulled from
the Yellow River after the little Boy made that Sunday
morning discovery in March of twenty one. This is about
April of twenty one, and Dorsey. Dorsey's strategy is they'll
(41:31):
go hard on that case, they'll try to get a conviction.
They can rest assured that there's going to be an appeal.
While it's under appeal, they'll try them on a second,
second murder. While that's under appeal, they'll try them on
a third, and they'll go through all eleven until they
get what they're looking for, which is to get John
s Williams behind bars at the very least and at
(41:52):
the end of a rope, preferably. And I don't want
to give away how the case turns out. It's surprising
number of ways. And Dorsey, emboldened by his role in
this case and shocked and appalled by the details that
(42:14):
have emerged during the investigation into how these these peons
were treated, decides he's going to yeah, he's kind of
continue what he started, and he publishes a pamphlet called
a Statement by Governor Hugh M. Dorsey as to the
State of the Negro in Georgia, usually shortened to either
(42:37):
Negro in Georgia or the Statement, And in the statement,
Dorsey enumerates one hundred and thirty five crimes against black
Georgians that have occurred just in the last couple of years,
just you know, during his term in office, certainly, but
mostly in his second term. These are divided into into
four categories, ranging from outright murder to property crimes to
(43:03):
just needless cruelties that had just you know, had been
perpetrated on black citizens repeatedly over the years. Presents this
this pamphlet as a speech initially in late April of
nineteen twenty one April twenty second at a hotel with
a with a group of prominent Georgia's citizens as his audience.
(43:25):
He's invited them there specifically to hear this statement, and
then creates an organization kind of a racial reconciliation council
of this audience after he's completed reading it. And at
first the statement is welcomed by the press and the
(43:46):
public as an incredibly courageous, painfully truthful document, But it
doesn't take long for that to shift and for Dorsey
to be completely destroyed. He was any any ambitions he
might have had for further public office, not that I
(44:06):
know that he had any it. I think he was
pretty much done after he was governor. We're erased, he
was all but impeached, managed to get through the remaining
few weeks of his term without that. But had they
had any extra time, I think that the people of
Georgia would have impeached him. They were incensed by the statement.
(44:32):
And you read it now and it's it's so surprisingly progressive,
so straightforward in its language. He said in the in
the pamphlet, we stand of people indicted, you know, and
if we don't change our ways, we're going to go
down in history looking no better than King Leopold of Belgium.
(44:55):
You know, it was responsible for the congoists atrocities, and
you know, that was the sort of thing that you
did not expect to see then, but you don't expect
to see it now either. This was really strong stuff,
really amazing. At least partly because of that statement, Dorsey
was all but written out of Georgia history. Good luck
(45:17):
trying to find much about him. He's he's been erased.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
You write about Clyde Manning, who ends up being the
witness at the trial, but also that he had a
trial of his own. We won't get into that at
this point, but interestingly, Clyde Manning is tried as well
as John S Williams, but Clyde Manning has his own trial.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Well. Clyde Manning was a member of one of the
two families who lived on the Williams plantation and were
not Peans. He was at least the second generation of
his family to live there. Well, he moved there with
his parents. You know, all indications was a smart, reasonable
guy who found himself in an impossible position with Williams
(46:10):
basically telling him, look, you either helped me kill all
of the rest of the workforce your friends, or I
kill you. You know. He became the state's chief witness against
john S Williams and was extremely effective in that role.
And then the state, it being Georgia nineteen twenty one,
(46:30):
couldn't very well put a white man on trial for
a crime and not try the black man who assisted him,
So they put Manning on trial and then actually put
him on trial a second time after that. You know,
it's really interesting when you look at the transcripts of
(46:51):
the Manning sessions, it's pretty clear that the witnesses, the
white witnesses at Clyde Manning's trial, who had gotten to
know Clyde Manning very well during the Chinas Williams trial,
white whennesses were very sympathetic to his situation, really did
(47:12):
from the stand what they could to impress upon the
jury that this was an honorable man ensnared in a
web that he could not escape.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
How does this case change the fortunes or continue the
fortunes of NACP, And how does the case how's the
case seen a few years later?
Speaker 3 (47:40):
I think that the NAACP certainly got a lot of
valuable information about pe andage out of this prosecution, and
it would be going too far to say that this
case ended the practice. But I think that it would
be fair to say that the Williams case blew pe
(48:02):
andage into the public eye in such a dramatic and
noisy fashion that it marked the beginning at the end
of the practice, or the end of it limped along.
Pe andage kind of lurched along for another twenty years
(48:23):
after this case, but at a much reduced level. You
never saw law enforcement has involved as complicit in its operation.
The kind of pe andage that you saw practiced, I
think most regularly after this case did not involve law
enforcement at all. You did not see people bailing prospective
peons out of jail anymore. What you saw was pe
(48:46):
andage baked in to the tenant farming situation. Sharecropping. If
it worked the way it was supposed to, a sharecropper
worked a piece of land in exchange for a place
to live on that land and the tools with which
to do the work, and in exchange for half of
the proceeds for many crops that he grows, and he
(49:10):
splits that those proceeds with his landlord, who supplies him
with the stuff he'll need, including his own to work
this land on his behalf. Well that's you know, if
it works the way it's supposed to, you have an
owner who is on the up and up. You see
that split of proceeds conducted fairly. And one of the
(49:35):
challenges for any sharecroppers that, of course he gets paid
his half of the proceeds at the end of the
year at harvest, you know, after the crop is sold. Well,
he's got to live for the entire year to get
to that point. So the owner in a sharecropping arrangement
would either loan him the money to get supplies food
(49:58):
and whatnot, food, tools, whatever he needed, or would have
an arrangement with a local storekeeper who would know that okay,
when this particular sharecropper comes in, I know it goes
on so and so's account. The problem was that there
were very few or there was no guarantee that the
(50:21):
white landowner was going to be honorable at all. The
expectation was that at least in party would not be.
What you saw it happen was that he did not
split the proceeds at the end of the year fairly
with his tenant. He took eighty and gave the tenant twenty.
Whatever it was, it was not an even split. And
you also saw him overcharge for the supplies that he'd
(50:45):
given that sharecropper throughout the year on the way to
that harvest. And so the sharecropper often hit with with
these two you know, digs into his income, often went
end of the year owing his landlord money instead of
actually getting a payday. And he wasn't could leave because
(51:09):
it was illegally Georgia for him a not to have
a job and b to leave a job, to leave
his his employers. You know, this contract that he had
for this this sharecropping without the other side's permission. And
certainly if he tried to leave while he owed his
white landlord money, big trouble. So you saw pe andage
(51:33):
continue for another generation or two in a much more
subtle fashion. But eventually, you know, World War World War
two brought a lot of mechanization to agriculture, and once
you removed the need for a huge labor force, you
removed the need for P and H.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
You talk about the legacy of D andage, but also
the legacy of future lynching or lynching. What was done
in that effort to end lynching.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Well, it didn't, you know, Needless to say, lynching did
not stop in nineteen twenty one. I think that some
of the horrors of this case bled over into a
lot of second thinking about lynching, about that entire practice.
Of course, lynching had you know, what we tend to
think of of the South and of racial strife of
(52:35):
the past in kind of hall black and white part
of the terms. You know that these were not whites
and blacks respectively, did not move as monoliths. So you know,
not every white was a cracker, and not every black
was a victim, and and but you know what you
(52:58):
saw after, you know, in the nineteen twenties was kind
of a gradual dissipation of the lynching practice in Georgia. Certainly,
not always, not elsewhere through the South necessarily, but by
the late twenties lynching had had fallen off dramatically in Georgia,
(53:21):
and by the early thirties, Georgia was no longer the
lynching capital of the South as it had been since
day one. Pretty much Mississippi had taken over that that
position and continues to hold it today. You know, I
wish I could say Dan that we as a species
(53:44):
became better with time. But the fact is lynching still happens.
You know, it's happened. It's happened periodically over the years,
you know, since since World War Two, you know, and
there's a lot of disagreement over the actual definition of lynching.
(54:06):
You know it when you see it, and it's still
happening on rare occasion.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
You read at the end of this book that you
visited Williams john S Williams home place in twenty twenty
one with his story in Timothy Pitts tell us a
little bit about this visit. Well.
Speaker 3 (54:28):
Tim Pitts was at the time a professor at West
Georgia University in Rome, and he had done his master's
thesis on the Williams case and had also spent a
(54:48):
lot of time researching Q. Dorsey in the effects of
the statement. So I was very interested in talking to
Tim right from the beginning of working on this project
and we hit it off, and on one of my
many trips down to Georgia, he and I convened in
Jasper County outside the courthouse. You've seen the courthouse if
you're a movie fan. It was where my cousin Benny
(55:11):
was filmed. All the all the exterior shots of town
are outside of the Jasper County Courthouse. Mano Cello. Anyway, the
one of the things we wanted to do was figure
out where the Williams family farm was, because it's it's
surprisingly hard to pinpoint it based on the newspaper coverage
(55:32):
at the time. There's nothing in the official documentation from
from the case that pinpoints it, and it's it's really
pretty amazing how so many reporters were writing about this
case at the time and none of them felt it necessary.
And this could be because they're writing for audiences in
(55:54):
New York and you know, far flung locations that wouldn't
know Jasper County geography anyway, But none of them thought
to mention where the heck this place was, and it
was a big chunk of land. So Tim and I
went looking for it.
Speaker 4 (56:08):
I had found a nineteen oh nine map of the
county that had been annotated with the names of landowners,
and john S Williams is right there on this there's
a road in Jasper County.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
Remains dirt today, follows exactly the same footprint that it
did in nineteen twenty one, And in fact, most of
Jasper County you could overlay a map of today over
the nineteen twenty one map and there'd be very little difference.
We headed out to this Cook Road and figured out
(56:43):
where the home place was. From that now, Johns Williams
his plantation was divided into two big chunks. You had
a three hundred and twenty five acre home place, which
was kind of in central Jasper County, seven miles from
the county seat. And then the bull of the property,
more than seven hundred and fifty acres, was over by
(57:04):
Jackson Lake, which forms the western border of the county.
It's a giant reservoir created in nineteen eleven, and Williams
had bought a bunch of property there immediately after the
lake was created. And those acres are the pieces of
the property that has three grown suns managed for him,
(57:27):
and that's where most of the the actual agriculture took place.
You know, it was just a big contiguous piece of property.
So anyway, Tim and I, you know, we we traveled
up Cook Road and you know, just couldn't see much
(57:48):
from the road of this property at all. Now, I
later spent a lot of time in the courthouse later
on that same visit and was able to trace the
deeds for the farm and figure at exactly where it
was both pieces of property, and in fact him and
I had been in the right place. We had been
looking exactly where the home place was. But I now
(58:11):
had the shape of these tracts that john S Williams owned,
and because I was able to trace the deeds forward
to the current ownership, I could figure out exactly where
these places were. So I was able to go to
the lakeside properties, which are mostly now enclosed by a
big upscale subdivision called Turtle Cove, able to go there
(58:36):
and pretty much get the lay of land, figure out
where things were, and figure out that, for instance, the
clubhouse of a nine hole golf course on the property
is really close, if not right on the spot where
one of john S Williams's sons had his place, and
that the agents visited during their their stop in February
(58:56):
of nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
So looking for a cemetery, did you find one?
Speaker 3 (59:04):
Well, all eleven victims in this case were buried publicly.
You know, these are folks that were not missed by
society at large as shocking and wrong is that is?
And yeah, frankly, the state of technology at the point
(59:27):
in terms of keeping keeping bodies after their discovery was
pretty rustic, and so they had to be put in
the ground quickly. So after they were recovered from the
Williams property, eight of the bodies were planted in a
(59:48):
Popper cemetery that was outside the county work farm. Later on,
the three folks who had been pulled from the rivers
in Newton County, there's a pretty strong likelihood that they
also wound up in the Jasper County Paupers pharm although
initially they were just buried in the river bank right
(01:00:10):
right on the you know, the sides of the Yellow
and South Rivers. So you're looking for eight to eleven
bodies that were buried in this Poppers cemetery. And I
knew that they were in an unmarked grave, but I
wanted to go and pay my respects and found out,
to my surprise, the county has kind of lost the
entire cemetery. And this didn't just you know, contain these
(01:00:33):
eleven graves or eight graves. They it contained all of
the you know, the bodies of folks who had died
as indigens going back for years. Any stranger to the
county who died during a visit wound up in that
cemetery as well. So I mean there were there were
probably a couple dozen at least who were buried there.
(01:00:54):
And that cemetery is gone without a trace. I can
tell you where it was, but I couldn't find it
when I went looking for it. You know, the County
work Farm is now a piece of property that's split
between the Sheriff's Department, a senior center, animal control, the
Department of Public Works for Jasper County, and then at
(01:01:16):
the back a big landfill. And there are very few
pieces of that property that haven't been completely reworked over
the years. I went looking, I searched, I did a
grid search of a forest that's on the property, found
nothing that resembled a cemetery at all. I studied aerial
photos that went back to world just after World War
(01:01:38):
two found no indication. You know, once you dig a hole,
it shows up in aerial photos. You know, for the
rest of time, there was nothing that hinted at a
cemetery in any of these aerial photos. And then I
asked the Sheriff of Jasper County, Donny Pope, who was
(01:02:00):
incredibly gracious in his dealings with me. I asked if
he'd help by investigating this one piece of property behind
the Senior Center that I hadn't been able to get
a good beat on how it had been used over
the years. And so he did a grid search with
inmates from the county jail and looking for some signs,
some physical clue that there were graves on this little
(01:02:24):
piece of property I was asking about. He couldn't find any.
So we you know, I don't know where these bodies are.
You know, if the county ever decides that they want
to put up a monument to the victims, they're going
to have a hard time doing it where they're buried.
Because I was able to find no one inefficiently and
(01:02:46):
no document in the county's possession that told me where
these bodies were.
Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
I want to thank you, Earl Swift for coming on
and talking about this incredible story or readers to you
have chronicle this extraordinary case, all the testimony, so for
readers to discover. I also want to ask for people
that might be interested in this story to read it further.
(01:03:16):
Do you have a website and do any social media?
Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Yeah? I do a little bit of social media, but
not much, Dan. My website's Earl Swift all one word
dot com and I'm on Facebook and I'm on Instagram
under my name. Yeah. I mean, if anybody wants to
reach me, Earlswift dot com has a contact a portal
built into it, and I promise it may take me
(01:03:40):
a while, but I answer every email I get.
Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Thank you so much, help put the shame the nineteen
twenty one murder farm massacre and the horror of Americans
second slavery. Thank you so much for this interview Earl Swift.
Thank you, and good night, and thank you. Thank you,
You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
killers in true crime history and the authors that have
written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
(00:30):
journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Good evening. On a Sunday morning in the spring of
nineteen twenty one, a small boy made a grim discovery
as he played on a riverbank in the Cotton Country
of rural Georgia. The bodies of two drowned men, bound
together with wire and chain and weighed with one hundred
pounds sack of rocks. Within days, a third body turned
(01:04):
up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that
followed eight others, and with them a deeper horror. All
eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths.
In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead
were among thousands of black men enslaved throughout the South
(01:25):
in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War.
Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that
mass killing and of the revelations about peonage or debt slavery,
that it placed before a public self satisfied that involuntary
(01:45):
servitude had ended at appomatics more than fifty years before.
By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political expose A
hell put to shame also reintroduces three Americans who spearheaded
the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner
(02:08):
behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely
faced punishment for violence against their black neighbours. The remarkable
polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first black leader
of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
marshaled the organization into a full on war against peonage.
(02:34):
Johnson's lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light skinned, fair haired,
blue eyed black man, conducted under cover work at the
scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to
throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end.
And Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the State House
(02:56):
as a hero of white supremacists, then redeemed himself in
spectacular fashion with the Murder Farm affair. This is a
story that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as
the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in
matters of race and justice, and the nineteen twenty one
(03:20):
case at its heart argues that the forces that so
royal society today have been with us for generations. The
book that we're featuring this evening is Hell Put to Shame,
the nineteen twenty one Murder Farm massacre and the Horror
of America's Second Slavery, with my special guest, longtime journalist
(03:44):
and author, Earl Swift. Welcome to the program, and thank
you very much for this interview. Earl Swift, thank you
so much, and congratulations on this book, Hell Put to Shame.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Thank you. It's it's been a long time the making.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Now you write later in the book, but I think
it's important to go and do this in the beginning.
Back in two thousand and seven, you were looking at
some newspapers on microfilm for a book on American highways,
and you came upon a front page headline from March
(04:22):
twenty seventh, nineteen twenty one New York Times. Tell us
about that headline and what it was the impetus for
I'm not sure that it was that date, but it
was certainly that month. I was trolling through microfilm of
nineteen twenty one New York Times is because, as you say,
I was working in a book about the American highway
(04:42):
system and how it came to be. I was looking
for a three line brief that I knew was somewhere
in the paper that month about the Federally Highway Actress.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Nineteen twenty one. Not exactly exciting stuff, but it was
I needed to make a point in the in the
story that I was trying to tell about how overlooked
this incredibly important piece of legislation was, and so I
needed to find this little tiny brief tucked somewhere in
the bowels of the paper. And as I went day
by day through the microfilm, I kept on running into
(05:14):
these front page stories about this murder trial that was
under the investigation at first, and then later on trial
that was underway down in Georgia. The case involved a
word that I had never seen before, that being p andage,
And as I read, I realized, just from what was
(05:35):
said in these stories that P and H was the
word from which we get the word peon, and it
is a form of slavery that managed to endure after
appomatics in the Thirteenth Amendment for generations and well into
the twentieth century, pretty much up until and including World
(05:55):
War Two. Vestes even remained with us today. But this
murder case involved the wholesale slaughter of an entire workforce
on a plantation in World Georgia. And the more I read,
the more I wanted to read. And I abandoned my
research into the Federal Aid Highway Act of nineteen twenty
(06:16):
one for the day and just started reading one story
after another, you know, successive days stories, the coverage of this,
of this investigation, and then the trial of the suspect
in the case.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
You take us, as the reader to January nineteen twenty one,
two special agents at the US Department of Justice Bureau
of Instigation, the forerunner of today's FBI. You write, we're
working when a black man named Gus Chapman walked in.
Tell us what he told agents.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Gus Chapman told agents that he had been working in
Atlanta the previous year, in nineteen nineteen, and that he
had been picked up for vagrancy. Now, vagrancy was one
of a set of laws developed by Southern states after
the Civil War, aimed almost exclusively at their young black
(07:08):
male populations. You did not see white people being picked
up her vagrancy. And the definition of the term is,
of course, you have no money in your pocket or
no job. It doesn't matter whether you're looking for a job.
But you happen to get stopped when you're penniless and
looking for work. You're a vagrant and you're going to jail.
Gus Chapman had been picked up on this vagrancy charge.
(07:30):
He had been hit with a fine that he could
not pay, and so he was looking at six months
on the chain gang. And while he pondered this fate
in walk to farmer from Jasper County, forty miles southeast
of Atlanta. This farmer said, look, you know, things are
looking pretty bleak for you. The chain gangs no fun
(07:53):
at all. Why don't you let me pay your fine
and then you can come work out your sentence with me.
I'll put you to a work, work, and then when
you know you get to the end of your term,
I'll let you go. But in the meantime, you know
it'll be it'll be like a home to you. Now.
Gus Chapman, being a young he was thirty nine years
old at the time. A young black man in the
(08:13):
South had done almost exclusively agricultural work, so this was
pretty attractive to him. So he went off with this
farmer who turned out to be the son of a
plantation owner in Jasper County, and he found out that
its charms had been oversold pretty dramatically. He was kept imprisoned.
He was locked up at night with others in the
(08:37):
same boat, other young black men who had been bailed
out of local jails. He worked at the wrong end
of a shotgun barrel. He was beaten for any infraction
real or imagine, most of them imagined, and these were
beatings with whatever was handy, bridles, trace chains, of a
lot of the stuff that would be used to haul
(08:58):
wagons and carriages. He also told the agents that he
had witnessed the white overseers of this plantation murder some
of his fellow peons before his eyes.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
He had told of escaping this farm and then being returned,
and then finally escaping once again and making his way
to Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, this was his second second attempt to get away,
and this one succeeded. The first time. He was tracked
down by fellow by some of the plantations other workers
and using dogs, and they cornered him several miles away
from the plantation and brought him back. And had things
gone the way they usually did when a piano escape,
(09:45):
he would have he would have died right there. He
would have been he would have been murdered. But he
managed to beg his way out of that with the
assurance that if he tried it again, he'd be killed
like a snake.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
The agent's whismer Brown had spoken to another worker named
James Strickland. What was the information that they garnered from him?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Well, it dovetailed almost perfectly with Gus Chapman's information. Strickland
was another escape peon from the same plantation. This is
the john S Williams plantation in Jasper County, roughly eleven
hundred acres. And like Chapman, he had been, you know,
picked up on a trifling charge and bailed out of
jail by the Williams family, brought to the plantation and
(10:30):
then put to work as a slave. And the most
important element of being a peon, I should mention, is
that you know if your life was in the hands
of the plantation owner. There was very little record keeping.
The state didn't keep track of where you were after
you left their custody. You know, these peons would be
bailed out of the jail and they vanished into the
(10:53):
void as far as the state was concerned. So the
plantation owners were who used this system were breeded do
whatever they wanted, and they had very little, very little
financial incentive to treat their people well, to even keep
them alive. In the bad old days of chattel slavery,
a plantation owner at least had that he had a
(11:15):
financial incentive to care for his slaves insofar as he
had a big investment in them, and that investment group
from year to year, and so it made no sense
to kill a slave, you know, to beat him to
the point where he was he was crippled, because you
were hurting your own investment. Whereas a plantation owner in
(11:37):
the nineteen twenties who was getting peons out of the
local jail. Whereas a plantation owner who kept peons had
only the investment of the you know, the piddling find
that he had paid and so had very little skin
in the game. Really, when you get down to it
in terms of treating anyone with even a modicum of humanity.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
You write about the Bureau of Visiting driving to Jasper
County February eighteenth, nineteen twenty one, and they went to
the john S Williams home place three hundred and twenty
five acres. Primarily, Caughton tell us about that meeting and
what do they see and what do they learn?
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Well, the executive summary is that they were told by
john S Williams that what they had been, you know,
the information that they brought with them from these two
escape peons was nonsense. That he ran a happy place,
that his quote boys end quote all wanted to be there,
were treated well fed, well housed well, and the agents
(12:40):
could see from just looking around that the field hands
did in fact appear to be well nourished and well
clothed and whatnot. But when they went on a tour
of the property with Williams, they came upon a bunk
house that was locked from the outside, and they saw
other physical evidence that in the agg or get convinced them,
(13:01):
you know, this guy's he's running a peunage operation. Now
they realized after talking attempting to talk to some of
the peans that they none of these workers would say
a word. They were terrified of Williams. And so the
agents agents Wismar and Brown realized they were going to
have to figure out a way to get these these
(13:21):
field hands away from the boss so they could speak freely.
And until then their case was kind of with sky Meet.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Well, they did speak to some people on that farm
that day until and took them for questioning separately until
John Williams arrived back at the farm.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
I mean, they did not These were very rudimentary interviews.
These were done on the fly. They caught people as
they were in the middle of work. This was not
something that you build a case around. And frankly, they
gleaned very little information from talking to those three because
they liked the other. PI said, the agents try to
(14:01):
talk to you. We're terrified.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Now you're right about The investigation is stimied until four
weeks later after agents. After the agents visit, a young
boy discovers a body and tell us about this discovery.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah. Back, of course, the agents had visited on February eighteenth,
and they drove off with a lot of work ahead
of them if they wanted to build a case. And
so it wasn't going to happen anytime soon, and so
you know, this case fell into kind of slid of
the back burner in their minds. And then the weekend
a couple weeks before eastern March of nineteen twenty one,
(14:39):
young boy is playing under a bridge on the Yellow
River in neighboring Newton County. This is fourteen miles from
the Williams place by road, and he notices something odd
in the middle of the river, a foot sticking up
out of the water. So it goes and gets some neighbors.
They take a boat out that this foot belongs to
(15:01):
a young black man who is drowned in the water,
and he's tied with wire to another young black man
also in the water, also drowned. They dragged the bodies
to the shore. There before them are two field workers,
obviously by the way they're dressed and cover alls and whatnot,
who had been wired together, what wired, you know, their hands,
(15:25):
Their hands were tied behind their backs with wire and
then that wire was tied together so they were bound
to each other, and then wrapped around their necks was
a heavy chain, a trace chain, and tied to the
trace chain was a one hundred pounds sack of rocks.
So the you know, the local some in the sheriff,
(15:46):
who in turn some of the county coroner, the local
doctor who operated as the coroner, and a corner's inquest
took place right there in the river, and they determined
that these men, who were in their twenties if not younger,
had been alive when they hit the water, and that
they had been thrown off that bridge that the little
boy had been playing under. That bridge was called Allen's Bridge,
(16:08):
and it's between Monticello and Jasper County and Jackson, the
county seat of neighboring Butts County.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Now, this story hits the papers the next day, and
also those agents in Atlanta read about the story as well.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Well, it does hit the papers. You know. One of
the really intriguing things about this case. I would love
to be able to go back in time, Dan to
just to see how this worked. But you know, this
little boy made this discovery in the Yellow River in
the middle of nowhere, and it was the middle of
nowhere back in nineteen twenty one. It remains the middle
of nowhere. Now this is at the very far tip,
(16:48):
at the southern tip of Newton County and there's just
nothing around. People have some houses on the river, but
you know they're a long ways away. This is in
this is the back of beyond. And within no time
at all after this discovery was made, two hundred people
had gathered on the riverbank. That's how many people watch
(17:11):
the Carner's inquest when it took place. And it just
boggles my mind to think that it with the communications
such as they were at the time, you know that
that a crowd like that would materialize almost instantly, you know,
at this tiny rural bridge over a over a river
that nobody gave much thought to.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
You're right that there was an occurrence in this Jasper
County in October nineteen nineteen, tell us about this incident.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
But Jasper County had a mixed reputation in terms of
racial harmony. The you know, there was a real divide
between Newton County where these bodies have been discovered in Jasper,
Jasper being almost viewed almost as like kind of a
Timbuctou of Georgia, just a place beyond civilization. That wasn't
(18:09):
helped when in October of nineteen nineteen, a school teacher
and part time preacher was lynched in Jasper. He certainly
wasn't the first lynching there, but that was unsolved at
the time that this case came to be.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
This Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Now tell us what happens. After the agents discovered that
there was more bodies thrown into the river.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
There was a third body that was discovered in the
water and a neighboring river, the South River. Man's bridge
crossing that river was about a mile away, And so
once that happened, you know, the general realization in the
state was that this, you know, the double murder in
the and the Yellow River, had not been a one off.
(19:04):
That there was something going on here. Somebody was getting
rid of these young black men. So eventually this story
wound up on the desks of agent Squismar and Brown,
who instantly saw that these bodies have been recovered from
waterways that were in the neighborhood of the john S
(19:25):
Williams Plantation in neighboring Jasper County, And they took a
trip down and found that a lot of the black
faces that they'd seen on the plantation on their first
visit appeared to be missing now to their horror, horror
realized that they may have inadvertently kicked off, kicked off
(19:46):
these deaths.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
So tell us about the rule of Governor Hugh Dorsey
in this investigation and this case.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Well, Hugh Dorsey was an international pariah when he became
governor of Georgia in nineteen seventeen. He had been the
lead prosecutor in the Leo Frank case of four years before,
and that's generally remembered as a great miscarriage of justice
in which the Jewish manager of a local pencil company
(20:20):
was put on trial for the murder and rape of
a young girl, thirteen year old girl who worked for him,
despite strong evidence that he had nothing to do with
the with her death, and in fact, despite the fact
that the state's main witness against him was most likely
the killer. In the course of getting the conviction, Dorsey
(20:43):
pulled every dirty trick in the book and debased himself
as a lawyer pretty dramatically, but was heralded as the
protector of white womanhood in the Georgia of the day
and swept into office and then one reelection in nineteen
eighteen for another two year term, and was approaching the
(21:06):
end of his second term when these events unfolded, and
you know, when the agents put two and two together
and realized that John S. Williams might have something to
do with the you know, with the appearance of these
bodies and local rivers. They also realized that Jasper County
and Newton Counties might be incapable of adequately bringing a
(21:29):
case against him. For one thing, he was cousins with
the sheriff, he had done business with the local prosecutor.
You know, there were conflicts of interest all over the place.
And layered on top of that was the fact that
he was the richest man in Jasper County by reputation
at least, and one of its largest landowners, you know,
a pillar of the community, a pillar of his church,
(21:52):
a major donor to every public cause. So this guy
was a first citizen. And so the agents worried that
these kindies were just not going to be able to
put together the political wherewithal to make a case happen,
and so they went to Hugh Dorsey. Now they knew,
of course, everybody knew Dorsey's past, and you know, the
(22:13):
fact that he had participated in what's viewed as the
worst case of judicial anti semitism in American history, didn't
you know, left them with a strong impression that he
was no friend to minorities, And he surprised them once
they described the story to him, told him what was
(22:33):
going on. He promised to devote the entire weight of
the state behind the prosecution and pretty much commandeered the
state's case against Johns Williams at that point. Now he
was former prosecutor. He knew what he was doing and
did it very well.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Who are a couple of the other people that are
important in this story in terms of getting this investigation
under way? You write about James Weldon Johnson well.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
As Dorsey began strategizing with the prosecutors and investigators working
in the case down down south. Of course, he was
in Atlanta. The case began to attract the attention of
folks elsewhere, and one of the people who paid close
attention to what was happening in Georgia was a New
(23:26):
Yorker named James Weldon Johnson, the first black leader of
the NAACP. Johnson is one of those amazing polymaths that
every American how to know about. And I'm embarrassed to
say that before I started working on this book, and
I did not know who he was. I would not
(23:47):
have recognized his name, right. I hang my head in
shame for that, because now that I know who he was,
it's impossible. It seems to me that I could have
lived so long without knowing. But anyway, he was this
remarkable black man born in Florida. He created the first
(24:08):
black high school in his state. He became the first
black person admitted to the Florida Bar. He became a
celebrated poet. He was a memoirist, a novelist. He was
a founding spirit behind the Harlem Renaissance. He and his
brother were best selling songwriters. They wrote two hundred songs
(24:32):
for the Broadway stage and had a number of really
big hits, international hits. He wrote lift every Voice and
sing since you Know, ever since labeled the black national anthem.
He was just a phenomenal, even the force of nature.
He could do it anything he put his mind to.
(24:52):
He succeeded at and he was also an early member
black member of the US Foreign Service. He served as
a consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Then he became a
columnist for The New York Age, which was Weekly, one
of the biggest black newspapers, certainly one of the most
influential in the country, and it was as a columnist
for the Age that he caught the attention of the
(25:15):
NAACP's leadership, the board of which was almost entirely white.
And we forget that the NAACP was largely founded by
by whites. The only black person directly involved in its
founding was W. E. B. Du Bois. Johnson came on
board with the organization in the mid teens as its
(25:36):
field secretary, which was basically a recruiting position, and he
put the end in the NAACP. He made it a
truly national organization and grew it from a few thousand
to several hundred thousand over the course of his five
years or so as his field secretary. And then eventually,
after the previous secretary was attacked on a visit to Austin,
(25:58):
Texas and beaten almost to death, Johnson was elevated to
the UH, the executive secretary position, which is basically the
seat the chief operating officer at the organization.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
He had written that next to lynching, there was no
greater cause of unrest than this vicious system of p
and Age.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Yeah, he sure did. A uh, and it had been
you know, P and H. One of the one of
the frustrations for the NAACP, which had recognized the evils
of p Andage of course since since its founding, was it.
It's it's a difficult crime to get your to get
a hold of, you know, to to recognize for one thing,
(26:42):
because it's subtle. You know, you're you're in the employee
of of your enslaver. On paper, it appears to be
just an kind of an employment contract, but it's anything but.
And you know, it's it unfolds what the complicity of
local law enforcement. So you know, it's it's difficult to
(27:06):
get cases identified as P and H because some of
the co defendants would be the law. It was hard
to put a face on the crime. And I think
that one of the things that immediately appealed in the
NAACP about getting involved in this case was this put
(27:27):
a public face not only on the victims, but on
the perpetry, you know, the alleged perpetrator. Because as time
was going on, it was becoming more and more apparent
that John S Williams at the very least knew about
the fact that these three bodies had wound up in
local rivers and might have had a bigger part to
(27:49):
play than just knowing about it. And then in the
next few days it became clear that there were a
lot more than three three victims, that in fact, there
were at least eleven peons who had had been murdered
just since the agents visit on February eighteen, and that
(28:10):
there might have been other killings on the plantation that
preceded those.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
One of the most disturbing elements of this book is
when you write about lynchings learned about in Memphis, and
then you have some of the descriptions of some of
these lynchings, just to demonstrate that the societal attitude of
that's at that time to pee and age, but just
to lynchings itself, Well, we.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Have a species. I guess we're a hell of a
lot more cold blooded a century ago than we are today.
I think maybe that's just wishful thinking, you know. I
introduced the subject of lynching not only to set the context.
You established the context for this pe andage case, but
also to describe the background of another person who was
(29:05):
involved in bringing this case from turning this case from
a local you know, the case of local interest into
a national cause, and that was James Weldon Johnson's protege
and assistant, a black man named Walter F. White. Walter
White was the NAACP's secret weapon in that he had
(29:31):
alabaster white skin. I mean, the guy you would never
have guessed in a million years that he was. He
was a black man. He had blue eyes, he had
blonde hair, he you know, had kind of an aquiline nose.
He by all appearances was yeah, you know, it was aryan,
(29:51):
but he was. He was. He was black. He was
because he could pass for white. He was just the
scenes of lynchings and race riots, white on black race riots,
which were shockingly common at the time. And he could
insinuate himself into a white crowd of perpetrators and get
(30:16):
the names of everybody who had been involved in the lynchings, say,
and then turn them over to the authorities. And it
being the South of nineteen, you know, in the late
teens and early twenties, none of this ever led to
any actual prosecutions. He'd turn over his reports and then
(30:38):
walk out of the office of whatever law enforcement official
he was dealing with them and that was the end
of his influence right there when he left the office.
But he was a remarkable figure and had a lot
of really close calls, terrifyingly close calls. So he was
on the scene investigating the lynchings many of the limp
(31:00):
changes that I mentioned. Of course, the absolute worst was
on Hugh Dorsey's watch in Georgia, and that was the
lynching outbreak that occurred in May of nineteen eighteen down
in the far south of the state, down on the
Florida border. The Mary Turner lynching specifically. You know, I
(31:21):
don't want to get into it here lest it disturb
your listeners too much. Yes, but the Mary Turner lynching,
I think is, you know, every lynching was an act
of such shocking brutality that it's difficult to understand today.
But the Marry Turner lynching takes that to a completely
(31:43):
new level. I can't even think about it without without squirmings.
It's just awful.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
The esus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 4 (31:54):
Just in.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Continuing for a second, the attitude that seemed to be
excusing the lynching publicly in newspapers. Could you just tell
us how they sort of excused lynching.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
Well, I mean, newspapers in the South were part of
the you know, in many cases, not all, but in
many cases, and this was true, especially of small newspapers
in small communities. They're part of the problem, you know there,
they're editors, were part of the leadership of whatever town
they were in. You know, this notion that you can't
(32:31):
have any friends as a newspaper editor had had really
not taken hold there. And so the you know what
you saw in the case, for instance, after Mary Turner's lynching,
rather than to cry the fact that this young woman
had been brutalized, rather than to cry the fact that
there had been a full on atrocity in their community,
(32:55):
the newspapers down that way talked about how she had
a big mouth and should have kept it shut. You know,
her husband what got Mary Turner killed was that her
husband fell victim, was one of the victims of this
lynching outbreak that happened in Lowndes County on the Florida line.
(33:18):
When she found out her husband had been lynched, Mary
brief stricken furious, announced that if she found out who
was responsible, she was going to sik the law on them.
And the folks who had killed her husband decided to
teach her a lesson. And that was kind of the
(33:38):
gist of the newspaper coverage was the Yeah, the people
took exception to her.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Remarks in this investigation of john S Williams. How do
agents go about trying to determine the truth. They have
to have a witness, So how do they go about
trying to get a witness for this prosecution?
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Well, I mean they what the what the agents and
the local Newton County sheriff. The sheriff's name in Newton County,
by the way, was Johnson, Just to confuse things further there,
In fact, there there was a surfeit of Johnson's in
this story. So you have you really need a scorecard
if you don't use first names. What the investors did
(34:27):
that really cracked things open was interview some of the
non peons black farm hands who worked on this plantation.
And there were there were two classes of black worker
on the john S Williams plant plantation. In the room,
there was a there were a couple of families that
were interconnected in through marriage and childbirth and whatnot, cousins
(34:51):
to each other. Generally, the Freeman's and the Mannings and
uh and they they comprised the bulk of the workforce,
and and the Williamses would augment that standing force with
additional labor from local jails. That's where the peons came in.
And so they rounded up some of these family members
(35:12):
who actually lived on the farm, had been part of
the continuing, you know, continuing life at the plantation. And
one of those family members was a young field boss
named Clyde Manning who was twenty seven years old at
the time. After a lengthy interview that went into the
wee hours, Clyde Manning eventually fessed up that John S
(35:37):
Williams was involved in these killings and that he Clyde Manning,
had been coerced into helping him with all but one
of them. Things started moving at a gallop after that,
and what you wound up with was a prominent white
citizen being arrested and put on trial solely on the
(36:03):
testimony of his black workers. And that just did not
happen in the Georgia of nineteen twenty one. It was
unthinkable that it would happen. That's, you know, thanks to
Hugh Dorsey now being involved in the prosecution and pushing
it along from Atlanta thanks to the national pressure that
was created by James Weldon Johnson and Walter White and
(36:25):
others at the NAACPN and you know, and in the press,
it happened.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
These people had stayed under the thumb of john S
Williams and his sons for years. Some of these people,
how were they convinced that they would be protected from
We just talked about lynch mobs and thirty two hundred
died at the hand of lynch mobs. So how did
they profess to protect these people that were going to
(36:56):
be a witness?
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Well, you know, I think you have to take yourself
back to nineteen twenty one. I recognized that that the
black population of the South wasn't accustomed to having white
people promised them, guarantee them anything. They're almost there. Every
transaction with whites ended up badly. You know, the whites
demonstrated that they could not be trusted in a business arrangement.
(37:20):
You know, they for instance, the whole business arrangement that
turned they turned men into peance. So I'm not sure
that the witnesses in this case went into that role
convinced that they would be protected I do think that
they recognized that here was a rare, all or nothing
(37:45):
opportunity to get out of the hell that they were living.
You know that that basically said, you know, mister Johnny
john S Williams, you know, we either testify against him
or eventually we wind up the same way these pians did.
Because the state was so energized about the prosecution. I
(38:09):
think they probably were just convinced that this was their
best shot to get justice and to put together lives
that might not have been decent by any modern standards,
but at least didn't have the specter of death hanging
overhead every single day.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
You write about the material witnesses at this trial and
for their protection they were locked up for the two months,
and their treatment was criticized by the newspapers. But you
write about how they felt about.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
This, well, yeah, I mean it was standard operating procedure
at the time that you locked witnesses up in a
criminal case of this stature, and that often went to
white witnesses as well. It was always the case with
black witnesses, and and and frankly it was for safe keeping.
(39:04):
I mean, the the I don't think officials and was
worried about the witnesses fleeing. They were worried about someone
getting to the witnesses and doing them harm. And that
was a real, a very real and justified worry. So
what you what you saw was that uh, you know
the uh the witnesses when they when they were rounded
(39:25):
up and putting the uh the tower which was what
the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta was was nicknamed, and
it looked like a medieval fortress. You saw these these
folks getting ah, you know, a per diem, which witnesses did,
and you saw them getting fed in the jail. And
the Atlanta newspaper just found that to be scandalous. These
(39:47):
people were living high on the hog, better than they
had any right to expect, and it was all the
taxpayers expense. Shocking, you know, for a newspaper that was
generally pretty dog on progressive for its day. This was
a shocking failure, slip up by the Atlanta Constitution. But yeah,
(40:07):
they complained about.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
It that Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear
these messages. Hugh Dorsey writes something called the Negro in Georgia.
Tell us about what he writes in this Negro in
Georgia and the backlash afterwards.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Well, of course, the trial, the trial amazes everyone. It's
just it is not something one expects in the Georgia
of nineteen twenty one to see this case actually make
it a trial. But it does actually goes to trial
three times. There are three separate trials and popping you know,
that are tied up with this this mass murder case.
(40:50):
And it's important to note that in all three trials
there is only you know, only one murder of the
eleven that is actually being prosecuted. Hugh Dorsey's plan originally
because he anticipated that there would be trouble getting a conviction.
Hugh Dorsey's plan was that the state would go after
(41:10):
John S Williams and any other defendant who cropped up
on one murder, in particular the murder of Lindsay Peterson,
one of the two black men who was pulled from
the Yellow River after the little Boy made that Sunday
morning discovery in March of twenty one. This is about
April of twenty one, and Dorsey. Dorsey's strategy is they'll
(41:31):
go hard on that case, they'll try to get a conviction.
They can rest assured that there's going to be an appeal.
While it's under appeal, they'll try them on a second,
second murder. While that's under appeal, they'll try them on
a third, and they'll go through all eleven until they
get what they're looking for, which is to get John
s Williams behind bars at the very least and at
(41:52):
the end of a rope, preferably. And I don't want
to give away how the case turns out. It's surprising
number of ways. And Dorsey, emboldened by his role in
this case and shocked and appalled by the details that
(42:14):
have emerged during the investigation into how these these peons
were treated, decides he's going to yeah, he's kind of
continue what he started, and he publishes a pamphlet called
a Statement by Governor Hugh M. Dorsey as to the
State of the Negro in Georgia, usually shortened to either
(42:37):
Negro in Georgia or the Statement, And in the statement,
Dorsey enumerates one hundred and thirty five crimes against black
Georgians that have occurred just in the last couple of years,
just you know, during his term in office, certainly, but
mostly in his second term. These are divided into into
four categories, ranging from outright murder to property crimes to
(43:03):
just needless cruelties that had just you know, had been
perpetrated on black citizens repeatedly over the years. Presents this
this pamphlet as a speech initially in late April of
nineteen twenty one April twenty second at a hotel with
a with a group of prominent Georgia's citizens as his audience.
(43:25):
He's invited them there specifically to hear this statement, and
then creates an organization kind of a racial reconciliation council
of this audience after he's completed reading it. And at
first the statement is welcomed by the press and the
(43:46):
public as an incredibly courageous, painfully truthful document, But it
doesn't take long for that to shift and for Dorsey
to be completely destroyed. He was any any ambitions he
might have had for further public office, not that I
(44:06):
know that he had any it. I think he was
pretty much done after he was governor. We're erased, he
was all but impeached, managed to get through the remaining
few weeks of his term without that. But had they
had any extra time, I think that the people of
Georgia would have impeached him. They were incensed by the statement.
(44:32):
And you read it now and it's it's so surprisingly progressive,
so straightforward in its language. He said in the in
the pamphlet, we stand of people indicted, you know, and
if we don't change our ways, we're going to go
down in history looking no better than King Leopold of Belgium.
(44:55):
You know, it was responsible for the congoists atrocities, and
you know, that was the sort of thing that you
did not expect to see then, but you don't expect
to see it now either. This was really strong stuff,
really amazing. At least partly because of that statement, Dorsey
was all but written out of Georgia history. Good luck
(45:17):
trying to find much about him. He's he's been erased.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
You write about Clyde Manning, who ends up being the
witness at the trial, but also that he had a
trial of his own. We won't get into that at
this point, but interestingly, Clyde Manning is tried as well
as John S Williams, but Clyde Manning has his own trial.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Well. Clyde Manning was a member of one of the
two families who lived on the Williams plantation and were
not Peans. He was at least the second generation of
his family to live there. Well, he moved there with
his parents. You know, all indications was a smart, reasonable
guy who found himself in an impossible position with Williams
(46:10):
basically telling him, look, you either helped me kill all
of the rest of the workforce your friends, or I
kill you. You know. He became the state's chief witness against
john S Williams and was extremely effective in that role.
And then the state, it being Georgia nineteen twenty one,
(46:30):
couldn't very well put a white man on trial for
a crime and not try the black man who assisted him,
So they put Manning on trial and then actually put
him on trial a second time after that. You know,
it's really interesting when you look at the transcripts of
(46:51):
the Manning sessions, it's pretty clear that the witnesses, the
white witnesses at Clyde Manning's trial, who had gotten to
know Clyde Manning very well during the Chinas Williams trial,
white whennesses were very sympathetic to his situation, really did
(47:12):
from the stand what they could to impress upon the
jury that this was an honorable man ensnared in a
web that he could not escape.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
How does this case change the fortunes or continue the
fortunes of NACP, And how does the case how's the
case seen a few years later?
Speaker 3 (47:40):
I think that the NAACP certainly got a lot of
valuable information about pe andage out of this prosecution, and
it would be going too far to say that this
case ended the practice. But I think that it would
be fair to say that the Williams case blew pe
(48:02):
andage into the public eye in such a dramatic and
noisy fashion that it marked the beginning at the end
of the practice, or the end of it limped along.
Pe andage kind of lurched along for another twenty years
(48:23):
after this case, but at a much reduced level. You
never saw law enforcement has involved as complicit in its operation.
The kind of pe andage that you saw practiced, I
think most regularly after this case did not involve law
enforcement at all. You did not see people bailing prospective
peons out of jail anymore. What you saw was pe
(48:46):
andage baked in to the tenant farming situation. Sharecropping. If
it worked the way it was supposed to, a sharecropper
worked a piece of land in exchange for a place
to live on that land and the tools with which
to do the work, and in exchange for half of
the proceeds for many crops that he grows, and he
(49:10):
splits that those proceeds with his landlord, who supplies him
with the stuff he'll need, including his own to work
this land on his behalf. Well that's you know, if
it works the way it's supposed to, you have an
owner who is on the up and up. You see
that split of proceeds conducted fairly. And one of the
(49:35):
challenges for any sharecroppers that, of course he gets paid
his half of the proceeds at the end of the
year at harvest, you know, after the crop is sold. Well,
he's got to live for the entire year to get
to that point. So the owner in a sharecropping arrangement
would either loan him the money to get supplies food
(49:58):
and whatnot, food, tools, whatever he needed, or would have
an arrangement with a local storekeeper who would know that okay,
when this particular sharecropper comes in, I know it goes
on so and so's account. The problem was that there
were very few or there was no guarantee that the
(50:21):
white landowner was going to be honorable at all. The
expectation was that at least in party would not be.
What you saw it happen was that he did not
split the proceeds at the end of the year fairly
with his tenant. He took eighty and gave the tenant twenty.
Whatever it was, it was not an even split. And
you also saw him overcharge for the supplies that he'd
(50:45):
given that sharecropper throughout the year on the way to
that harvest. And so the sharecropper often hit with with
these two you know, digs into his income, often went
end of the year owing his landlord money instead of
actually getting a payday. And he wasn't could leave because
(51:09):
it was illegally Georgia for him a not to have
a job and b to leave a job, to leave
his his employers. You know, this contract that he had
for this this sharecropping without the other side's permission. And
certainly if he tried to leave while he owed his
white landlord money, big trouble. So you saw pe andage
(51:33):
continue for another generation or two in a much more
subtle fashion. But eventually, you know, World War World War
two brought a lot of mechanization to agriculture, and once
you removed the need for a huge labor force, you
removed the need for P and H.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
You talk about the legacy of D andage, but also
the legacy of future lynching or lynching. What was done
in that effort to end lynching.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
Well, it didn't, you know, Needless to say, lynching did
not stop in nineteen twenty one. I think that some
of the horrors of this case bled over into a
lot of second thinking about lynching, about that entire practice.
Of course, lynching had you know, what we tend to
think of of the South and of racial strife of
(52:35):
the past in kind of hall black and white part
of the terms. You know that these were not whites
and blacks respectively, did not move as monoliths. So you know,
not every white was a cracker, and not every black
was a victim, and and but you know what you
(52:58):
saw after, you know, in the nineteen twenties was kind
of a gradual dissipation of the lynching practice in Georgia. Certainly,
not always, not elsewhere through the South necessarily, but by
the late twenties lynching had had fallen off dramatically in Georgia,
(53:21):
and by the early thirties, Georgia was no longer the
lynching capital of the South as it had been since
day one. Pretty much Mississippi had taken over that that
position and continues to hold it today. You know, I
wish I could say Dan that we as a species
(53:44):
became better with time. But the fact is lynching still happens.
You know, it's happened. It's happened periodically over the years,
you know, since since World War Two, you know, and
there's a lot of disagreement over the actual definition of lynching.
(54:06):
You know it when you see it, and it's still
happening on rare occasion.
Speaker 2 (54:11):
You read at the end of this book that you
visited Williams john S Williams home place in twenty twenty
one with his story in Timothy Pitts tell us a
little bit about this visit. Well.
Speaker 3 (54:28):
Tim Pitts was at the time a professor at West
Georgia University in Rome, and he had done his master's
thesis on the Williams case and had also spent a
(54:48):
lot of time researching Q. Dorsey in the effects of
the statement. So I was very interested in talking to
Tim right from the beginning of working on this project
and we hit it off, and on one of my
many trips down to Georgia, he and I convened in
Jasper County outside the courthouse. You've seen the courthouse if
you're a movie fan. It was where my cousin Benny
(55:11):
was filmed. All the all the exterior shots of town
are outside of the Jasper County Courthouse. Mano Cello. Anyway, the
one of the things we wanted to do was figure
out where the Williams family farm was, because it's it's
surprisingly hard to pinpoint it based on the newspaper coverage
(55:32):
at the time. There's nothing in the official documentation from
from the case that pinpoints it, and it's it's really
pretty amazing how so many reporters were writing about this
case at the time and none of them felt it necessary.
And this could be because they're writing for audiences in
(55:54):
New York and you know, far flung locations that wouldn't
know Jasper County geography anyway, But none of them thought
to mention where the heck this place was, and it
was a big chunk of land. So Tim and I
went looking for it.
Speaker 4 (56:08):
I had found a nineteen oh nine map of the
county that had been annotated with the names of landowners,
and john S Williams is right there on this there's
a road in Jasper County.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
Remains dirt today, follows exactly the same footprint that it
did in nineteen twenty one, And in fact, most of
Jasper County you could overlay a map of today over
the nineteen twenty one map and there'd be very little difference.
We headed out to this Cook Road and figured out
(56:43):
where the home place was. From that now, Johns Williams
his plantation was divided into two big chunks. You had
a three hundred and twenty five acre home place, which
was kind of in central Jasper County, seven miles from
the county seat. And then the bull of the property,
more than seven hundred and fifty acres, was over by
(57:04):
Jackson Lake, which forms the western border of the county.
It's a giant reservoir created in nineteen eleven, and Williams
had bought a bunch of property there immediately after the
lake was created. And those acres are the pieces of
the property that has three grown suns managed for him,
(57:27):
and that's where most of the the actual agriculture took place.
You know, it was just a big contiguous piece of property.
So anyway, Tim and I, you know, we we traveled
up Cook Road and you know, just couldn't see much
(57:48):
from the road of this property at all. Now, I
later spent a lot of time in the courthouse later
on that same visit and was able to trace the
deeds for the farm and figure at exactly where it
was both pieces of property, and in fact him and
I had been in the right place. We had been
looking exactly where the home place was. But I now
(58:11):
had the shape of these tracts that john S Williams owned,
and because I was able to trace the deeds forward
to the current ownership, I could figure out exactly where
these places were. So I was able to go to
the lakeside properties, which are mostly now enclosed by a
big upscale subdivision called Turtle Cove, able to go there
(58:36):
and pretty much get the lay of land, figure out
where things were, and figure out that, for instance, the
clubhouse of a nine hole golf course on the property
is really close, if not right on the spot where
one of john S Williams's sons had his place, and
that the agents visited during their their stop in February
(58:56):
of nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
So looking for a cemetery, did you find one?
Speaker 3 (59:04):
Well, all eleven victims in this case were buried publicly.
You know, these are folks that were not missed by
society at large as shocking and wrong is that is?
And yeah, frankly, the state of technology at the point
(59:27):
in terms of keeping keeping bodies after their discovery was
pretty rustic, and so they had to be put in
the ground quickly. So after they were recovered from the
Williams property, eight of the bodies were planted in a
(59:48):
Popper cemetery that was outside the county work farm. Later on,
the three folks who had been pulled from the rivers
in Newton County, there's a pretty strong likelihood that they
also wound up in the Jasper County Paupers pharm although
initially they were just buried in the river bank right
(01:00:10):
right on the you know, the sides of the Yellow
and South Rivers. So you're looking for eight to eleven
bodies that were buried in this Poppers cemetery. And I
knew that they were in an unmarked grave, but I
wanted to go and pay my respects and found out,
to my surprise, the county has kind of lost the
entire cemetery. And this didn't just you know, contain these
(01:00:33):
eleven graves or eight graves. They it contained all of
the you know, the bodies of folks who had died
as indigens going back for years. Any stranger to the
county who died during a visit wound up in that
cemetery as well. So I mean there were there were
probably a couple dozen at least who were buried there.
(01:00:54):
And that cemetery is gone without a trace. I can
tell you where it was, but I couldn't find it
when I went looking for it. You know, the County
work Farm is now a piece of property that's split
between the Sheriff's Department, a senior center, animal control, the
Department of Public Works for Jasper County, and then at
(01:01:16):
the back a big landfill. And there are very few
pieces of that property that haven't been completely reworked over
the years. I went looking, I searched, I did a
grid search of a forest that's on the property, found
nothing that resembled a cemetery at all. I studied aerial
photos that went back to world just after World War
(01:01:38):
two found no indication. You know, once you dig a hole,
it shows up in aerial photos. You know, for the
rest of time, there was nothing that hinted at a
cemetery in any of these aerial photos. And then I
asked the Sheriff of Jasper County, Donny Pope, who was
(01:02:00):
incredibly gracious in his dealings with me. I asked if
he'd help by investigating this one piece of property behind
the Senior Center that I hadn't been able to get
a good beat on how it had been used over
the years. And so he did a grid search with
inmates from the county jail and looking for some signs,
some physical clue that there were graves on this little
(01:02:24):
piece of property I was asking about. He couldn't find any.
So we you know, I don't know where these bodies are.
You know, if the county ever decides that they want
to put up a monument to the victims, they're going
to have a hard time doing it where they're buried.
Because I was able to find no one inefficiently and
(01:02:46):
no document in the county's possession that told me where
these bodies were.
Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
I want to thank you, Earl Swift for coming on
and talking about this incredible story or readers to you
have chronicle this extraordinary case, all the testimony, so for
readers to discover. I also want to ask for people
that might be interested in this story to read it further.
(01:03:16):
Do you have a website and do any social media?
Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Yeah? I do a little bit of social media, but
not much, Dan. My website's Earl Swift all one word
dot com and I'm on Facebook and I'm on Instagram
under my name. Yeah. I mean, if anybody wants to
reach me, Earlswift dot com has a contact a portal
built into it, and I promise it may take me
(01:03:40):
a while, but I answer every email I get.
Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
Thank you so much, help put the shame the nineteen
twenty one murder farm massacre and the horror of Americans
second slavery. Thank you so much for this interview Earl Swift.
Thank you, and good night, and thank you. Thank you,
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