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

their black neighbors in peace, they learned otherwise the next morning, when tensions rose over the burning of a building near Cumming.
    When they heard that the storehouse of a white man named Will Buice had mysteriously caught fire in the night, whites concluded that it was the work of black arsonists, retaliating for the lynching. The Georgian reported that “the clouds of race war which have hung over Forsyth . . . threaten to break into a storm of bloodshed today.” The fire was taken as proof that, just like in Plainville, Cumming was now on the brink of a black insurrection. “Rumors that the negroes . . . are rising and arming themselves have led almostto a panic among the women of the little town,” one observer wrote, adding that
even the conservative men fear that the lynching of yesterday and the burning of a store today are merely the first movements in a race war which may sweep the county and bring death to many. Citizens are arming for trouble.
    But despite all the rumors, most black residents were too busy trying to protect their families to think about retaliation. Like African Americans all over the Jim Crow South, they understood that even the mildest forms of resistance or the faintest hint of protest could trigger a new wave of white violence. Many would have heard about the black woman in Okemah, Oklahoma, who, in 1911, had been killed for no crime other than defending her fifteen-year-old son against a lynch mob. Newspapers reported that when Laura Nelson confronted the white men who had accused her boy of stealing, Nelson was dragged from her house and repeatedly raped before she and the son she’d tried to protect were hanged side by side from a bridge over the Canadian River.
    If anyone in Forsyth’s black community thought of publicly naming the leaders of the mob that had killed Edwards, they would have understood the terrible risk. Only a few years later, in 1918, a pregnant woman named Mary Turner would be killed in Lowndes County, Georgia, for having openly grieved for her husband, Hayes. When she threatened to swear out warrants against the men who had abducted and lynched him, the response was swift and savage, even by the standards of Jim Crow Georgia. According to historian Philip Dray, “before a crowd that included women and children, Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly witha hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground, gave a cry, and was stomped to death.”

    The lynching of Laura Nelson, 1911
    Like Mary Turner, Jane Daniel must have carried an almost unbearable burden of grief, rage, and fear once she learned—hardly a day after her cousin Ernest had been taken prisoner—that her husband, Rob, had been hanged on the Cumming square, his body gawked at by whites, and torn apart by hundreds of bullets. But if Jane was tempted to go to county officials seeking justice, or to raise her voice in lament, she knew that to do so could have deadly consequences. It had happened manytimes and would happen again in Georgia: after lynching a black victim, mobs often turned their attention to surviving family members—for crying out in grief, or calling for arrests, or for simply knowing who it was who had pulled a trigger or lobbed a rope over a tree limb. Like thousands of other widows of lynched black men, Jane Daniel knew that her only chance at safety was silence.
    Not even that was enough in the end, for on Wednesday, September 11th, newspapers reported that Jane Daniel, her brother Oscar, and their neighbor Ed Collins had been arrested in connection with the Crow assault. According to the Constitution , “Another lynching at Cumming [was] narrowly averted” when “a mob formed to take . . . these negroes . . . and swing them up to the same telephone pole on which their partner in crime swung yesterday.” This time, though, Mayor Charlie Harris was