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

and care of the prisoners myself.
    By whitewashing Lummus out of the scene, and skipping over the fact that he himself had abandoned his post, Reid implied that he was the last line of defense. “The mob poured wildly into the jail, smashing locks as they came to them,” he said, adding just enough detail to help readers forget that he had not, in fact, been present at the time:
Breaking down Rob Edwards’ cell door, the infuriated men yanked the cringing negro into the corridor . . . someone struck him on the head with a sledge hammer, fracturing his skull. Then someone else shot him.
    As a final flourish, Reid said that “several friends kept [me] in [my] home” while the jail was under attack. Then he remindedreaders that even had he been there, “the big sheriff” would have been unable to save Edwards:
Of course, it would have been all the same if I had been there . . . Even though I do carry about a lot of flesh and muscle, I would have been like a straw in the whirlwind against that crowd.
    The sheriff had hardly finished his tale when a reporter for the Georgian , recognizing a scoop when he heard one, ran off to file his story. Reid had managed, in one rambling, Falstaffian interview, to claim that he’d ingeniously hidden the jail keys; that he had been held prisoner by the mob; and that he would have been unable, despite his great strength and muscular physique, to have stopped the lynchers even if, by some superhuman effort, he had managed to escape his captors. With that, the future Ku Klux Klansman and self-proclaimed “straw in the whirlwind” of the lynching climbed into a car and drove off. He was anxious, he said out the window, “to be on the scene when darkness came.”
    THE STORY OF the “race riot” in Forsyth disappeared from Georgia’s newspapers almost as quickly as it had appeared. In a single week, Cumming had witnessed the near lynching of Grant Smith; the arrival of the Marietta Rifles to quell an imagined race war; the discovery of Mae Crow’s bloody body; the killing of Rob Edwards; and the imprisonment of nearly a dozen young black suspects, who were now awaiting trial in the Fulton Tower. As Reid drove back north on the afternoon of September 12th, editors in Atlanta were proofing the last of the stories they would run about Forsyth for almost a month. “Quiet reigns in Cumming,” they assured readers. “No disorder of any kind.”
    When Reid went to work the next morning, he found the townsquare humming with activity for the first time in days. Wealthy wives of the county were finally willing to brave the streets, and visions of a black revolution were fading into the background as Cumming returned, for the most part, to business as usual.
    Everyone knew that the prisoners would be brought back from Atlanta to stand trial, and that their return would whip “the violent element” of the county into another fury, particularly if witnesses were called—as they surely would be—to testify about Mae Crow’s injuries. But all of that lay in the future, and in an effort to defuse the situation, Judge Newt Morris announced that both the Grice and Crow cases would be postponed until the next regular session of the Blue Ridge Circuit court, scheduled for late October. This left white residents in a state of uncertainty, particularly since Bud and Azzie Crow’s daughter was still unconscious out in Oscarville, in critical condition from her head wounds. Mayor Harris and Deputy Lummus wouldn’t have been the only Cumming residents who looked warily toward the future, wondering just what sort of mayhem news of her death might unleash.
    BUT FOR HUNDREDS of black people in the county, the worst kind of trouble had already begun. Though it would take weeks before reports reached Atlanta, in the days after the attack on Crow a nighttime ritual began to unfold, as each evening at dusk groups of white men gathered at the crossroads of the county. They came with satchels of brass bullets,