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