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  By all accounts, he attacked her. She tried to fight him off. He dragged her off the path into the woods, where he grabbed a rock and struck her repeatedly on the head with it. Then he raped her and left her for dead. Later that day, he told some friends what he’d done and asked them to help get rid of the body. After dark, he returned to the crime scene with his half-brother, Thomas Oscar, Thomas’s sister Jane, and a friend named Ted Galent. They found Martha Jean still alive, lying in a pool of her own blood. As Jane held a torch aloft, Oscar and Dent took turns raping Martha Jean. When they finished, they left her there, apparently having forgotten the original purpose of their trip.

  After a night of frantic searching, Martha Jean’s distraught father found her clinging to life Monday morning. He swept her up in his arms and stumbled back to his house. Two local doctors were summoned to her bedside, but it was too late. She was in an irreversible coma, though that evening’s Gainesville newspaper reported she had named her attackers and would recover. (This was most likely a calculated piece of misinformation intended to help force a confession.)

  When Martha Jean died late Monday afternoon, Dent was already in custody. A hand mirror at the crime scene was traced through a local store after a clerk recalled selling one like it on Saturday to Dent. Threatened with lynching if he did not confess, the slow-witted man quickly admitted to the crime. He was taken to Cumming, then whisked to the larger town of Gainesville before angry whites could re-form a mob to overwhelm the small company of troops ringing the courthouse.

  News of Martha Jean’s death put whites in a fury and brought a hundred vigilantes roaring into Gainesville Monday night. Mob members with clubs pounded on the locked front doors of the Hall County Courthouse and threatened to break them down. Wright, who had stayed with his prisoner, knew he had to act quickly to save Dent. At this point, many sheriffs would have simply looked the other way or handed the keys to the mob, but Wright slipped out the back door with the prisoner. He commandeered a touring car and took off for Atlanta with Dent and two deputies. The fifty-three mile trip over mountain roads took three hours—record time back then. Meanwhile in Cumming, the mob of angry whites surrounding the courthouse broke up when they learned Dent had been twice removed from their grasp. They would return, however.

  Tuesday morning, deputies brought in Dent’s three alleged accomplices and two men Wright considered material witnesses with knowledge of the crime, Ike Driscoll and Sam Hardaway. That afternoon, a mob of 300 stormed the courthouse during Wright’s absence, smashing doors with crowbars and rushing past outnumbered and outgunned deputies to the jail cells. They were frustrated to find only Galent. Deputies had hidden the two witnesses and Oscar, while Wright had spirited the woman away that morning. Talton believed lawmen deliberately chose to sacrifice one black victim to the mob in hopes of limiting the violence.

  As the cowering prisoner kneeled on the floor and begged for mercy, several men with pistols and rifles stepped forward and started blasting away. After they riddled the body with bullets, mob members beat his lifeless corpse with crowbars, then dragged him outside and down the town’s main street before stringing him up on a telephone pole near the spot where Roberts had been whipped. Upon his return, Wright found that the white community’s bloodlust had been satisfied, so he seized the opportunity to transport the remaining prisoners to Atlanta.

  The mob was only temporarily sated, however. After admiring their work, posing for pictures beside Galent’s bloody corpse, and collecting some ghastly souvenirs, it was time to get back to lynching. There was unfinished business in Marietta, so they set off to find Ronnie Harris and Preacher Roberts in connection with the earlier “attack” on the unnamed white woman. Wright called the circuit judge in Marietta and advised him a mob was heading his way. The judge ordered the prisoners moved to the Tower, Atlanta’s heavily fortified city jail, where they would join Dent.

  Once word spread that there would be no fun that night, the crowd dispersed, its members melting back into the hills from whence they came. Wright regretfully advised the judge that there were no warrants for Roberts’s arrest, so the black preacher was released from jail that night. He did not return to Forsyth County. Nothing more of his fate is known.

  White sentiment continued to run at fever pitch. “Great emotion against these brutes persists,” the Atlanta Sentinel noted after Galent’s death. Closer to home, the Gainesville Democrat editorialized, “The good people of Forsyth have behaved themselves with noteworthy self-control,” complimenting them for not tracking down more victims to lynch.

  In any case, with the suspects gone, prospects for violence seemed to decrease and reporters left town. There wouldn’t be much news coming out of Forsyth until trial coverage began in early October. Contrary to the Gainesville newspaper’s editorial, however, Forsyth whites showed no signs of calming down. Every store in the county sold out of guns and ammunition; armed men continually roamed the countryside, looking for blacks to harass.

  Crime—both real and imagined—became the rallying cry for poor whites, but their primary motive no longer involved punishing rapists. Instead, they saw an opportunity to knock blacks down a peg or two.

  For nearly a half-century, lynching and terrorism had been used in the South as a means of racial control, and Forsyth whites were ready to find a new use for such violence. No longer content to make bad examples of individual blacks, the white community quickened with resolve and grand ambition. While most white Southerners could live with blacks as long as they remained powerless and subservient, Forsyth County’s poor whites were tired of competing with black labor and especially weary of seeing African-American landowners performing better economically than they did. Such whites were often envious of blacks, the preferred tenants of landowners. Talton stated that the South’s ruling class found blacks cheaper, more dependable, and easier to work with than whites, who insisted on higher wages for less work and had an undeniable mean streak. The Southern aristocracy had a history of pitting poor whites against blacks, and in Forsyth County, the conflict turned extreme.

  Blacks could not stop this reign of terror without powerful white allies, and therefore, they were out of luck. While not unique, Forsyth County, pinned against mountains to the north, was not a typical plantation county. Farms were small and soil was not rich. Unlike the cotton belt, this region lacked a large, entrenched aristocracy with paternalistic ties to former slaves and their families. In Forsyth, blacks had few white benefactors, and none willing to stand up for their rights. In the end, local leaders bowed down to the mob.

  The whites began a process known in later decades as “ethnic cleansing.” Then, it was called “whitecapping”—nightriding in the tradition of the once and future Ku Klux Klan, disbanded during Reconstruction and resurrected atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain in 1915 in response to The Birth of a Nation and America’s most famous lynching, that of Leo Frank, a Jew, in Marietta.

  As in other Southern states, Georgia blacks were emasculated politically in 1912, especially in rural areas. In 1908, constitutional disenfranchisement capped two decades of legislation designed to keep blacks in a state approximating slavery. Talton called this process “affirmative action for whites.”

  And so, with the tacit approval of their wealthier neighbors, Forsyth’s poor whites pushed forward with their pogrom, inviting comparisons to the treatment of the area’s Cherokees in the previous century. “These fierce, warlike Scotch-Irish hill folk reverted to their old ways, fueled by an ancient rage and rekindled by this unspeakable act,” wrote a Northern reporter. “All would pay for the sins of the few. The issue was no longer justice. This was war: Defeat the enemy and take the spoils.”

  Talton called Forsyth County’s 1912 troubles “an ultra-violent labor action against blacks by poor whites, egged on by their upper-class neighbors who wanted little to do with either of them.”

  Shots were fired into sharecroppers’ cabins and landowners’ homes. Warning signs were posted: Nigger Git Out
of Forsyth. Fires were set. Barns, houses, schools, and churches burned. As a consequence, more blacks joined the exodus. In the great diaspora of a displaced people, this was a minor eddy in the ocean, but it was remarkable in its completeness. Furthermore, it was the major event in the lives of those forced out. In a 1983 interview conducted by Talton, eighty-year-old Isaiah Smith recalled the day he left town “sometime late September the year of all the trouble”:

  “I was nine years old when they ran us out of Forsyth County in 1912. My father let me take one thing I wanted when we left. I chose a baseball he’d bought for me in the spring. I remember gripping it tight in my hand as we pulled away from our house. My mother was expecting my sister then, so she laid down in the back. We had a mule named Sam that Pop sold when we got to Atlanta. White men on horseback watched us with their rifles pointed in the air. Pop was staring forward with the reins in his hands. ‘This is what they do, son,’ he told me. ‘This is what they do.’ I heard the sound of glass breaking and turned to see a lighted torch fly through the front window. Pop grabbed my head and twisted it around so hard he hurt my neck. ‘Damn it, boy, don’t look back,’ he said. ‘Don’t give them the pleasure of seeing your pain.’ Most of the day passed before he talked again. He never got over it. That was his land, handed down to him by his father. So the white men stole it, just like they stole the land from the Indians. Took our crops, too. And they’ve had their way up there ever since. Today’s not one bit different in Forsyth County than the day I left.”

  * * *

  On September 30, 1912, the Blue Ridge Circuit grand jury sitting in Cumming returned indictments against Dent and Oscar in the rape and murder of Martha Jean Rankin. One grand juror happened to be the victim’s uncle. To the modern observer, this might seem like a conflict of interest, but it was a minor infraction of protocol compared to what happened when the trial began.

  Fearing more lynchings and negative publicity, Governor Brown had declared a state of insurrection in Forsyth County and called up four militia companies to escort the prisoners from Atlanta to Cumming. Their orders were to protect the suspects and quell any racial disturbances that might occur, but they were told nothing of the nightriding that was still going on.

  There was no train service to Cumming. The closest stop was in the Gwinnett County town of Buford, a dozen miles away. The soldiers, 150 strong, arrived in Buford around noon on Wednesday, October 2, and deboarded with the prisoners—Dent, Oscar and his sister Jane, along with the two hapless witnesses in the case. Harris—the suspect in the earlier “phantom” case—was also brought for trial.

  The soldiers marched the prisoners across a rolling stretch of land that would disappear several decades later under Lake Sidney Lanier. Idly curious whites watched as the ring of militiamen surrounding chained prisoners tromped through the mud. As the sun set, the procession arrived at the courthouse in Cumming. The soldiers presented the prisoners to Sheriff Wright, who locked them up in holding cells. The soldiers then formed a circle around the courthouse and set up bivouac.

  As the county prepared for trial, farmers stood around the courthouse in sweat-stained work shirts, spat tobacco, cussed the soldiers, and talked about “niggers needing hanging.” However, word quickly spread about the overwhelming opposition a mob would face. While Brown was no friend of blacks, whites knew he was willing to give “shoot to kill” orders to protect Georgia’s law-and-order image. This same battle-hardened militia unit had recently enforced martial law in Augusta during a violent streetcar workers’ strike, killing two passers-by who failed to halt on command.

  The separate trials of Dent and Oscar began Thursday morning and ended that night. One company of soldiers stayed inside the courthouse while the others ringed the building, standing in picket with fixed bayonets. This show of force relieved locals of their civic duty to burst into the courtroom and lynch the defendants, so they turned their attention elsewhere. Vendors took advantage of the crowds and set up an impromptu street fair, selling drinks, sandwiches, and cheap jewelry to the gawking hill people. Meanwhile, the town’s remaining blacks went into hiding.

  With Judge Clement Riley presiding in the courtroom, the victim’s father, William Rankin, served as the main prosecutor before an all-white, all-male jury (as required by Georgia law at the time). “This was proof that the trial was a sham and an extension of mob law,” Talton wrote. “What juror could resist his pleadings and testimony when he cried out in anguish and banged the jury box, railing as he recounted his horror at finding his darling girl lying on the ground, broken beyond repair?” Sitting beside Rankin was Robert Hay, the Blue Ridge Circuit solicitor general. Like Brown, he would, just a few years later, have a hand on the rope around Leo Frank’s innocent neck.

  While Dent and Oscar had attorneys, whether they actually had a defense was another matter. Their lawyers argued that they were Negroes and knew no better, then called on jurors for mercy. The evidence consisted mainly of the testimony of their accomplices. Driscoll and Hardaway, the two material witnesses who had been held for a month, testified in exchange for their freedom—even though they had never been charged with any crime. (Talton drily noted that “freedom” meant safe passage out of Forsyth.) The most damaging testimony came from Jane Oscar, who testified for her life as she spoke against her blood kin.

  Dent and Oscar were both convicted of rape and murder, the jury returning its verdict shortly after 9:30 p.m. By then, a heavy rain had begun falling and the crowds had dispersed. Inside the courtroom, only court officials, lawmen, the defendants and their attorneys, soldiers, and reporters remained. Word filtered out through town and countryside that night, but any talk of lynching was quelled by inclement weather—and the soldiers’ sputtering campfires encircling the courthouse, which served to remind locals of the resistance they would face. The next morning, Judge Riley sentenced Dent and Oscar to death by hanging on October 25. He ordered the troops to return the prisoners to jail in Atlanta so they would survive until their executions.

  Riley postponed Harris’s case, which was already falling apart. The prosecutor openly stated that the evidence against him was slight, and that his alibi witnesses were afraid to testify because they feared mob violence. The judge stated his hopes for trying Harris in calmer surroundings and assured the public there would be no need for a military presence at the upcoming trial. Talton interpreted this as an apology and invitation to the mob: “Y’all come back now, y’hear?”

  The case against Harris was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence—a good thing for him, since his witnesses had left town. Local legend held that he stayed on in Forsyth for another thirty years until he died of natural causes, but Talton found no record of him in the 1920 census and no further mention of him beyond a notation beside his name in a 1913 docket book: Nol prossed.

  Late Friday morning, the troops decamped and marched all six prisoners back to the rail station in Buford. An eerily quiet crowd watched them pass, content to let the law take its fatal course; the condemned men’s lawyers had announced there would be no appeal. It was a strange procession, a four-hour slog through the mud by a ring of soldiers a hundred yards wide at times. They reached the depot in Buford by mid-afternoon Friday and boarded the waiting train.

  Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing continued. A week after Dent and Oscar were convicted, an Atlanta newspaper took note of anti-black outrages in Forsyth, reporting that “a state of terror grips the black community.” Signs on every road leading into Forsyth carried the community’s new motto: Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Forsyth County. By then, five black churches and two schools had been burned to the ground. Shots were fired into the houses of blacks who refused to leave, as well as those of their white allies, whose tiny numbers diminished as the horror increased. As an unwelcome consequence, a tremendous labor shortage developed during the crucial harvest time.

  Media attention forced local whites to act like they cared about Negroes. Resolutions passed at mass meetings in
Cumming calling for federal and state aid to suppress the growing campaign of intimidation, arson, beatings, and nightriding. By then, violence had spread to nearby Cherokee, Dawson, and Hall counties. Black carpenters building a barn were forced off the job at gunpoint in Gainesville, where warrants against their white assailants were issued. However, in Forsyth, no whites were ever arrested for crimes against blacks despite the massive campaign of violence.

  After the meetings, Governor Brown again declared Forsyth County in a state of insurrection. This was required so he could mobilize troops to escort Dent and Oscar to the gallows. The governor did nothing to stop the whitecapping, which by then had almost completely accomplished its purpose. Brown advised moderate Forsyth whites who wanted to stop the lawlessness that they were on their own and should employ private detectives if they wanted security. None were hired.

  Two companies of National Guard troops were detailed to the death march. They quick-stepped the two prisoners from the Tower in Atlanta to Terminal Station, leaving on Southern Train No. 18 at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 24. After a night march from the Buford depot, they arrived at the Cumming courthouse at 1:30 a.m. on the day of the hangings. The press mocked Dent and Oscar, reporting, “They marched along as gaily as if they were in a circus parade.”

  The gallows were constructed near the courthouse in a pasture belonging to Randolph Carswell, a wealthy doctor and son of Forsyth County’s largest antebellum slave owner. A high wooden fence had been constructed around the scaffold to prevent curious onlookers from witnessing the execution, in line with the judge’s order that the hangings “shall be in private, witnessed only by the executioner, guards, clergy, family members of the defendants, and two physicians to certify the deaths.”

  The local citizenry would have none of that, however. As soldiers marched into town late at night, the fence was doused with kerosene and set ablaze. By dawn, the view of the gallows was unobstructed. At daybreak, soldiers cordoned off the area and stood around the scaffold in a circle 200 yards across as the crowd poured in—on foot and by automobile, horseback and carriage. Families came with picnic lunches. According to one report, a boy sitting on his father’s shoulders pointed at the gallows with its twin hangman’s nooses and said, “That’s where bad niggers go to die.”