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Monday, Oct. 12, 2009

Student probes bloody chapter of Macon history

As the lynch mob got ready to kill John “Cocky” Glover, a black man, it obeyed a Bibb County deputy’s request to kill him farther away from a sick woman’s home so they didn’t disturb her too much.

For Cathy Miller, who wrote an award-winning paper on the 1922 lynching, the area’s darkest periods must not be forgotten because they’re defining moments in Macon’s race relations.

“From one act by a guy who was drunk off his butt — not to excuse it — it just became complete pandemonium. It wasn’t just Glover,” she said. “They were taking potshots at people. It really became a white against black moment.”

Miller, a 24-year-old senior at Macon State College, went to the Georgia Archives Oct. 5 to receive the annual award from the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board for excellence in student research. Judges thought that “few, if any, historians have examined” some of the records she looked at, including grand jury indictments and plenty of newspaper articles. What she found appalled the 2004 Warner Robins High School valedictorian.

Glover’s lynching was launched with a still-common problem: A drunk guy was turning violent. Deputy Walter C. Byrd and two colleagues were assigned to find him; Byrd found him in Wall Street Alley. Glover fired a .25-caliber pistol once. The other deputies chased. Glover fired more shots, fatally wounding two poolroom patrons.

The death certificates summarized the tale: Sam Brooks: “Shot in stomach. Murder.” George Marshall: “Gun shot (pistol). Wound of abdomen. Murder.” And the one that made white people angry, Walter C. Byrd’s: “Gun shot wound in breast. Shot by John Glover. Murder.”

A few days later came one more fatality, John Glover Jr.: “Murdered by unknown parties (Lynched).”

SEARCHING FOR TRUTH

Miller said she knows Glover killed the men. But the lynching was wrong, and even worse were several officials complicit in that act, she said.

Miller said Americans may want to remove lynching from their minds because of how gruesome it was. Always an A student and now a history major, Miller paid attention to grade school books. She doesn’t remember even a mention of a lynching.

The violence started near the poolroom on a Saturday night, July 29, 1922. Glover was lynched Aug. 1, three days later. Between the two dates was a rash of violence. Nobody was ever found guilty — “Nobody,” Miller emphasizes. Charges were dropped; perjury was claimed; one jury even wrapped up a five-person murder trial after 30 minutes of deliberation.

Miller said she has no doubt Glover was guilty. “What was done was not justice, though,” she said. “He should have been taken to a court of law and convicted.”

After he left the poolroom, Glover disappeared for a time. Police searched houses and asked other cities to look for him. Miller’s research shows at least three black people were fired upon downtown that first night.

Police closed black businesses within hours of the 6:10 p.m. shootings.

“They closed from Broadway to Cherry Street,” she said. “They called it the Black Belt.”

In her paper, Miller cited an editorial by W.T. Anderson of the Macon Telegraph: “Negroes were attacked on Saturday night who did not even know that Walter Byrd had been shot. Among them were some well known Negroes, who are law abiding, peaceable and inoffensive. Yet the gang treated them just as though they had committed the murder.”

A train conductor recognized Glover and told police. In Griffin, Glover wounded another deputy as he was caught. Miller wrote that Glover begged for an unusual kind of help on his way to Griffin’s jail: “I know what you arrested me for; go and shoot me. Don’t take me back to Macon.”

But they did, or tried to. Officers from Macon met up with the Griffin contingent near the Bibb-Monroe border. Miller wrote that they “took Glover into their custody, and then dodged from road to road in an effort to get Glover safely to jail. However, near Holton, they ran into a mob, who upon seeing Glover lying prone in the backseat demanded the officers turn him over to them.”

Miller said she’s offended at what happens next: “Glover was taken by the mob, and then, curiously, returned soon after so that officers could question him.” The mob later seized him again, and at a deputy’s urging, moved the execution site away from a sick woman’s house, tied him to a small pine tree and shot him repeatedly.

Miller wrote that the “mob’s sympathy for an ill woman is hard to fathom when taken in light of the callous disregard they showed to the legal process.”

Glover was killed in Monroe County by mostly Bibb County residents, within sight of the county line. There were about 400 people in the lynch mob, but Miller said the police outnumbered the people who were active in the lynching. Caked in blood and dirt, Glover’s body was dumped in the lobby of the black-owned Douglass Theatre, stripped of clothing and shoes. The Monroe County sheriff talked Bibb County officials into paying $77 to bury Glover. Bibb detectives left the body with the coroner, in a Monroe County lumber yard.

A judge launched a lynching inquest. Within days, a Bibb County grand jury indicted five men, mostly on charges of rioting and forming a lynch mob.

Monroe County soon charged five men in the killing, scheduling a trial within weeks. But when the trial started, a prosecutor said he’d never seen so much changed testimony. The accused men all said they’d gone with the crowd only to help Bibb deputies stop the lynching. The jury was out half an hour. The five accused men were found innocent that quickly.

All other charges were dropped — about 16 years later. Miller wrote in her paper that “the death of John Glover resulted in a parade of ‘show’ indictments. Macon’s good name could not be besmirched further by having no criminal charges issued in one of the most violent outbreaks of lawlessness the city had seen. With the many indictments for carrying concealed weapons, rioting, and unlawful assembly, at least the city of Macon could point to these documents and say, ‘See, we tried!’ ”

Miller says now such dark moments should be understood and discussed, because mob rule can arrive surprisingly quickly.

“Hopefully, people will realize this isn’t a history that should be forgotten,” she said. “It should be remembered, and feared.”

To contact writer Mike Stucka, call 744-4251.