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“In the heart of an uncharted range of mountains with a crippled bloodhound following the scent with gasping choking sobs, the Negro, sought unrelentingly for five days, tonight was believed near exhaustion.” Thus, in the summer of 1927, a correspondent for the Raleigh News and Observer reported the latest news from a manhunt in western North Carolina, where hundreds of armed pursuers hunted a twenty-three-year-old man. Accused of murdering a young girl in the foothills town of Morganton, Broadus Miller had fled west, up the Johns River and into the mountains. For nearly two weeks, the hunt for Miller attracted great attention throughout North Carolina and beyond. Newspapers as far away as California covered the case, which Morganton resident and future U.S. senator Sam Ervin Jr. later described as “the largest manhunt in western North Carolina’s history.” Contemporary press coverage emphasized the manhunt’s mountainous setting , but the case originated—and concluded—far from the mountain woods.1 The story of the 1927 manhunt begins at the turn of the century in Greenwood County, South Carolina, in the cotton-producing flatlands of the western Piedmont. Formed in 1897 from Abbeville and Edgefield counties, Greenwood County had a population of nearly thirty thousand people, two-thirds of whom were African Americans. These former slaves and their descendants toiled in the local cotton fields, while the region’s white minority maintained political power by force. The year following the county’s creation, the election of November 1898 precipitated widespread violence throughout many parts of the South. In the most noted of these incidents, armed white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, over- “The Largest Manhunt in Western North Carolina’s History” Chapter 12 The Story of Broadus Miller 340 Kevin W. Young “The Largest Manhunt in Western North Carolina’s History” 341 threw the democratically elected, racially integrated city government, then swept through the city’s African American neighborhoods, killing several people and causing hundreds more to flee north. The same week as the Wilmington massacre, Democrats clashed with African Americans attempting to vote in Phoenix, a small community in southern Greenwood County. The fight at Phoenix sparked a weeklong reign of terror in which white supremacists murdered at least eight people. In the wake of the killings , the Greenwood Index warned local African Americans “to keep out of politics,” declaring that “our civilization won’t allow us to entertain any thought of the negro taking a part in a white man’s realm.”2 Born about 1904 and orphaned at an early age, Broadus Miller grew up with his three siblings in the household of their uncle and aunt, Thomas and Alpha Walker. The Walkers were tenant farmers in northern Greenwood County, in a region where lynchings and other forms of violence were common. Two years after Miller was born, a local mob—comprised of both whites and blacks—seized an accused rapist named Bob “Snowball” Davis, an African American man who had allegedly assaulted women of both races. The mob tied Davis to a tree and killed him in a volley of gunfire. In October 1911, a gruesome lynching spectacle took place in the community of Honea Path, where a mob led by Joshua Ashley, a member of the South Carolina General Assembly, captured a young African American accused of raping a white girl. Several thousand people, including the editor of the local newspaper, traveled to the scene to watch Ashley and his companions hang Willis Jackson—still alive and pleading for mercy—upside down from a telephone pole, then riddle his body with gunfire. After killing the teenager, members of the mob cut off Jackson’s fingers to keep as souvenirs.3 Broadus Miller would have been about seven years old when the mob killed Willis Jackson at Honea Path, which was only a few miles north of Miller’s home. When Miller was around thirteen years old, a mob in neighboring Abbeville County lynched Anthony Crawford, one of South Carolina ’s most prosperous and successful African American farmers. Crawford owned over four hundred acres of prime cotton fields, but after quarrelling over cotton prices with an Abbeville shopkeeper, he was placed in the local jail. Two hundred men stormed the jail and dragged the wealthy farmer through the streets to a public fairground, where they hanged him and then fired volleys of gunfire into his body. In the words of historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the killing was a case of “an affluent black man...

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