Saving the Soul of Georgia: Donald L. Hollowell and the Struggle for Civil Rights

ONE: Preparing for Battle: Early Influences and Aspirations

In 1917 World War I, the “war to end all wars,” was raging across Europe. After three years of neutrality, the United States had entered the fray. In France, American soldiers—including thousands of African Americans—were fighting to defend liberty and democracy. At the same time, African Americans in the United States were also struggling to defend liberty and democracy. In 1905, a group of activist black leaders created the Niagara Movement to fight for the political and civil rights of African Americans. Called together in Niagara Falls by scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, this movement was composed of blacks whom Du Bois labeled the “talented tenth”—those with sufficient ability and education to assume leadership among African Americans. The platform of this movement called for manhood, suffrage, civil rights, equal opportunity in economic life, the abolishment of Jim Crow, and fair treatment of “colored” soldiers. In 1909, outraged by a riot and lynching in Springfield, Illinois, several members of the Niagara Movement joined forces to create a new organization to fight segregation and other forms of racial oppression : the naacp. Blacks hoped that their sacrifices in the battle for liberty abroad would ensure progress toward racial equality in America . An idealistic and perhaps naive Du Bois even urged African [ C h a p t e r O n e Preparing for Battle Early Influences and Aspirations 12 ] chapter one Americans “to put aside their just grievances, close ranks with white citizens, and help win the war.” Du Bois echoed the earlier assertions of abolitionist Frederick Douglass that military service would make the right to citizenship undeniable. Nevertheless, Du Bois’s hopes of achieving equal treatment for blacks in the United States as a result of their sacrifices during World War I were not realized. Even as Americans were fighting for freedom in France, the civil rights of African Americans, so dearly purchased on the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg, continued to vanish. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which respectively granted them citizenship, guaranteed equal treatment under the law, and gave them the right to vote, were undermined by Jim Crow laws that sanctioned violence, intimidation, and second-class citizenship. Such laws affected every aspect of southern life. For blacks, failure to conform could be dangerous—and often fatal. Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 persons, the vast majority of whom were black, were hanged, shot, or even burned alive at the hands of lynch mobs, while many others just disappeared. The fate of Daniel Barber and his family is but one example. On January 14, 1915, Barber, his sixteen-year-old son Jesse, and his two married daughters, Eula and Ella, were lynched in Monticello, Georgia. When Police Chief J. P. Williams attempted to arrest Daniel Barber and his wife, Matilda, on a bootlegging charge, and the Barbers allegedly forcibly resisted arrest, Matilda was shot and killed by Chief Williams. The Barbers then beat Chief Williams. Following the arrest and jailing of Barber and his three children, a mob of more than one hundred angry white men overpowered the jailers, dragged the Barbers from their jail cell to a tree in the center of Monticello’s black section, and lynched them one by one. Barber was forced to watch the lynching of his three children before he met the same fate. By 1917 lynching had become a common spectacle for the purpose of keeping blacks in line. In 1919 the naacp published a volume titled Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, which provided a chronological list of lynching victims by state along with the purported reason for each act of violence. Sadly for blacks in the Jim Crow South, there was virtually no legal recourse. Legislatures and city councils were all white, as were the police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials. With the help of organizations such as the naacp, by the time the United States entered World War I, blacks were beginning to take the offensive in response to the Jim Crow social order. This was also the year that Donald preparing for battle [ 13 Lee Hollowell entered the world. Born December 19, 1917, in Wichita, Kansas , he was the younger of Harrison and Ocenia Hollowell’s two sons and the third of their four children. Harrison Hollowell had moved to Kansas from the small farm near Senatobia , Mississippi, where his parents eked out an...