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1 chapter one The Legal Lynching of John Downer “Well, personally and frankly I think the boy with her screwed her.”1 In 1932 this blunt assessment brought a Macon, Georgia, federal courtroom to a stunned silence. Marion Williamson, a captain in the Georgia National Guard and a Decatur attorney, sat in the witness chair. He had spoken the unspeakable truth, and he had spoken it under oath. It would, as it turned out, make no difference. A white woman had accused a black man of rape, and he would die for it. Nothing could save John Downer from the electric chair, not even the best efforts of Elbert Tuttle, a highly regarded Atlanta lawyer who took up Downer’s cause. Like Marion Williamson, Tuttle had become involved in the case a year earlier. On May 19, 1931, John Downer and an acquaintance had been arrested and taken to the Elberton jail, located on the second floor of the sheriff’s home. News of the rape accusation circulated, and by 3:00 p.m. a mob several hundred strong had gathered. In Atlanta, Governor Lamartine Hardman issued a proclamation putting Elberton under martial law. Homer C. Parker, the adjutant general of the Georgia National Guard, ordered two Elberton units to duty and sent two Atlanta officers—Captain Williamson and the regimental commander, Col. Gerald P. O’Keefe—to assist. By the time they arrived, members of the mob were hammering away at the lock on Downer’s cell. The soldiers managed to clear the jail, but they were not able to secure the sheriff’s home downstairs, far less the grounds. General Parker dispatched Tuttle, a captain in the National Guard, to take tear gas grenades to the beleaguered troops. Tuttle called his closest friend, Leckie Mattox, also a captain in the National Guard and his cousin by marriage. The two men decided that Mattox would wear civilian clothes so that he could blend into the mob. 2 « chapter one They raced toward Elberton, arriving just after sundown and just in time to hear a burst of machine-gun fire from the jail. The mob had ignored the machine-gun positions set up to secure the second-floor jail and crowded into the yard and the sheriff’s home. They had taken up two cries: “They won’t shoot” and “They only have blanks.” The last line of defense was a machine gun at the top of the stairs manned by Captain Williamson and Colonel O’Keefe. Just as Tuttle drove up, the mob began sallies up the stairs. O’Keefe fired several rounds of his pistol, calling out to the crowd, “These aren’t blanks.” When that had no effect, he ordered machine-gun fire; at least one man was struck.2 Almost simultaneously, Tuttle and Mattox lobbed several canisters of tear gas. Suddenly attacked from two sides, the crowd was shaken. Tuttle made his way inside, where he and Maj. Andrew Drake, the local commander, managed to move the mob out of the sheriff’s house. Over the next hour the crowd continued to swell. Tuttle found the fire chief and had a hose brought to disperse the crowd, but the mob quickly gained control of it and directed it at the jail, breaking the windows and drenching the prisoners and their guards.3 They didn’t mind; the water quenched the tear gas that had drifted upstairs. The mob began to threaten to blow up the jail if the two suspects weren’t turned over to them. Dynamite used in quarrying was readily available. Emissaries from the crowd warned Colonel O’Keefe of the plan, some saying the only thing preventing it was that soldiers from Elberton were inside the jail. Circulating in the crowd outside, Leckie Mattox was increasingly convinced the threat was real. As he later testified, he began “talking to groups of men . . . as if I were one of the Elbert County people; and the gist of my remarks was that we did not want to blow up a bunch of our Elbert County boys in there just to get a couple of negroes.”4 The threats continued. Finally, a man O’Keefe believed to be the superintendent of a quarry told O’Keefe that the crowd had the dynamite and that they would detonate a warning blast that would give the soldiers five minutes to clear the jail. Two companies from Monroe, Georgia, arrived, assembled in formation, and marched to the jail, but...

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