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1    THEY WANT TO SEE THE THING DONE Public Executions WHEN HENRY HODGES, his wife, and their three children were found brutally murdered in their home six miles outside Statesboro, Georgia, the white people of that town and surrounding Bulloch County were whipped into a frenzy of horror and fear. On the evening of 27 July 1904, Hodges, a yeoman farmer of modest means whose wife had recently inherited a small amount of money, was knocked down and robbed in his yard. The culprits proceeded to murder each member of the family with an axe. They then piled the bodies in one room and set a torch to the entire house. Suspicion immediately fell on a black man, Paul Reed, a tenant on the land of Hodges’s neighbor. When questioned, Reed’s wife revealed that her husband had confessed the crime to her, saying that he had committed it with his friend, Will Cato, a laborer on another nearby farm.1 By the Saturday after the murders, thousands of white citizens had gathered in Statesboro, anticipating a lynching. Hundreds more gathered at the burned remains of the Hodges house.There, according to the Statesboro (Ga.) News, “They were met by the sight of the most awful scene that we have ever been called upon to witness. The smoke was still issuing from the smouldering ruins and the scent of the burning of human flesh filled the air.”2 Such a crime had never before occurred in Bulloch County, a relatively prosperous county in the Georgia pine barrens, populated largely by white yeoman cotton farmers and a growing middle class in the county seat of Statesboro. The county had grown considerably since 1889, when the railroad connected it to outside markets. Statesboro, which increased in population from 525 in 1890 to nearly 2,500 in 1904, boasted a new courthouse, new churches, electric lights, and new telephone and water systems at the time of the lynching. It was “distinctly a town of the New South,” observed 20 SPECTACLE  Ray Stannard Baker, a northern journalist who investigated the lynching for McClure’s magazine.3 African Americans made up over 40 percent of the population, working mostly as farm laborers or in the growing turpentine industry, a key source of wealth and development in the county. But white residents, searching to place blame for the Hodges murders, pointed their fingers at the turpentine industry, which, since it required transitory labor, brought what they considered shiftless and disruptive young black men into the county.4 Many of these men, like Cato and Reed, stayed on to work on local farms, and white residents believed they raised the level of vice and crime in the county. White residents were filled with terror that they might meet the fate of the Hodges family at the hands of black men who lived on or near their land.This was a “community of good farmers moving along the even tenorof their way,” reported the Statesboro News, awakened “to the fact that they were living in constant danger and that human vampires lived in their midst, only awaiting the opportunity to blot out their lives by murder and the torch.”5 Amid this climate of racial fear and outrage, a public meeting was called in the county courthouse to decide whether to lynch Reed and Cato before they were brought to trial.The few men who attempted to persuade against any unlawful vengeance, including the mayor and several ministers, were met with silence. Even the “best citizens of the county” reportedly showed “little sympathy for the effort to protect the set of red handed devils who had committed this, the blackest crime that ever blasted the good name of our county and state.”6 No lynching was attempted at this point, however, largely because people became convinced that more blacks were involved in the crime and that Cato and Reed could provide essential testimony. The prisoners were removed to Savannah for safekeeping and brought back to Statesboro for their trial under guard from the state militia. Special trains were chartered from Savannah to bring in out of towners, and hundreds crowded the courthouse to witness the trial, which lasted one day. Rumors that Reed and Cato were members of a secret organization of blacks called the Before Day Club, which was conspiring to murder white farmers and their families, only amplified the sense of alarm throughout the county and intensified public interest in the trial. Reports quickly surfaced...

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