Hell Put to Shame by Earl Swift

Author:Earl Swift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Part Four

American Congo

27

SO IT WAS THAT ON SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 1921, the unthinkable occurred. Less than four weeks after the bodies of Lindsey Peterson and Will Preston were discovered at Allen’s Bridge, an all-white jury convicted the white man who killed them, principally on the testimony of a Black man. In Covington’s courthouse square, the majority view, if not consensus, was that the jury had demonstrated “horse sense” with both its guilty verdict and its lenient sentencing recommendation.

Beyond the Newton County seat, the verdict was greeted with a mixture of satisfaction and relief. Few were more pleased, it seems safe to say, than the prosecution’s architect, strategist, and whip. “The result of the trial is not only what I had hoped it would be for the sake of justice and the good name of our state,” Hugh Dorsey told a reporter later in the day, “it was also what I had known it would be if the wish of every good citizen could receive effective expression.

“If anywhere men have been asking what Georgia means to do about such things, this superbly orderly trial, the verdict rendered this morning, and the grand jury probe which begins in Monticello next Monday, are an answer Georgia would ask to have considered.” The governor praised Judge Hutcheson, Lonnie Brand, “and the officials and men of Newton County” while downplaying his own role as prosecution chess master. “I could lend only my influence to help them,” he said. “I shall continue to lend it and do everything in my power to see that investigation and action wipe out every vestige of the blot which the Jasper County revelations put upon the state’s reputation.”

In the main, the rest of the world seemed equally impressed by the verdict. “A high and solemn message” had been delivered by the jury of “plain, upright citizens,” the Atlanta Journal proclaimed, that message being “that the law shall be upheld, that wrongdoing shall be condemned, that righteous dealing must prevail, for even the lowliest and poorest in the land.” The New York Tribune reckoned that Williams’s fate offered “more hope of light in this darkest problem of the nation than any event in years.” Charles Stump, the Broad Ax correspondent, decided the jury had “shown to the world that there is manhood in the white man, and he can rise above race prejudice and issue out justice.”

The New York World saw the verdict as “a hopeful augury for the future of the negro.” It tempered its enthusiasm, however, with the observation that “if the principals in the case had been reversed, if Peterson had killed Williams, Peterson would have been executed.” Once they got past their initial surprise at the jury’s decision, many commentators, southern and otherwise, came to share the World’s worry that Williams got off easy. “In accordance with strict justice and the facts in the case, Williams should hang,” James Weldon Johnson wrote in his New York Age column. “Indeed, to use an old expression, hanging is too good for him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.