I Saw Death Coming by Kidada E. Williams

Author:Kidada E. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Attacks, surveillance, and widespread white collusion and silence about strikes increasingly persuaded more families to leave their communities for good. Their former homes carried only the promise of further injury. Authorities would not stop the killings or do anything to bring attackers to justice. As survivors realized how insecure they and their families were in their hometowns, they often had to start making long-term plans to relocate and start anew.

The family of James Alston, a state legislator of Macon County, Alabama, survived the raid in which a mob stood outside his gate and released a barrage of bullets into the home: 265 pieces of shot lodged into the siding, and sixty passed through the window. Another five were lodged into the headboard of the bed where James and his wife slept. Two narrowly missed his head and burst through his pillow; and except for the fortunate placement of a foot roll, four more bullets would have ripped his feet apart.

James was hit in the hip and back. His pregnant wife was shot and one of his children was shot, too. With the ball still lodged in her foot, Mrs. Alston was unable to walk.49 “I had to leave there to keep from being shot,” James said, “and to keep my wife from being shot,” again.50 White men had threatened James before, including attempts to bribe him to leave office, but he had refused to leave. Now, having come so close to being killed, James knew he could not stay and live.

Simon Elder fled his Clarke County, Georgia, homestead right after his captors left. “I kept traveling from one place to another all that night,” he said. Simon made his way to his landlord’s home, hoping to get shelter and assistance, only to discover that the couple’s son might have participated in the strike on his wife, Mary, and him.51 That personal betrayal persuaded Simon to leave. He remained in the community for two more nights, ensuring Mary was as safe as she could be and handling whatever he could on such short notice. Simon hired a wagon to take him to Madison depot, where he caught a train that carried him roughly sixty miles to Decatur. Mary joined Simon in the city later. “I have lived there ever since,” Simon said.52

Once the outcasts decided to leave, they often realized that getting out and making it to a new permanent residence was not always easy. Lack of funds or support systems in distant areas slowed down victims’ decisions to decamp. In addition to physical injuries and transporting all their belongings, families faced obstacles like rising waters along waterways they would normally cross with ease. Others may have had unpaid debts; landlords and store merchants had an economic incentive to keep debtors in town to collect what they were owed. For many families, it was harder to stay than to leave (or, leaving was hard, staying was impossible).

During and after Reconstruction, tens of thousands of African Americans abandoned the South’s rural, underdeveloped villages for its towns and cities.

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