Hell Put to Shame
The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Hell Put to Shame is a powerfully unsettling portrait of the single most savage episode in the long decades of savagery inflicted by white southerners on their Black neighbors in the 20th century—and the methodical process that followed to erase those crimes from America’s collective memory." —Douglas A. Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a gripping new work of narrative nonfiction telling the forgotten story of the mass killing of eleven Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation in the spring of 1921—a crime that exposed for the nation the existence of “peonage,” a form of slavery that gained prominence across the American South after the Civil War.
On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War.
Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that it placed before a public self-satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before.
By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political exposé, Hell Put to Shame also reintroduces readers to three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely faced punishment for violence against their Black neighbors. The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full-on war against peonage. Johnson’s lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed Black man, conducted undercover work at the scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end. And Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the statehouse as a hero of white supremacists—then redeemed himself in spectacular fashion with the “Murder Farm” affair.
The result is a story that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in matters of race and justice. And the 1921 case at its heart argues that the forces that so roil society today have been with us for generations..
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Historian Earl Swift shines a spotlight on the underhanded practices that kept Black labourers in shackles even after the American Civil War in this harrowing read. In 1921, the bodies of Black men began appearing around Jasper County, Georgia. A federal investigation unearthed a murder spree by white plantation owner John Sims Williams meant to hide his use of peonage—an illegal form of indentured servitude—to keep his farm profitable. Wading into the murky waters of the investigation, trial, and unexpected conviction of Williams, Swift takes stock of the early–20th century South with incredible flair. He also isn’t afraid to probe some of the story’s more complex figures—like Black foreman Clyde Manning, who unsuccessfully argued that he helped kill the men out of fear for his life. Swift’s account of the century-old case offers a long view of just how slowly the currents of racial justice shift in the United States.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1921 spree killing of 11 Black men in rural Jasper County, Geo., and the subsequent trial of the white man responsible uncovered the ugly underbelly of peonage, "a form of slavery that had survived in the South for generations after Appomattox," according to this propulsive history from bestseller Swift (Chesapeake Requiem). In a system created by plantation owners in coordination with local police, a young Black man would be arrested for a trumped-up offense, jailed, and charged with exorbitant fines, which a white farmer would offer to pay in return for the prisoner's labor. However, as Swift explains, once on the farm, the prisoner would be forbidden to leave, "trapped in what amounted to debt slavery." Federal agents at the Bureau of Investigation, tipped off by an escapee, went to Georgia to interview plantation owners about the illegal practice, including John S. Williams, who proceeded to kill 11 of his farmhands in a two-week span to cover up earlier murders and peonage on his plantation. As a result of the eyewitness testimony of Clyde Manning, another captive who served as Williams's de facto overseer, an all-white jury convicted Williams, and he was sentenced to life in prison. The ease of reading Swift's efficient prose belies its elegance: "Soon the houses fell away, and the cotton rose, and they were in the country." This is a must-read.
