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“YOU LOOK LIKE A PIED MAN”: MURDER IN MONTGOMERY COUNTY, GEORGIA, 1893

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Malinda Maynor Lowery
Malinda Maynor Lowery*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
*
email: [email protected]
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Type
Forum: Indigenous Histories of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 541 - 550
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Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Oxford English Dictionary Online, “pied,” Draft Revision June 2005 http://dictionary.oed.com.ezp2.harvard.edu/cgi/entry/50178832?query_type=word&queryword=pied&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&search_id=e3d5-p7eMJ7-7109&result_place=1 (accessed August 8, 2006); Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, August 3, 1893; July 27, 1893; September 7, 1893; September 28, 1893; September 30, 1893; Savannah Morning News, September 9, 1893; Atlanta Constitution, August 10, 1893; Americus (Ga.) Weekly Times-Recorder, July 28, 1893; Robert Scott Davis, Jr., A History of Montgomery County, Georgia to 1918 (Roswell, GA: W. H. Wolfe Associates, 1992), 281, 372.

2 Maynor, Malinda, “People and Place: Croatan Indian in Jim Crow Georgia, 1890–1920,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21 (2005): 37–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In particular, newspapers actively followed the case of Rich Lowry, an outlaw who was accused of murder in 1890. Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, June 1, 1892; June 2, 1895; April 14, 1893; June 2, 1892; June 3, 1892.

3 A helpful summary of the historiographic arguments about segregation is found in John David Smith, ed., When Did Southern Segregation Begin? (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002). For examples of relevant interpretations, see Mark Schultz, The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 67; Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 130; Rabinowitz, Howard N., “More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing the Strange Career of Jim Crow,” The Journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 842–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: Black Resistance and White Violence in the American South, 1880–1940” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 271–91; Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (London, Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 6.

4 Some studies demonstrate the wide variety of ways in which the regime of white supremacy included or excluded mixed-race or otherwise nonwhite people, demonstrating how the boundaries of whiteness fluctuated. See Victoria Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); William McKee Evans, To Die Game: The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerrillas of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Tribe, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2010); James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988); Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without A History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); George Brown Tindall, Natives and Newcomers: Ethnic Southerners and Southern Ethnics (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995); E. M. Beck and Stewart Tolnay, “When Race Didn't Matter: Black and White Mob Violence Against Their Own Color” in Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death, 132–54.

5 To understand how a “unorganized” murder such as this might actually comprise a form of social comment, see Kelley, Robin D. G., “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” The Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Deloria, Philip J., “American Master Narratives and the Problem of Indian Citizenship in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (Jan. 2015): 3–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Following Blair L. M. Kelley's examination of resistance to rail segregation, I would propose that in Montgomery County and perhaps elsewhere, Indians played on their racial ambiguity to articulate dissent. See especially pp. 52–58 for her discussion of New Orleans’ elite creole community and its role in protesting segregation, including the separate identities held by creoles of color and the black middle class, comprised of former slaves and their descendants. Kelley further notes that shared political concerns over resisting segregation brought the creole and black communities together, especially as the legislature attacked the citizenship rights of both groups, but that creoles nevertheless continued to maintain their distinctive identities, separate from both blacks and whites (60–61). And yet, Kelley argues, whites did not care about the different origins of people of color in New Orleans (63); in Montgomery County, however, it seems that they did. Kelley, Right to Ride, 6, 52–58, 60–61, 63.

8 While Kelley articulated Louisiana whites’ simplistic view of race in creating segregation statutes, other historians have explored the distinct pressure that mixed-race people have put on the laws that upheld white supremacy. Indeed, Plessy's attorney Albion Tourgee seemed to believe that a phenotypically white person was crucial to proving the insensibility of racial distinctions, though this strategy, in its appeal to white supremacist sympathies, failed to secure black citizenship and instead spawned a solution that reinforced color and class distinctions. Kelley, 77, 80. See Brattain, Michelle, “Miscegenation and Competing Definitions of Race in Twentieth-Century Louisiana,” The Journal of Southern History 71 (2005): 631, 644–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peggy Pascoe, “Race, Gender, and the Privileges of Property: On the Significance of Miscegenation Law in the U.S. West” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, eds. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 215–30; Pascoe, Peggy, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” The Journal of American History (1996): 44–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Novkov, Julie, “Racial Constructions: The Legal Regulation of Miscegenation in Alabama, 1890–1934,” Law and History Review 20 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://historycooperative.press.uiuc.edu/journals/lhr/20.2/novkov.html (accessed April 6, 2007); Harris, Cheryl, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1709–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Saks, Eva, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” Raritan 8 (1988): 39–69Google Scholar; Schultz, 68–72; Hale, 6–7.

9 Johnson, Guy B., “Personality in a White-Indian-Negro Community,” American Sociological Review 4 (1939) 516–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilbert, William Harlen Jr., “Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States,” Social Forces 24 (May 1946): 438–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brewton Berry, Almost White (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Dane, J. K. and Griessman, B. Eugene, “The Collective Identity of Marginal Peoples: The North Carolina Experience,” American Anthropologist 74 (Feb.–Apr. 1972): 694–704CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DeMarce, Virginia, “‘Verry Slitly Mixt’: Tri-racial Isolate Families of the Upper South—A Genealogical Study,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 80 (Mar. 1992): 5–35Google Scholar; DeMarce, Virginia, “Looking at Legends—Lumbee and Melungeon: Applied Genealogy and the Origins of Tri-Racial Isolate Settlements,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 81 (Mar. 1993): 24–45Google Scholar; Fergus M. Bordewich, Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Doubleday, 1996); Melissa Schrift, Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

10 See, for example, Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South; Katherine M. B. Osburn, Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830–1977 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Arica L. Coleman, That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

11 Osburn, Choctaw Resurgence; Lowery, Lumbee Indians; Coleman, That the Blood Stay Pure; Adams, Mikaela M., “Savage Foes, Noble Warriors, and Frail Remnants: Florida Seminoles in the White Imagination, 1865–1934,” Florida Historical Quarterly 87 (Winter 2009): 404–35Google Scholar; Mikaela Adams, “Who Belongs? Becoming Tribal Members in the South” (PhD diss., UNC-Chapel Hill, 2012); Lisa J. Lefler and Frederic Wright Gleach, eds., Southern Indians and Anthropologists: Culture, Politics, and Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); John Finger, Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York: New York University Press, 2010), ch. 2.

12 Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, July 27, 1893; Savannah Morning News, July 27, 1893, July 28, 1893; Statesboro (Ga.) Bulloch Times, August 17, 1893; Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, September 7, 1893; Savannah Morning News, September 9, 1893; James E. Dorsey and John K. Derden, Montgomery County, Georgia: A Source Book of Genealogy and History (Swainsboro, GA: Magnolia Press, 1983), 11; Memoirs of Georgia, Volume II (Atlanta: The Southern Historical Association, 1895), 570, 572, 573, 575, 578; See Lew Barton, The Most Ironic Story in American History: An Authoritative, Documented History of the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina (Pembroke, NC: n.p., 1967); Reed Smith, “The Croatans: Who and Where?” in The State (Columbia, SC) February 18, 1891; Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 204 n. 23.

13 James E. Dorsey and John K. Derden, Montgomery County, Georgia: A Source Book of Genealogy and History (Swainsboro, GA: Magnolia Press, 1983), 11; Wetherington, 8–11; Hawkinsville (Ga.) Dispatch, February 13, 1873, quoted in Robert Scott Davis, Jr., A History of Montgomery County, Georgia to 1918 (Roswell, GA: W. H. Wolfe Associates, 1992), 210; Figures are from Davis, 132; Dorsey and Derden, 19–20; Armstrong, Thomas, “The Transformation of Work: Turpentine Workers in Coastal Georgia, 1865–1901,” Labor History 25 (1984): 522CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wetherington, 77; Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, November 14, 1889; April 3, 1890; November 27, 1890. Also Wetherington, 48–49.

14 Memoirs of J. C. Wilkes (1877–1947) in Davis, 226.

15 Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, September 28, 1893.

16 Savannah Morning News, July 27, 1893, July 28, 1893; September 9, 1893.

17 Historian Mark M. Smith tells us that “white southerners believed that they did not need their eyes alone to authenticate racial identity, presumed inferiority, and … criminality.” Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1 [introduction].

18 Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, July 27, 1893; Savannah Morning News, July 27, 1893, July 28, 1893; Statesboro (Ga.) Bulloch Times, August 17, 1893; Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, September 7, 1893; Savannah Morning News, September 9, 1893. The Americus Times-Recorder alone called them “Negroes” in their headlines and “mulattos” in their articles, both in the initial reports of the arrest and in the trial reporting. Americus (Ga.) Times-Recorder, August 4, 1893; September 8, 1893; September 15, 1893. The September 15 report also refers to the men as “Scuffletonians.” Savannah Morning News, September 30, 1893; Mt. Vernon (Ga.) Montgomery Monitor, September 28, 1893.

19 Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 92.

20 Ibid.; Atlanta Constitution, July 25, 1893; August 10, 1893.

21 Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride, 47.

22 Cockrell, Dale, “Jim Crow, Demon of Disorder,” American Music 14 (Summer 1996): 172CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 6–8, 113; see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Cockrell, quoted in American Experience, Public Broadcasting Service, “Blackface Minstrelsy,” Stephen Foster (1999–2000), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy_8.html (accessed April 14, 2003). See also Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); and Stephen Johnson, ed., Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).

23 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).