After first occupying all of the seats in the second-floor council chambers for the start of the ceremony, more than 100 people filed out of Statesboro City Hall for the candle-lit dedication of the marker that exposes the shameful history of lynching in Bulloch County on one side and of lynching in America on the other.
The Thursday night, Jan. 11, 2024 ceremony was a culmination – but not yet the conclusion – of efforts begun five years ago by the local group now known as the Statesboro-Bulloch Remembrance Coalition. The coalition was inspired by and worked with the Equal Justice Initiative, or EJI, which operates the Legacy Museum and its National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and has now provided the freestanding, heavy cast-aluminum marker.
“Tonight has been a long time coming,” said Adrianne McCollar, one of three current Remembrance Coalition co-chairs. “Our group formed in 2019 after several members of our coalition visited the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, and returned absolutely committed to the process of community remembrance.”
Greeting the crowd in the council chambers, McCollar, on behalf of herself and the other co-chairs – Dr. Chris Caplinger and Delinda Gaskins – thanked the coalition’s past and present supporters, as well as City Council, “this mayor” and Police Chief Mike Broadhead.
The reference to “this mayor” prompted some audience laughter because Statesboro’s mayor is Adrianne McCollar’s husband, who later thanked her and the coalition. City Council had on Feb. 21, 2023, voted 4-0 approval for an easement allowing the Remembrance Coalition to erect the marker on city-owned soil adjacent to City Hall. Statesboro police provided crowd and traffic control for the January 2024 dedication night, closing East Main to vehicles from the four-Main Streets intersection to beyond City Hall.
“For generations after the Civil War ended slavery, Black Bulloch County citizens were the victims of racial terror, and tonight we’ll unveil a marker that confronts our history of a legacy of slavery and racial injustice,” McCollar continued. “This marker documents some of the most tragic times in our shared history, and no one living today is responsible for the lynching of the nine men listed on the marker that we’ll unveil tonight.
“But every last one of us in here are absolutely responsible for ensuring that the legacy of racial injustice is completely dismantled, and this is part of that work.”
Viewed from East Main Street, the front of the marker contains a narrative naming eight of the nine Black men that EJI documented were lynched in Bulloch County from 1886 to 1911. The nine and the dates they died are Jake Braswell, July 15, 1886; Kennedy Gordon, April 11, 1901; Paul Reed and William Cato, Aug. 16, 1904; Albert Roberts and another Black man, name unknown, Aug. 17, 1904; Sebastian McBride, Aug. 27, 1904; Thompson Gilbert, Feb. 18, 1908; Henry Jackson, April 21, 1911.
“Suspicion alone – even in the absence of evidence or due process – caused many white people to presume a Black person’s guilt,” the marker text states before the narrative of the nine individual lynchings.
For the first, Jake Braswell in 1886, the text states that a white mob abducted him “following the alleged assault of a white girl” and tied him to a tree limb and riddled his body with bullets after forcing him to “choose” between being burned alive or hanged. It states that Kennedy Gordon in 1901 was shot repeatedly by a white mob that seized him from a constable “after reports of an attempted assault.”
Hodges murders not in text
But for the two immediate victims of the most infamous lynching in Bulloch County history, Cato and Reed, the marker text does not mention that they had been convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced by a judge to hang at a later date for the murders of five members of the white Hodges family in their burned-down home in the country.
The text summarizes only the illegal but never punished actions of the mob that gathered in Statesboro the week of the trials and further racial violence of the terrible summer 120 years ago, beginning as follows:
“On August 16, 1904, a white mob of at least 100 abducted Will Cato and Paul Reed from the courthouse, marched them to woods a mile north of here, and burned them alive.”
The killings of Albert Roberts and the “other unidentified Black man” and Sebastian McBride are then described, also from August 1904. The mention of purported reasons for the lynchings resumes for those in 1909 and 1911.
“If we are to remain the greatest nation in the world – and I’m going to say, we are that – then we must ensure that the laws extend not just to the victims but that they extend to those accused,” McCollar said in her remarks.
She said she was sharing this because some in the community had expressed concern about Paul Reed and Will Cato’s names being listed on the marker.
“What I say to you is that these men deserved for the laws of this land to extend to them, and they did not deserve the vigilante justice, to be hanged and burned just a few miles down this road,” McCollar continued. “So that’s why their names are on this marker, and we will not juxtapose the brutal, lawless lynching of these men against the horrific, brutal murder of the Hodges family.
“We can agree that both of them were horrific, and the violence in both instances deserved justice,” she said.
Understanding today
Co-chair Chris Caplinger also spoke, observing that “All lives matter,” and “Black lives matter,” are both true statements in the abstract. “But we don’t live in the abstract. We live in a world in which Black lives have not, in fact, always mattered, and it’s crucial that we confirm that they do,” said Caplinger, a history professor who is white.
“We see it as a vote of confidence in our community that we can tell the truth about our history, and that history is very relevant to today,” he said. “We live in a world shaped by the racial violence of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Understanding these tragedies is important to understanding things like the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.”
Coalition member Dr. Stacy Smallwood recited his “Poem of Remembrance,” beginning, “I’m sorry we did not send for you sooner/ you have been here all this time/ trudged underfoot of whisper and shame. …” Later adding, “But tonight we remember …” and invoking the local lynching victims by their first names, the poem drew a standing ovation.
The crowd further applauded the Rev. Donald Chavers Jr. of Agape Worship Center singing, “(Something inside) So strong.”
‘America for all of us’
Mayor Jonathan McCollar spoke, proclaiming, “Until America is America for all of us, America will never be America to any of us. When our founding fathers scribed those founding documents … what they scribed was the aspirations of a land that has yet to be.”
Dr. James Thomas served as master of ceremonies. Members of the city-sponsored Statesboro Youth Council, including Ivna Casuso, Jamersyn Hughes and Azaria Joyce, had parts in the ceremony.
As the crowd moved outside, candles were distributed to and lighted from source candles for a moment of silence “to acknowledge the victims of racial terror.” A representative from the Equal Justice Initiative, Deksyos Damtew, spoke briefly of EJI’s origins in founder Bryan Stevenson’s effort to provide legal representation to prisoners on Alabama’s death row and others believed to have been convicted without adequate representation. This was expanded to include the remembrance project regarding lynching.
Marker revealed
Laura Milner, a founding member of the Statesboro-Bulloch Remembrance Coalition, and the Rev. Francys Johnson, minister and civil rights attorney, lifted the veil from the marker to reveal its gold lettering on a blue background.
The back of the marker, facing the alley between City Hall and the next city-owned building, carries the “Lynching in America” text, concluding, “Although many victims of racial terror lynching were not documented and remain unknown, at least 702 racial terror lynchings of Black people have been documented in the state of Georgia.” As Damtew noted, EJI has documented more than 6,500 lynchings that occurred nationwide between 1865 and 1950.
The local Remembrance Coalition’s efforts continue with a soil collection project from lynching sites, an essay contest for high school students and other projects, with information at www.bullocheji.org.
