The “ While
attending a trial at the By SUSIE JAMES Written For the COMMONWEALTH Twenty-three, including
two brothers whose suit against Jim Liddell Jr. of Today, Shortly after the fatal day, however, a grand jury wrote about its investigations into the riot. The same grand jury also was asked to look into the lynching of a young convict, which happened a month earlier in the courtyard. The convict, Will
McKinney, who was about The grand jury wrote
that on the night of Though as in the investigation of the "Carrollton Courthouse Riot" the grand jury failed to return any indictment, its members wrote, "We feel it our duty to condemn without reservation the act of barbarism visiting such terrible vengeance upon a helpless convict." John T. Stanford was
foreman of the grand jury, which also included T.A. Kimbrough, W.A. Layne, G.S.
Fox, W.P. Mussalwhite, Lawyer Lott, Ance Liddell, G.F. Roberts, W.F. Mabry,
J.H. Fields, W.C. Chatham, J.B. Harlin, Lee McMillon, L.L. Chambley, J.V.
Williford, and G.W. Pentecost. ( Five days before the
lynching, according to a historian for the W.P.A., who in the late The grand jury wrote that there was a second encounter between the Browns and Liddell, but during the first, Liddell had referred to Ed Brown as a "S.O.B." After eating supper at a hotel, Liddell, who was either with other men or was joined by them shortly afterward, walked toward a group outside, which included the Browns, and asked what they were doing there. Ed, the grand jury found, replied that it was none of his "g-d business", and then Liddell slapped Ed in the face. If others were
seriously injured or killed during the shooting which erupted, the grand jury
did not say, but they did report that Liddell was wounded in the thigh and in
the arm, recovering well enough to return to his home in Two days after the
shooting, the Browns were arraigned before Mayor The grand jury wrote that when the case came to trial, Ed Brown fired at Liddell after hearing "some disturbance" outside of the courtroom, precipitating the massacre. "The evidence before us goes to show that the Browns were turbulent and desperate half breeds, always ready for a conflict..." the grand jury concluded, ultimately blaming the Browns for everything. Outside, and
stretching up the road leading to Some jumped out of the windows of the courtroom as they tried to avoid the gunfire. Walter McLeod, according to the W.P.A. account, was shot in the heel, and Jake Cain was crippled for life as he tried to get away. The body of one man was left hanging from a window. "George
Jackson, et. al." were paid $ (Elsewhere in the
W.P.A. account, it’s written Oury was called out of services at T.E. Marshall
remarked to the W.P.A. historian asking for details about the "Carrollton
Courthouse Riot" of * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Carrollton Massacre Courthouse Map “They Didn’t Want Us
To Hate” By SUSIE JAMES Special to the Clarion-Ledger Twenty-three people
– all black – either died during the so-called Carrollton Courthouse Riot of Burks’ grandfather’s
name appeared on the list in a What happened that day, Burks says in a voice softened with emotion and with pain, grownups didn’t discuss in front of the children. Her father, who had the same first name as his father, told her later: “We didn’t want to teach you to hate.” Blacks had crowded into the courtroom to watch a trial. Mixed-blood blacks, Ed and Charlie Brown, sons of a free black man of Indian extraction who had moved to Carroll County from Tennessee, had filed assault charges against James Liddell, a white man. The Browns were well known, and so was Liddell. Drumbeats of warning had sounded earlier in the day. Some got the warning and obeyed. Others didn’t, or came anyway. The sheriff, T. T. Hamilton, according to the reports, was home at dinner. Mounted, armed men flooded the square. The gunmen entered the courthouse and went upstairs and into the courtroom.. Gunfire erupted. If there were exits, they were the tall windows, not those two blocked doors. A grand jury convened to investigate the so-called riot, amazingly, placed the blame of that bloody day on the backs of the Browns, who were both killed outright. Cain took his second-storey exit. “I’ll tell you history,” Burks says, feeling with one of her hands her own back to show the location of the scar in his own back that her grandfather tried to hide. It has been said for years that Cain limped from injuries he suffered that day, jumping from the window. “He was shot in the back,” Burks says, “he lay wounded and bleeding, and men came up with guns to shoot him again. Someone said, don’t waste bullets, (he’s) going to die anyway. Later, someone came and took him away. I don’t think he ever saw a doctor, just a person who did healing.” Ed Brown’s body was riddled with bullets. According to the article in the New Orleans newspaper, one of these rifle balls passed through three seats of heart pine, each one and one half inches thick. Cain’s brother, Simon, died at the courthouse. Their father was also named Simon, Burks says. “He had already been sold down here,” she says, trying to remember correctly. “My grandfather’s mother brought her baby with her when they came on down from Virginia. Caroline, I think that was her name.” Caroline’s Simon,
Burks says, came out of slavery with many working skills. He dug wells. He
disappeared up in northern Burks points her cane to a shaded tombstone. “That’s Lucy Ann Cain Wilkerson-Peters,” she says, “Sally Cain, her mother, is buried beside her.” Sally Cain was married to Burks’ grandfather Cain’s brother, Simon. “She knew big words, she couldn’t write them,” Burks says, almost slyly. “She’d go work in the big house and listen to the old master. Those big words, that’s how she got her ‘Mr. McCain’. She’d just repeat what she heard in the big house, she called him ‘McCain’, not ‘Cain.’” The Cains owned
land, and descendants still own the place down highway “I could never be
SATISFIED,” Burks explains. She didn’t want to become a teacher, because, she
says, she recognized so many young people of her race had been injured by
receiving instruction from people who hadn’t been properly educated themselves.
She went on to Chicago and wound up in Indianapolis, Ind. She lived there about
Back home, she
married Winston W. Burks, whose tombstone, she points out, in During her time away
from A new youth club, Youth of Carrollton, organized recently, meets in the tiny Senior Citizens’ Center she owns. County supervisors also lease her shotgun styled building, which her father built, as a feeding site for senior citizens, and Burks is trying to wrangle some extensive renovations to enlarge the center. It would be a way of helping keep young people in the historically black neighborhood off the streets and out of trouble, Burks says, recalling the disciplines of her own generation. “The older ones, they were very strict with us,” Burks recalls, “protective.” Several years ago, the Cain family homecoming took place in that well-kept glen. This year, it was in California. “We swap around,” Burks said, closing the cemetery gate. The gravel road
leading away from the Cain Cemetery hooks up with another one, narrow and
twisting. Interchanges back into the present subtly continue until the pavement
of highway Burks chuckles. “I was close to my grandfather, and I listened to the older ones, but I’m not telling everything,” she says. “I’m saving some things for my book.” * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The Cleveland Gazette (Ohio) The Cleveland Gazette (Ohio) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * MORE TO COME |