Deep Roots: America's Legacy of Racial Terror
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Memorial for Wesley "Wes" Johnson at the Peace and Justice Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
"For I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan" - Genesis 37:17
For as long as I can remember, my father wanted me to know where we came from.
I was born on the same coastal Florida land as my father and my father’s father. Our military-oriented town, part of the Panama City Beach area, helped define us, though as a child I knew only pieces of the story and had yet to hear the name Wes Johnson. It was in recent years when I began to discover what I call my inheritance — a family history written in the blood of racial violence and state-sanctioned murder, buried in the red-clay soil of a neighboring state.
Like many Navy men, my father spoke when he needed to. Except when our house was full of his buddies from the ship. Occasionally, I would get an SOS call from the garage: "Hey T-Y, go grab me a couple MGD's out the fridge." Several sips into his Miller Genuine Draft, you would hear a bounty of laughter as he began spilling tales of life at sea and stories of when he was a boy.
I sat on the floor near his feet to hear every detail. He'd riff about his childhood, how during the summer his mother would take him and his sisters to Alabama to pick pecans. He mentioned that our family had roots there, and some of our relatives owned land and had been sharecroppers under Jim Crow segregation.
What I heard in 2000 as a 7-year-old stuck with me. I carried it into adulthood and eventually it led me to connect with my cousin, Faye Howell-Walker, whose own search reaches back three generations in Dothan, Alabama.
Around the same time I became curious, Faye, 38 years my senior, started researching the story of Wes Johnson, our distant relative, and the circumstances of his death. Faye and my father are second cousins once removed. My paternal great-great grandmother is Faye's great aunt. Growing up in the South, it was well known that lynchings had occurred in many of the small towns our families frequented.
Gateway to the Gulf
Dothan, in southeastern Alabama, is located between southwest Georgia and the Florida Panhandle. Incorporated in 1885 during the land rush that followed the Indian Removal Act, Dothan was at the heart of agricultural trade in the South that brought economic prosperity to the region by way of tenant farming, sharecropping and the production of cotton by the ton.
By 1907, the Atlanta and St. Andrews Bay railway was completed, providing access to a developing Florida beach resort, Panama City, 83 miles away. Dothan received the nickname "Gateway to the Gulf."
Dothan (Follow highway 231 south to Panama City)
Although slavery had long ended, farms and plantations remained as places where black people continued to live and work as sharecroppers. Wanting more than a life of picking cotton for her and her seven children, Faye's mother, Lorene Peoples, left Dothan one year after Faye was born. They drove south down highway 231 until arriving in Panama City, where Lorene’s aunt Lydan and her husband Wilburn Campbell lived. Wilburn is my great-great-grandfather.
Years of working in the field picking cotton didn’t allow Faye’s mother an opportunity for a high school education, so she found work as a maid cleaning hotels along the beach. By the age of 12, Faye grew very close with her Aunt Lydan. On Saturday mornings, when Aunt Lydan wasn’t working at a bar on the main drag, Faye would walk more than two miles to spend time at her home.
A brand new blue-and-black 1950s Oldsmobile sat in the driveway. Chrome accents surrounded its frame and reflected the sun's glow. Stepping inside Aunt Lydan’s home was like walking into a mansion, in the imagination of a young girl. The reality is that Wilburn and Lydan were comfortable enough to have real hardwood floors, and a coffee table decorated with knitted scarves and little trinkets. Their home retained a sweet aroma that smelled of doughnuts, although there wasn’t anything on the stove or in the oven.
Faye saw in her aunt a role model and viewed her as a strong family matriarch. One day when she visited the bar at age 12, an older man tried to talk to Faye in a way that Lydan felt was inappropriate. Lydan brandished the switchblade she kept in her bra and held it to the man’s throat. “My eyes [were] big as golf balls when I saw that! Then she said, that goes for all of you men,” Faye recalled recently. “I loved that woman.”
After 15 years in Panama City, Faye moved back to Alabama with her mother and attended Dothan High School in the 1960s. While a decade had passed since the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated public schools, racism remained strong in Dothan. One day, walking through her high school’s hallway on the way to her next class, Faye was sent to the principal office after getting into a fistfight with a white girl who called her called a n***er. Faye was suspended while the other girl was not punished.
Three years after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Aunt Lydan died of breast cancer. Faye held her hand by her bedside. A decade later Alex Haley’s “Roots” was released, inspiring Faye to begin researching our shared history.She felt a sense of urgency to connect the family’s past and present while her mother was still alive.
With many unanswered questions, Faye took on the challenge of tracing the family tree, starting with Lydan’s side (the Peoples). She organized the first family reunion on the beach in Panama City. “We had a nice time... we had breakfast in the park, we were out there with grits, pancakes, sausage and bacon, we had the works!” she recalled.
In 1989 Faye moved to Tallahassee, where she took a class at the local community college. Though her research was still premature, she sought to make deeper connections and reached out to her older brother, who had begun compiling information and set her off in the right direction. Hearing personal narratives from older relatives at the family reunion compelled her to take action.
Faye rushed to buy a cassette tape recorder. While browsing the electronics section of a Goodwill store, she spotted a eggshell-white Tandy CCR-81 with one red key to the far left and a handheld microphone attached. “This recorder was my saving grace,” she said.
Faye's Saving Grace (left Tandy recorder, cassette tapes)
Instinctively, Faye interviewed the eldest people in our family whom she could get a hold of, understanding the value of accessing memories while they were still present. The oldest relative was 105. Hours and hours of interviews and recorded voices, filling more than 60 tapes, are now stored in a large boot box.
From 2000 to 2005, Faye rigorously compiled oral histories to write her first book, Shaking My Tree. During this time she still had no idea how close she was to making a shocking discovery. It wasn't until she interviewed the mother of Lydan Peoples, my great-great-great-grandmother, Nettie Johnson-Peoples, that the links to Wes Johnson began to emerge and wrote her second book Shaking My Tree - A Second Glance about her direct lineage.
“So you know I got ... both sides of the story from the white side which appeared in the newspaper… and the black side, of course, you know our word wasn’t worth a nickel back then.”
“The story goes...”
Roots Never Forgotten
Wes Johnson was the nephew of Lee Johnson, a relative of my great-great-great grandmother, Nettie Johnson-Peoples. Wes was born out of wedlock and his father was a man named Jessie Callins.
In 1937, Jessie and Wes worked and lived on John Oates’ farm as sharecroppers in Henry County, Alabama. Wes was wrongfully accused of assaulting Mrs. Rupert Barnes near Tumbleton on a Saturday night. The next day, Oates attempted to hide Wes before a posse tried to come and get him.
“The posse told Oates that if he didn’t turn them over they were gonna burn the house down with them,” Faye told me. “And so Oates told them that he would take Wes and turn him over to the sheriff so the sheriff can lock him up.” Oates wasn’t able to turn Wes over because the posse sent for the sheriff to come and get him.
Newspaper articles, published by the Anniston Star and Decatur Daily in 1937, reported the rest of the story as follows:
Late in the night, a group of approximately 100 armed men arrived at the Abbeville jail where Sheriff Louie Corbett and the jailer were outnumbered.
“I was waked by the mob about 1:30 a.m., the mob had already come in and covered me and Louie with guns,” the jailer reportedly said. “I got up and went into Louie’s room and they covered me with shotguns and told me not to move.”
The posse pried open the tool box where the sheriff kept his keys, grabbing 19-year-old Wes from a jail cell and driving him to the scene of the alleged crime. The mob strung him up and then shot his lifeless body as it hung from a poplar tree.
Traumatized and in fear of being lynched themselves, the black community understood the message loud and clear. Any one of them, at any time, could be next.
Riddled with shotgun pellets, Wes's body dangled from the tree for hours into the morning. John Oates sent Jessie to retrieve his body. When Jessie arrived at the horrific scene, he viewed a puddle of dry blood in the dirt below his son's feet.
Jessie placed his son into the back of a flatbed truck and drove back to Oates farm. Wes was buried in an unmarked grave to avoid further desecration. But the scene that unfolded in the courtroom would signify what the rule of law would continue to look like for black Americans in the Deep South.
On February 2, 1937, then-Alabama Gov. Bibb Graves received a long-distance call from Sheriff Corbett as soon as he heard of the lynching, asking for an explanation. Graves sent Capt. Potter Smith of the state highway patrol to investigate. Eventually, the governor ordered an impeachment and papers were filed with the Alabama Supreme Court for charges against Sheriff Corbett for “cowardice and neglect” of his duties.
It was one of the relatively few times in history that a state took determined steps to discover the truth about a lynching. After facing impeachment, Sheriff Corbett mentioned that he could identify some of the members of the mob, and by Thursday February 5th, 10 people were charged with having participated in the “lynching party.”
On May 14th, the grand jury remained deadlocked at 11-7 in favor of indicting the leaders of the mob. Under Alabama law at least 12 members of the jury had to vote for indictment. The case was taken under advisement; after 35 minutes of deliberation, it was dismissed and no one was charged.
Faye still lives in Dothan. She continues to till the red-clay soil her ancestors worked on for generations, starting when they arrived from West Africa. They brought with them seeds and knowledge of self from the motherland. Each spring, Faye plants her seeds to grow tomatoes, yellow squash, watermelons and sweet potatoes.
Wes' story is now being told far and wide, along with thousands of others. In some cases, we do not know the victim’s name. Members of the Tumbleton community got together in April 2nd, 2018 to purchase Wes a headstone. Faye asked for a specific Bible verse to be etched on the face of the headstone. It reads:
“And Ye Shall Know the Truth and The Truth Shall Make You Free”
Wes Johnson's headstone, donated in April, 2018 by the Tumbleton Community.