Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery

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. (Apr.)