HELL PUT TO SHAME-Earl Swift

In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War. Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage or debt slavery, that it placed before a public self satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at appomatics more than fifty years before.

By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political expose A hell put to shame also reintroduces three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely

faced punishment for violence against their black neighbours. The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full on war against peonage.

Johnson's lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light skinned, fair haired, blue eyed black man, conducted under cover work at the scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end. And Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the State House as a hero of white supremacists, then redeemed himself in

spectacular fashion with the Murder Farm affair. This is a story that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in matters of race and justice, and the nineteen twenty one case at its heart argues that the forces that so

royal society today have been with us for generations. The book that we're featuring this evening is Hell Put to Shame, the nineteen twenty one Murder Farm massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery, with my special guest, longtime journalist and author, Earl Swift. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Earl Swift, thank you so much, and congratulations on this book, Hell Put to Shame.

was certainly that month. I was trolling through microfilm of nineteen twenty one New York Times is because, as you say, I was working in a book about the American highway system and how it came to be. I was looking for a three line brief that I knew was somewhere in the paper that month about the Federally Highway Actress.

that was underway down in Georgia. The case involved a word that I had never seen before, that being p andage, And as I read, I realized, just from what was said in these stories that P and H was the word from which we get the word peon, and it is a form of slavery that managed to endure after appomatics in the Thirteenth Amendment for generations and well into the twentieth century, pretty much up until and including World

War Two. Vestes even remained with us today. But this murder case involved the wholesale slaughter of an entire workforce on a plantation in World Georgia. And the more I read, the more I wanted to read. And I abandoned my research into the Federal Aid Highway Act of nineteen twenty one for the day and just started reading one story after another, you know, successive days stories, the coverage of this, of this investigation, and then the trial of the suspect in the case.

But you happen to get stopped when you're penniless and looking for work. You're a vagrant and you're going to jail. Gus Chapman had been picked up on this vagrancy charge. He had been hit with a fine that he could not pay, and so he was looking at six months on the chain gang. And while he pondered this fate in walk to farmer from Jasper County, forty miles southeast of Atlanta. This farmer said, look, you know, things are looking pretty bleak for you. The chain gangs no fun

at all. Why don't you let me pay your fine and then you can come work out your sentence with me. I'll put you to a work, work, and then when you know you get to the end of your term, I'll let you go. But in the meantime, you know it'll be it'll be like a home to you. Now. Gus Chapman, being a young he was thirty nine years old at the time. A young black man in the South had done almost exclusively agricultural work, so this was

pretty attractive to him. So he went off with this farmer who turned out to be the son of a plantation owner in Jasper County, and he found out that its charms had been oversold pretty dramatically. He was kept imprisoned. He was locked up at night with others in the same boat, other young black men who had been bailed out of local jails. He worked at the wrong end

of a shotgun barrel. He was beaten for any infraction real or imagine, most of them imagined, and these were beatings with whatever was handy, bridles, trace chains, of a lot of the stuff that would be used to haul wagons and carriages. He also told the agents that he had witnessed the white overseers of this plantation murder some of his fellow peons before his eyes.

would have been he would have been murdered. But he managed to beg his way out of that with the assurance that if he tried it again, he'd be killed like a snake.

then put to work as a slave. And the most important element of being a peon, I should mention, is that you know if your life was in the hands of the plantation owner. There was very little record keeping. The state didn't keep track of where you were after you left their custody. You know, these peons would be bailed out of the jail and they vanished into the

void as far as the state was concerned. So the plantation owners were who used this system were breeded do whatever they wanted, and they had very little, very little financial incentive to treat their people well, to even keep

them alive. In the bad old days of chattel slavery, a plantation owner at least had that he had a financial incentive to care for his slaves insofar as he had a big investment in them, and that investment group from year to year, and so it made no sense to kill a slave, you know, to beat him to the point where he was he was crippled, because you were hurting your own investment. Whereas a plantation owner in the nineteen twenties who was getting peons out of the

local jail. Whereas a plantation owner who kept peons had only the investment of the you know, the piddling find that he had paid and so had very little skin in the game. Really, when you get down to it in terms of treating anyone with even a modicum of humanity.

clothed and whatnot. But when they went on a tour of the property with Williams, they came upon a bunk house that was locked from the outside, and they saw other physical evidence that in the agg or get convinced them, you know, this guy's he's running a peunage operation. Now they realized after talking attempting to talk to some of the peans that they none of these workers would say

a word. They were terrified of Williams. And so the agents agents Wismar and Brown realized they were going to have to figure out a way to get these these field hands away from the boss so they could speak freely. And until then their case was kind of with sky Meet.

River in neighboring Newton County. This is fourteen miles from the Williams place by road, and he notices something odd in the middle of the river, a foot sticking up out of the water. So it goes and gets some neighbors. They take a boat out that this foot belongs to a young black man who is drowned in the water, and he's tied with wire to another young black man also in the water, also drowned. They dragged the bodies

to the shore. There before them are two field workers, obviously by the way they're dressed and cover alls and whatnot, who had been wired together, what wired, you know, their hands, Their hands were tied behind their backs with wire and then that wire was tied together so they were bound to each other, and then wrapped around their necks was a heavy chain, a trace chain, and tied to the trace chain was a one hundred pounds sack of rocks.

So the you know, the local some in the sheriff, who in turn some of the county coroner, the local doctor who operated as the coroner, and a corner's inquest took place right there in the river, and they determined that these men, who were in their twenties if not younger, had been alive when they hit the water, and that they had been thrown off that bridge that the little

boy had been playing under. That bridge was called Allen's Bridge, and it's between Monticello and Jasper County and Jackson, the county seat of neighboring Butts County.

nothing around. People have some houses on the river, but you know they're a long ways away. This is in this is the back of beyond. And within no time at all after this discovery was made, two hundred people had gathered on the riverbank. That's how many people watch

the Carner's inquest when it took place. And it just boggles my mind to think that it with the communications such as they were at the time, you know that that a crowd like that would materialize almost instantly, you know, at this tiny rural bridge over a over a river that nobody gave much thought to.

and part time preacher was lynched in Jasper. He certainly wasn't the first lynching there, but that was unsolved at the time that this case came to be.

rid of these young black men. So eventually this story wound up on the desks of agent Squismar and Brown, who instantly saw that these bodies have been recovered from waterways that were in the neighborhood of the john S Williams Plantation in neighboring Jasper County, And they took a trip down and found that a lot of the black faces that they'd seen on the plantation on their first visit appeared to be missing now to their horror, horror

realized that they may have inadvertently kicked off, kicked off these deaths.

governor of Georgia in nineteen seventeen. He had been the lead prosecutor in the Leo Frank case of four years before, and that's generally remembered as a great miscarriage of justice in which the Jewish manager of a local pencil company was put on trial for the murder and rape of a young girl, thirteen year old girl who worked for him, despite strong evidence that he had nothing to do with the with her death, and in fact, despite the fact

that the state's main witness against him was most likely

the killer. In the course of getting the conviction, Dorsey pulled every dirty trick in the book and debased himself as a lawyer pretty dramatically, but was heralded as the protector of white womanhood in the Georgia of the day and swept into office and then one reelection in nineteen eighteen for another two year term, and was approaching the end of his second term when these events unfolded, and you know, when the agents put two and two together

and realized that John S. Williams might have something to do with the you know, with the appearance of these bodies and local rivers. They also realized that Jasper County and Newton Counties might be incapable of adequately bringing a case against him. For one thing, he was cousins with the sheriff, he had done business with the local prosecutor. You know, there were conflicts of interest all over the place.

And layered on top of that was the fact that he was the richest man in Jasper County by reputation at least, and one of its largest landowners, you know, a pillar of the community, a pillar of his church, a major donor to every public cause. So this guy was a first citizen. And so the agents worried that these kindies were just not going to be able to put together the political wherewithal to make a case happen,

and so they went to Hugh Dorsey. Now they knew, of course, everybody knew Dorsey's past, and you know, the fact that he had participated in what's viewed as the worst case of judicial anti semitism in American history, didn't you know, left them with a strong impression that he was no friend to minorities, And he surprised them once they described the story to him, told him what was

going on. He promised to devote the entire weight of the state behind the prosecution and pretty much commandeered the state's case against Johns Williams at that point. Now he was former prosecutor. He knew what he was doing and did it very well.

every American how to know about. And I'm embarrassed to say that before I started working on this book, and I did not know who he was. I would not have recognized his name, right. I hang my head in shame for that, because now that I know who he was, it's impossible. It seems to me that I could have lived so long without knowing. But anyway, he was this remarkable black man born in Florida. He created the first black high school in his state. He became the first

black person admitted to the Florida Bar. He became a celebrated poet. He was a memoirist, a novelist. He was a founding spirit behind the Harlem Renaissance. He and his brother were best selling songwriters. They wrote two hundred songs for the Broadway stage and had a number of really big hits, international hits. He wrote lift every Voice and sing since you Know, ever since labeled the black national anthem. He was just a phenomenal, even the force of nature.

He could do it anything he put his mind to. He succeeded at and he was also an early member black member of the US Foreign Service. He served as a consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Then he became a columnist for The New York Age, which was Weekly, one of the biggest black newspapers, certainly one of the most influential in the country, and it was as a columnist for the Age that he caught the attention of the NAACP's leadership, the board of which was almost entirely white.

And we forget that the NAACP was largely founded by by whites. The only black person directly involved in its founding was W. E. B. Du Bois. Johnson came on board with the organization in the mid teens as its field secretary, which was basically a recruiting position, and he put the end in the NAACP. He made it a truly national organization and grew it from a few thousand to several hundred thousand over the course of his five

years or so as his field secretary. And then eventually, after the previous secretary was attacked on a visit to Austin, Texas and beaten almost to death, Johnson was elevated to the UH, the executive secretary position, which is basically the seat the chief operating officer at the organization.

And you know, it's it unfolds what the complicity of local law enforcement. So you know, it's it's difficult to get cases identified as P and H because some of the co defendants would be the law. It was hard to put a face on the crime. And I think that one of the things that immediately appealed in the NAACP about getting involved in this case was this put a public face not only on the victims, but on

the perpetry, you know, the alleged perpetrator. Because as time was going on, it was becoming more and more apparent that John S Williams at the very least knew about the fact that these three bodies had wound up in local rivers and might have had a bigger part to

play than just knowing about it. And then in the next few days it became clear that there were a lot more than three three victims, that in fact, there were at least eleven peons who had had been murdered just since the agents visit on February eighteen, and that there might have been other killings on the plantation that preceded those.

You established the context for this pe andage case, but also to describe the background of another person who was involved in bringing this case from turning this case from a local you know, the case of local interest into a national cause, and that was James Weldon Johnson's protege and assistant, a black man named Walter F. White. Walter White was the NAACP's secret weapon in that he had alabaster white skin. I mean, the guy you would never have guessed in a million years that he was. He

was a black man. He had blue eyes, he had blonde hair, he you know, had kind of an aquiline nose. He by all appearances was yeah, you know, it was aryan, but he was. He was. He was black. He was because he could pass for white. He was just the scenes of lynchings and race riots, white on black race riots, which were shockingly common at the time. And he could insinuate himself into a white crowd of perpetrators and get the names of everybody who had been involved in the lynchings, say,

and then turn them over to the authorities. And it being the South of nineteen, you know, in the late teens and early twenties, none of this ever led to any actual prosecutions. He'd turn over his reports and then walk out of the office of whatever law enforcement official he was dealing with them and that was the end of his influence right there when he left the office. But he was a remarkable figure and had a lot

of really close calls, terrifyingly close calls. So he was on the scene investigating the lynchings many of the limp changes that I mentioned. Of course, the absolute worst was on Hugh Dorsey's watch in Georgia, and that was the lynching outbreak that occurred in May of nineteen eighteen down in the far south of the state, down on the Florida border. The Mary Turner lynching specifically. You know, I don't want to get into it here lest it disturb

your listeners too much. Yes, but the Mary Turner lynching, I think is, you know, every lynching was an act of such shocking brutality that it's difficult to understand today. But the Marry Turner lynching takes that to a completely new level. I can't even think about it without without squirmings. It's just awful.

not taken hold there. And so the you know what you saw in the case, for instance, after Mary Turner's lynching, rather than to cry the fact that this young woman had been brutalized, rather than to cry the fact that there had been a full on atrocity in their community, the newspapers down that way talked about how she had

a big mouth and should have kept it shut. You know, her husband what got Mary Turner killed was that her husband fell victim, was one of the victims of this lynching outbreak that happened in Lowndes County on the Florida line. When she found out her husband had been lynched, Mary brief stricken furious, announced that if she found out who was responsible, she was going to sik the law on them. And the folks who had killed her husband decided to

teach her a lesson. And that was kind of the gist of the newspaper coverage was the Yeah, the people took exception to her.

And there were there were two classes of black worker on the john S Williams plant plantation. In the room, there was a there were a couple of families that were interconnected in through marriage and childbirth and whatnot, cousins to each other. Generally, the Freeman's and the Mannings and uh and they they comprised the bulk of the workforce, and and the Williamses would augment that standing force with additional labor from local jails. That's where the peons came in.

And so they rounded up some of these family members who actually lived on the farm, had been part of the continuing, you know, continuing life at the plantation. And one of those family members was a young field boss named Clyde Manning who was twenty seven years old at

the time. After a lengthy interview that went into the wee hours, Clyde Manning eventually fessed up that John S Williams was involved in these killings and that he Clyde Manning, had been coerced into helping him with all but one of them. Things started moving at a gallop after that, and what you wound up with was a prominent white citizen being arrested and put on trial solely on the testimony of his black workers. And that just did not happen in the Georgia of nineteen twenty one. It was

unthinkable that it would happen. That's, you know, thanks to Hugh Dorsey now being involved in the prosecution and pushing it along from Atlanta thanks to the national pressure that was created by James Weldon Johnson and Walter White and others at the NAACPN and you know, and in the press, it happened.

turned they turned men into peance. So I'm not sure that the witnesses in this case went into that role convinced that they would be protected I do think that they recognized that here was a rare, all or nothing opportunity to get out of the hell that they were living. You know that that basically said, you know, mister Johnny john S Williams, you know, we either testify against him or eventually we wind up the same way these pians did.

Because the state was so energized about the prosecution. I think they probably were just convinced that this was their best shot to get justice and to put together lives that might not have been decent by any modern standards, but at least didn't have the specter of death hanging overhead every single day.

was a real, a very real and justified worry. So what you what you saw was that uh, you know the uh the witnesses when they when they were rounded up and putting the uh the tower which was what the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta was was nicknamed, and it looked like a medieval fortress. You saw these these folks getting ah, you know, a per diem, which witnesses did, and you saw them getting fed in the jail. And

the Atlanta newspaper just found that to be scandalous. These people were living high on the hog, better than they had any right to expect, and it was all the taxpayers expense. Shocking, you know, for a newspaper that was generally pretty dog on progressive for its day. This was a shocking failure, slip up by the Atlanta Constitution. But yeah, they complained about.

eleven that is actually being prosecuted. Hugh Dorsey's plan originally because he anticipated that there would be trouble getting a conviction. Hugh Dorsey's plan was that the state would go after John S Williams and any other defendant who cropped up on one murder, in particular the murder of Lindsay Peterson, one of the two black men who was pulled from the Yellow River after the little Boy made that Sunday morning discovery in March of twenty one. This is about

April of twenty one, and Dorsey. Dorsey's strategy is they'll go hard on that case, they'll try to get a conviction. They can rest assured that there's going to be an appeal. While it's under appeal, they'll try them on a second, second murder. While that's under appeal, they'll try them on a third, and they'll go through all eleven until they get what they're looking for, which is to get John s Williams behind bars at the very least and at the end of a rope, preferably. And I don't want

to give away how the case turns out. It's surprising

number of ways. And Dorsey, emboldened by his role in this case and shocked and appalled by the details that have emerged during the investigation into how these these peons were treated, decides he's going to yeah, he's kind of continue what he started, and he publishes a pamphlet called a Statement by Governor Hugh M. Dorsey as to the State of the Negro in Georgia, usually shortened to either Negro in Georgia or the Statement, And in the statement,

Dorsey enumerates one hundred and thirty five crimes against black Georgians that have occurred just in the last couple of years, just you know, during his term in office, certainly, but mostly in his second term. These are divided into into four categories, ranging from outright murder to property crimes to just needless cruelties that had just you know, had been

perpetrated on black citizens repeatedly over the years. Presents this this pamphlet as a speech initially in late April of nineteen twenty one April twenty second at a hotel with a with a group of prominent Georgia's citizens as his audience. He's invited them there specifically to hear this statement, and then creates an organization kind of a racial reconciliation council

of this audience after he's completed reading it. And at first the statement is welcomed by the press and the public as an incredibly courageous, painfully truthful document, But it doesn't take long for that to shift and for Dorsey to be completely destroyed. He was any any ambitions he might have had for further public office, not that I know that he had any it. I think he was pretty much done after he was governor. We're erased, he was all but impeached, managed to get through the remaining

few weeks of his term without that. But had they had any extra time, I think that the people of Georgia would have impeached him. They were incensed by the statement. And you read it now and it's it's so surprisingly progressive, so straightforward in its language. He said in the in the pamphlet, we stand of people indicted, you know, and if we don't change our ways, we're going to go down in history looking no better than King Leopold of Belgium.

You know, it was responsible for the congoists atrocities, and you know, that was the sort of thing that you did not expect to see then, but you don't expect to see it now either. This was really strong stuff, really amazing. At least partly because of that statement, Dorsey was all but written out of Georgia history. Good luck trying to find much about him. He's he's been erased.

kill you. You know. He became the state's chief witness against john S Williams and was extremely effective in that role. And then the state, it being Georgia nineteen twenty one, couldn't very well put a white man on trial for a crime and not try the black man who assisted him, So they put Manning on trial and then actually put

him on trial a second time after that. You know, it's really interesting when you look at the transcripts of the Manning sessions, it's pretty clear that the witnesses, the white witnesses at Clyde Manning's trial, who had gotten to know Clyde Manning very well during the Chinas Williams trial, white whennesses were very sympathetic to his situation, really did from the stand what they could to impress upon the jury that this was an honorable man ensnared in a web that he could not escape.

after this case, but at a much reduced level. You never saw law enforcement has involved as complicit in its operation. The kind of pe andage that you saw practiced, I think most regularly after this case did not involve law enforcement at all. You did not see people bailing prospective peons out of jail anymore. What you saw was pe

andage baked in to the tenant farming situation. Sharecropping. If it worked the way it was supposed to, a sharecropper worked a piece of land in exchange for a place to live on that land and the tools with which to do the work, and in exchange for half of the proceeds for many crops that he grows, and he splits that those proceeds with his landlord, who supplies him with the stuff he'll need, including his own to work

this land on his behalf. Well that's you know, if it works the way it's supposed to, you have an owner who is on the up and up. You see that split of proceeds conducted fairly. And one of the challenges for any sharecroppers that, of course he gets paid his half of the proceeds at the end of the year at harvest, you know, after the crop is sold. Well, he's got to live for the entire year to get

to that point. So the owner in a sharecropping arrangement would either loan him the money to get supplies food and whatnot, food, tools, whatever he needed, or would have an arrangement with a local storekeeper who would know that okay, when this particular sharecropper comes in, I know it goes on so and so's account. The problem was that there were very few or there was no guarantee that the

white landowner was going to be honorable at all. The expectation was that at least in party would not be. What you saw it happen was that he did not split the proceeds at the end of the year fairly with his tenant. He took eighty and gave the tenant twenty. Whatever it was, it was not an even split. And you also saw him overcharge for the supplies that he'd given that sharecropper throughout the year on the way to

that harvest. And so the sharecropper often hit with with these two you know, digs into his income, often went end of the year owing his landlord money instead of actually getting a payday. And he wasn't could leave because it was illegally Georgia for him a not to have a job and b to leave a job, to leave his his employers. You know, this contract that he had for this this sharecropping without the other side's permission. And certainly if he tried to leave while he owed his

white landlord money, big trouble. So you saw pe andage continue for another generation or two in a much more subtle fashion. But eventually, you know, World War World War two brought a lot of mechanization to agriculture, and once you removed the need for a huge labor force, you removed the need for P and H.

and blacks respectively, did not move as monoliths. So you know, not every white was a cracker, and not every black was a victim, and and but you know what you saw after, you know, in the nineteen twenties was kind

of a gradual dissipation of the lynching practice in Georgia. Certainly, not always, not elsewhere through the South necessarily, but by the late twenties lynching had had fallen off dramatically in Georgia, and by the early thirties, Georgia was no longer the lynching capital of the South as it had been since day one. Pretty much Mississippi had taken over that that position and continues to hold it today. You know, I wish I could say Dan that we as a species

became better with time. But the fact is lynching still happens. You know, it's happened. It's happened periodically over the years, you know, since since World War Two, you know, and there's a lot of disagreement over the actual definition of lynching. You know it when you see it, and it's still happening on rare occasion.

you're a movie fan. It was where my cousin Benny was filmed. All the all the exterior shots of town are outside of the Jasper County Courthouse. Mano Cello. Anyway, the one of the things we wanted to do was figure out where the Williams family farm was, because it's it's surprisingly hard to pinpoint it based on the newspaper coverage

at the time. There's nothing in the official documentation from from the case that pinpoints it, and it's it's really pretty amazing how so many reporters were writing about this case at the time and none of them felt it necessary. And this could be because they're writing for audiences in New York and you know, far flung locations that wouldn't know Jasper County geography anyway, But none of them thought to mention where the heck this place was, and it

was a big chunk of land. So Tim and I went looking for it.

the county seat. And then the bull of the property, more than seven hundred and fifty acres, was over by Jackson Lake, which forms the western border of the county. It's a giant reservoir created in nineteen eleven, and Williams had bought a bunch of property there immediately after the lake was created. And those acres are the pieces of the property that has three grown suns managed for him, and that's where most of the the actual agriculture took place.

You know, it was just a big contiguous piece of property. So anyway, Tim and I, you know, we we traveled up Cook Road and you know, just couldn't see much from the road of this property at all. Now, I later spent a lot of time in the courthouse later on that same visit and was able to trace the deeds for the farm and figure at exactly where it was both pieces of property, and in fact him and I had been in the right place. We had been

looking exactly where the home place was. But I now had the shape of these tracts that john S Williams owned, and because I was able to trace the deeds forward to the current ownership, I could figure out exactly where

these places were. So I was able to go to the lakeside properties, which are mostly now enclosed by a big upscale subdivision called Turtle Cove, able to go there and pretty much get the lay of land, figure out where things were, and figure out that, for instance, the clubhouse of a nine hole golf course on the property is really close, if not right on the spot where one of john S Williams's sons had his place, and that the agents visited during their their stop in February

of nineteen twenty one.

Popper cemetery that was outside the county work farm. Later on, the three folks who had been pulled from the rivers in Newton County, there's a pretty strong likelihood that they also wound up in the Jasper County Paupers pharm although initially they were just buried in the river bank right right on the you know, the sides of the Yellow and South Rivers. So you're looking for eight to eleven

bodies that were buried in this Poppers cemetery. And I knew that they were in an unmarked grave, but I wanted to go and pay my respects and found out, to my surprise, the county has kind of lost the entire cemetery. And this didn't just you know, contain these eleven graves or eight graves. They it contained all of the you know, the bodies of folks who had died as indigens going back for years. Any stranger to the county who died during a visit wound up in that

cemetery as well. So I mean there were there were probably a couple dozen at least who were buried there. And that cemetery is gone without a trace. I can tell you where it was, but I couldn't find it when I went looking for it. You know, the County work Farm is now a piece of property that's split between the Sheriff's Department, a senior center, animal control, the Department of Public Works for Jasper County, and then at

the back a big landfill. And there are very few pieces of that property that haven't been completely reworked over the years. I went looking, I searched, I did a grid search of a forest that's on the property, found nothing that resembled a cemetery at all. I studied aerial photos that went back to world just after World War two found no indication. You know, once you dig a hole, it shows up in aerial photos. You know, for the rest of time, there was nothing that hinted at a

cemetery in any of these aerial photos. And then I asked the Sheriff of Jasper County, Donny Pope, who was incredibly gracious in his dealings with me. I asked if he'd help by investigating this one piece of property behind the Senior Center that I hadn't been able to get a good beat on how it had been used over the years. And so he did a grid search with inmates from the county jail and looking for some signs, some physical clue that there were graves on this little

piece of property I was asking about. He couldn't find any. So we you know, I don't know where these bodies are. You know, if the county ever decides that they want to put up a monument to the victims, they're going to have a hard time doing it where they're buried. Because I was able to find no one inefficiently and no document in the county's possession that told me where these bodies were.