Tag: lynching

Father, son arrested and charged with murder in death of Ahmaud Arbery

GBI Press Release Ahmaud Arbery Death Investigation Glynn County, GA  – On May 7th, 2020, the GBI arrested Gregory McMichael, age 64, and Travis McMichael, age 34, for the death of Ahmaud Arbery.  They were both charged with murder and aggravated assault.  The McMichaels were taken into custody and will be booked into the Glynn County Jail. On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was in the Satilla Shores neighborhood in Brunswick, GA when both Gregory and Travis McMichael confronted Arbery with two firearms.  During the encounter, Travis McMichael shot and killed Arbery. This case is being investigated in partnership with District Attorney Tom Durden. On May 5th, 2020, District Attorney Tom Durden formally requested the GBI investigate the death of Ahmaud Arbery. …

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Lynching in post-Reconstruction Georgia: State-sanctioned terrorism

The following passage is an excerpt from The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia, by Donald L. Grant (Jonathan L. Grant, ed.) Published by University of Georgia Press, 2001. All rights reserved. Book webpage. Lynching in the New South: Georgia After the Ku Klux Klan won its battle to maintain white supremacy, the lynch mob of the New South assumed a major role in maintaining blacks as a caste of peasants and serfs.  Between 1889 and 1918, Georgia had more lynchings than any other state, and 94 percent of the victims were black.  By no coincidence, Georgia had the South’s lowest cotton-field wages during this time. The post-Reconstruction reign of terror was nearly totally demoralizing.  With good…

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Brambleman wins major publishing award

News from Thornbriar Press (orig. pub. June 3, 2013) Strange Tale of Georgia County’s Ethnic Cleansing Claims Prize Brambleman, Jonathan Grant’s gritty, supernaturally-tinged tale of racism, redemption, and revenge in Forsyth County, Georgia, has won the Independent Book Publishers Association’s 2013 Gold Benjamin Franklin Award for popular fiction. Franklins, which honor excellence in  editorial and design, are considered among the highest national honors for small presses and independent publishers. This year’s awards were presented at the IBPA’s annual meeting in New York City on May 29 in a prelude to Book Expo America. Brambleman (Thornbriar Press, $18.95, ISBN 978-0-9834921-2-2) tells the story of homeless Atlanta writer Charlie Sherman, who is tricked by a stranger to finish a dead history professor’s book about one…

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“I was nine years old when they ran us out”

Jacket copy “I was nine years old when they ran us out of Forsyth County in 1912. My father let me take one thing, a baseball he’d bought for me in the spring. I gripped it tight as we pulled away from our house. My mother was expecting my sister then, so she laid down in the back of the wagon. White men on horseback watched us with their rifles pointed in the air. Pop stared forward with the reins in his hands. ‘This is what they do, son,’ he told me. I heard glass break and turned to see a torch fly in our front window. Pop grabbed my head and twisted it so hard my neck hurt. ‘Boy, don’t look…

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