Please be aware there is offensive language contained in this post, in the form of contemporary quotes.

In 1958, most White families in Terrell County earned less than $4000 a year. James C. Brazier (1926-1958), a WWII veteran, and his wife Hattie Bell Brazier worked five jobs between them, and earned at least that much. This was an exception among Black families, who only averaged $1300 a year, but the Braziers were an exceptional family. They knew they had to work extra hard to just get by, and they thrived. They owned their own home and James had purchased two new cars between 1956-1958. The mere sight of James driving around town in his new Chevrolet Impala triggered rage in some of the most virulent racists in the county, Dawson police chief Howard Lee, officers Weyman Burchle Cherry (1926-1970), Randolph McDonald (1910-1995), and sheriff Zachary Taylor “Z.T.” Mathews (1892-1984), prominent among them.

The Braziers weren’t involved in any of the Civil Rights activities just beginning to simmer in 1958, even though as a successful young Black man, James Brazier was often the target of overzealous law enforcement, having been arrested on trumped up charges at least a half a dozen times. He had sustained physical violence requiring a hospital visit after at least one of the arrests, in 1957. When Brazier asked Cherry why he was being treated so badly, the officer replied, “You is a nigger who is buying new cars and we can’t hardly live. I’ll get you yet.” After more physical intimidation, Cherry warned, “You’d better not say any damn thing about it or I’ll stomp your damn brains out.”

On Sunday, 20 April 1958, after spending the day with his family at I Hope Baptist Church near Dawson and later at Mt. Mary near Sasser, Brazier dropped Hattie and his children off at their home on Ash Street and proceeded to take his sister’s children home.

On his way back to Ash Street, James encountered his father, Odell Brazier, being hit over the head by officer Randolph McDonald. He pleaded with McDonald to stop hitting his father, but the officer drove away with the senior Brazier under arrest. James drove Odell’s car back to his house, explaining to Hattie what he had seen. Soon, McDonald and officer Cherry arrived at the Ash Street residence. They dragged James outside, in front of his family and his neighbors, hit him in the head with a blackjack, and kicked him in the groin. James, Jr., attempting to help his father, was callously pushed to the ground by Cherry. The officers bore no warrant, but of course, in the Jim Crow South, they didn’t really need one. They told him he was being charged with threatening an officer and interfering with the arrest of Odell Brazier.

James Brazier was still wearing his Sunday clothes when he was booked into the Terrell County jail, though they were stained and bloodied by this time. A perfunctory exam by Dr. Charles Ward, the county medical officer, declared Brazier intoxicated. His speech was slurred, but this was due to his serious head injuries. In this sense, Ward was as complicit in Brazier’s eventual death as anyone else. Other prisoners at the jail later recalled that Brazier was taken out during the night by Cherry, McDonald, and other law officers. After a protracted absence, he returned naked but for an army blanket, bloody, and incoherent. He was not even physically able to walk into his sham hearing in mayor’s court the next morning and had to be carried out of his cell. Mayor Verma Lee Singletary (1908-1981) ordered the trial postponed, noting that Brazier seemed intoxicated. Upon seeing her husband near the end of the “trial”, Hattie let out a scream and was thrown out of the courtroom. She later stated “He was sitting in a chair, slung over, and his tongue was hanging kind-of half-way out and a long sleet of white slobber was hanging out his mouth.”

After the sham trial, Hattie rushed James to the Terrell County Hospital, where Dr. Ward (the same Dr. Ward who had proclaimed Brazier to be drunk the night before) suggested Brazier, by now completely unconscious, be taken to a specialist in Columbus. He died on 25 April 1958 at the Columbus Medical Center. His cause of death was officially listed as cerebral necrosis and hemorrhage related to head trauma. He was buried with military honors at I Hope Cemetery.

The Braziers left Dawson a few months after James’s death, but they fought hard for justice. As his son lay dying in Columbus, Odell Brazier drove to Atlanta to report the case to the FBI. Hattie spent years seeking justice for her husband. Racial violence continued to be perpetrated by local law enforcement. Just months after the lynching of Brazier, officer Cherry shot Tobe Latimer at a juke joint and killed another Black man, Willie Countryman soon thereafter. Sham arrests continued to taunt the African-American community, and though more FBI investigations continued, little came of the efforts. Terrell County was getting a lot of negative attention in the national press, but nothing changed at the time. Dawson News editor and future mayor Carl Rountree’s (1904-1985) local response to these shameful events was thus: “At the moment without a ‘Little Rock,’ The Washington Post and Times-Herald must have a whipping boy…And so they have chosen Dawson, on the basis of rumor, as its new target…The negroes of Dawson have nothing to fear.”

Outside pressure continued to focus on Terrell County, but with little hope of real justice, it went nowhere. Witnesses to Brazier’s beating changed their testimonies out of fear, and one, Marvin Goshay (c. 1937-1961), was found dead in a local funeral home, apparently asphyxiated. Not that their testimonies would have mattered. Racists were so entrenched in Georgia’s political and legal system at the time, from Senator Richard B. Russell and Governor Herman Talmadge right down to local judges and lawmen, that legal actions in the Brazier case were hopeless from the start. Hattie filed a civil suit against the Terrell County officers, but it also failed to get justice for the Brazier family.

Hattie Bell Brazier eventually moved to New Jersey to be near her daughter, Veda. She remarried and became Hattie Watson. She died in 2005. Her legacy is the tireless work she did to right a wrong that should never have happened.

Z. T. Matthews remained sheriff of Terrell County until 1969. Weyman Cherry, who was promoted to police chief soon after the Brazier case, remained in that office until being killed in a car crash in 1970. The county eventually moved on to the point where Black politicians and law enforcement officers were commonplace, but this story should never be forgotten.

At a time when Black history is being purged from schools, I feel the worst stories of the Jim Crow era deserve as big an audience as possible. We don’t need the schools to share these stories, nor do we need to dwell on them, but their censorship by politicians speaks to the fact that for many, these views haven’t ever changed. They are painful reminders, but important to our shared histories.

Sources/Suggested Reading. The following sources are excellent introductions and much more detailed than mine.

An Overview of the Brazier Case, The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University

Hattie Brazier Stands Up, by Marie Kelly