Milan is located in Dodge and Telfair Counties, one of many Georgia towns with such a distinction. It was settled in the 1880s due to the arrival of the railroad in the area. It was named for Milan, Italy, and of course, has a Georgia pronunciation. It’s “My-lun”, not “Muh-lan”. Many people have asked me over the years why Georgia has such unusual place names, and it’s not just Georgia. The reason is because common names, especially surnames, were already in use and the post office department wouldn’t allow towns with the same, or even similar, names.
Milan became the focus of unwelcome national attention during the summer of 1919, known as Red Summer. The story is graphic, but as Black history is being officially censored in Georgia and many other states, it should be told. And to be certain, Milan was not alone in regards to such atrocities.
On 24 May 1919, two white men, John Baptiste Dowdy, Sr. (1894-1919) and Levi Evans, attempted to break into the home of a Black woman, Emma McCollers, with the intent of raping her two young daughters. Dowdy’s father, Rev. William Dowdy, was the mayor of Milan. When the family refused to allow them in the house, Dowdy fired his gun.
The girls fled to the nearby home of Emma Tishler and were followed by Dowdy and Evans. During the chaos, Ms. Tishler hid in a well. Berry Washington, a 72-year-old Black sharecropper, heard the commotion and attempted to defend the girls. Dowdy fired at Washington, and after a struggle, Washington killed Dowdy. Washington turned himself soon after the shooting and was transferred to the jail in McRae.
The next day, Deputy Sheriff Dave McRanie handed Washington over to a lynch mob who removed him from the jail and in the early hours of 26 May 1919, hanged him from a post at the site of the shooting and riddled his body with gunshot. His mutilated corpse was left in public view for at least a day, no doubt as an ominous warning to the local Black community.
What an awful story. I echo the comments from Ann, above.
I have a more recent, and entirely different, memory of Milan. As a young college student in the 1970’s, I worked summers and Christmases for my family’s now-defunct wholesale hardware business in Savannah, which had some 1000 retail customers across eastern GA and SC, and northern FL, serviced by territory salesmen who lived somewhere in the area they covered.
Ernest Martin’s store in Milan was one such customer, and I had worked many of his orders, as a summer order clerk in high school and college, earning money to pay for college. The summer of 1972, I think it was, I was a truck driver’s helper for part of that summer, and got to visit a number of our customers in south GA and the SC low country. I will never forget that summer, for a variety of reasons.
That happened to be the year that workers in the northwest states’ paper industries decided to go on strike. At the time, the majority of the nation’s toilet paper was produced at mills in Washington state and maybe Oregon. The threatened strike caused a nationwide panic over the potential interruption of supplies of that vital commodity, not seen since until Covid-19 hit our country five years ago.
Ernest Martin’s store at the time was just a small town grocery. One day our truck stopped by with a delivery, and after dropping his order in the storeroom, I needed to use the restroom. I was directed to a small space in back, the size of a broom closet — and was surprised to see individual rolls of toilet paper stacked along three of the four walls, floor to ceiling! Mr. Ernest was prepared for that strike! (Which, fortunately, was averted at the last minute.)
I have never forgotten that day. Many years later, my wife and I went to Macon for an alumnae reunion at her alma mater, Wesleyan College. One of the alumnae had a booth there with copies of a book featuring many small towns in Georgia. Milan was one of them. As I remember, that book featured pairs of pictures for each entry: one showing the original building, the other showing either the later upgraded version or the one that replaced it.
That book had a picture of both the collapsed pile of bricks that was all that remained of Er5nest Martin’s original store, and the newer building that replaced it.
I bought that book. I would not trade it for all the gold in China.
Godspeed, Ernest Martin, wherever you are.
( Hopefully) we learn from history how to do better and be better people.
How sad this history is now swept under the carpet.