Liberty County received historic snowfall on Tuesday night as a result of Winter Storm Enzo, a weather system that brought blizzard conditions to the Gulf Coast and lower Southeast. I’m sharing a few random landmarks from my local rambles of the past week. My only regret is that I couldn’t photograph everything. I hope you enjoy seeing these as much as I enjoyed making them. I’ll be sharing some shots from Long County, as well.
Pleasebe 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.
I Hope Baptist Church, where the Brazier family attended church. The church standing at the time of Brazier’s death was burned during the widespread local church burnings in 1962. Marvin Milner, along with two other white men, actually served prison time for this act.
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. Wardwho 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.
Headstone of James C. Brazier, I Hope Cemetery. (c.1926-1958)
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.”
Hattie Bell Brazier. Courtesy Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project via Veda Brazier Bush. Public domain image with no known restrictions.
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.
James Brazier in his Navy uniform. Courtesy Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project via Veda Brazier Bush. Public domain image with no known restrictions.
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.
“He is never far from any of us”. One of at least ten “story windows” installed at Mount Mary in 1963.
Mount Mary Baptist Church in Chickasawhatchee, a forgotten settlement near Sasser, shares a similar history with other Black churches in the area. It was an active congregation founded by freedmen and their descendants in the late 19th century. [I’m still confirming details about the history of the church and will update when I learn more].
In 1962 Mount Mary was used for voter registration meetings by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and like Shady Grove in Leesburg and Mount Olive in Sasser, it was burned to the ground in retaliation. In fact, it was destroyed on the same day as Mount Olive, 9 September 1962. It was rebuilt in 1963. The stained glass windows are the most notable feature of the church, which was designed by Atlanta architect Joe Amisano. Trappist monks of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers are credited with the windows. I’m not sure if the other churches feature the “story windows”, with verses and illustrations. I am trying to learn more about them.
Mount Olive Baptist Church was established in Sasser in 1896 by freedmen and their descendants. In 1962, as the Albany Movement spread beyond the borders of Dougherty County with the intention of registering voters and raising civil rights awareness, it played a central role in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Many Black churches were resistant to the movement due to the potential for retaliation by White employers and law enforcement and many of those fears were realized at Mt. Olive, with the unapologetic support of Terrell County sheriff Zachary Taylor “ZT” Mathews. Mathews was an avowed racist and particularly irredeemable character who had most notably led the coverup in the lynching of James C. Brazier.
Because of Mount Olive’s prominence in the community, it was the primary site for the mass meetings of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its allies, organized by Charles Sherrod. On 25 July 1962, Sherrod led a meeting at Mount Olive, with White activists Ralph Allen and Penny Patch also present. The SNCC activists were well aware of the attention they had attracted by local law enforcement but continued their work. As noted in the SNCC digital archives: Mass meetings at churches were under constant surveillance. Police sometimes stood outside the churches, taking the names of people as they entered. In Sasser, Georgia, a tiny town in Terrell County, Sheriff Zeke Matthews and a dozen deputies stormed into the Mount Olive church during a mass meeting and went from pew to pew rubbing their pistols; they then stood scowling in the back. Reporting on this for the New York Times, Claude Sitton quoted Matthews as telling him, “We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years.”
On 9 September 1962, Mount Olive fell victim to arson, with no immediate aid from firefighters or law enforcement, begging the question of their own involvement. Zeke Mathews’s responses to journalists covering the crime were predictably despicable, blaming the arson on outside agitators. He was quoted in the 10 September 1962 edition of the New York Times: “It’s unusual for white folks to go down there living with n___ – pretty unusual. The n____s are upset about it, too – the better n___.” And he told the Atlanta Constitution: “People here are disturbed because some of these white boys are living with Negroes. I think that has more to do with the fires than this voter registration business. People here know that the Negroes just don’t care anything about voting.”
While real justice in the case(s) was questionable, the congregation of Mount Olive persisted, and with the aid of funds raised by Jackie Robinson and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was rebuilt in 1963 during the pastorate of Rev. F. S. Swaggott. It remains active today.
Shady Grove Baptist Church was established in the late 1870s by freedmen families, and in 1880 members James Harris, Paul Tracy, Billy Pope, and Boss Scrutchins purchased the land on which the congregation still worships today. Rev. Samuel Lamar was the first pastor.
On 14 August 1962, Shady Grove was the first of four Black churches (including Mt. Mary, Mt. Olive, and I Hope) to be burned by arsonists in Lee and Terrell Counties. Unsurprisingly, local officials who inspected the Shady Grove site dismissed arson as a cause, blaming it instead on “faulty electrical wiring.” The FBI disagreed and in October charged domestic terrorists Jack Smith and Douglas Parker with the crime.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who visited the ruins of the church, wrote (in part) in the September 1962 issued of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Newsletter, in an essay entitled “The Terrible Cost of the Ballot”: “Tears welled up in my heart and my eyes not long ago as I surveyed the shambles of what had been the Shady Grove Baptist Church of Leesburg, Georgia. I had been awakened shortly after daybreak by my executive assistant, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, who informed me that a SNCC (Student Non violent Coordinating Committee) staffer had just called and reported that the church ·where their organization had been holding voting clinics and registration classes had been destroyed by fire and/or dynamite.
Lee Count y is one of the three southwest Georgia counties where for years an attempt to register to vote has been tantamount to inviting death...
The naked truth is that whether the object of the Negro community’s efforts are directed at lunch counters or interstate busses, First Amendment privileges or pilgrimages of prayer, school desegregation, or the right to vote, he meets an implacable foe in the southern white racist. No matter what it is we seek, if it has to do with full citizenship, self-respect, human dignity, and borders on changing the “southern way of life ,” the Negro stands little chance if any, of securing the approval, consent or tolerance of the segregationist white South.
Exhibit “A”: The charred remains of the Shady Grove Baptist ·Church, Lee County, Georgia. This is the terrible cost of the ballot in the Deep South.”
Shady Grove was one of the three burnt churches to be rebuilt in 1963, with Dr. King present at the groundbreaking ceremony. Fundraising efforts successfully netted $70,000 (over $700k in 2024 dollars) and were led by baseball star Jackie Robinson, who along with Dr. King helped bring attention to the problem. Joe Amisano, representing the Georgia branch of the American Institute of Architects, designed the new church, as well as those at Mt. Mary and Mt. Olive.
According to local history, this structure was built as the Lee County Public Works Building, likely in the 1930s or 1940s, and is variously known as the Leesburg Stockade and the Lee County Stockade.The word stockade usually evokes romanticized notions of Western cattle drives. In the Jim Crow South, a stockade was more likely to be a stark place used for the warehousing of Black prisoners, a reminder that the racial order would be maintained. It was an element of an inherently racist ideal driven by White Supremacy and White Christian Nationalists with the approval and participation of most, if not all, of the county’s elected officials.
In July 1963, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized a protest in Americus, marching from Friendship Baptist Church to the segregated Martin Theatre. According to a story on Georgia Public Radio, a group of Black girls joined the line to purchase tickets and were arrested on site. They ranged in age from 12-15. After being briefly held in Dawson, they were transferred to the Leesburg Stockade. Their parents knew nothing of their whereabouts until a janitor got word to them of their incarceration. They came to be known as the Stolen Girls.
Conditions in the stockade were horrible. The girls slept on concrete floors with barely-running water and a non-functioning toilet. Food was brought to them but was often under-cooked or substandard. It’s hard to imagine a society that thought it was acceptable for this to happen to anyone, let alone children. But so it was.
The story of the Leesburg Stolen Girls was widely publicized by SNCC. When photographer Danny Lyon’s images were published in Jet magazine it brought an unwelcome national focus on Lee County and the girls were released in September 1963. They were not charged with any crimes but were billed for their stay in the facility. Dr. Shirley Green-Reese, one of the Stolen Girls, helped lead the initiative to have a Georgia historical marker placed at the site in 2019.
Now known as Evergreen United Church of Christ, this historic congregation was established in 1903 with the assistance of the American Missionary Association, an arm of the United Church of Christ focused on the construction and support of schools for Black children in the South. Under the leadership of Jerry Walden, Jr., a group of men in the Beachton community formed the Evergreen Congregational Church and built a wood-frame schoolhouse on land donated by Please Hawthorne. A frame church was built adjacent to the school in 1904. Rev. William H. Holloway, the first pastor, served until 1911.
The present school building was constructed in 1911 and renamed the Grady County Training School. It featured classrooms downstairs and residences for teachers upstairs and was designed by James E. Wright, Sr., of Thomasville, one of Georgia’s first professional Black architects. According to the Jack Hadley Black History Museum: “James Ernest Wright, Sr., (1887-1972), was the first African American architect in Thomasville, Georgia. He received his degree in architecture and brick masonry from the Tuskegee Institute during the tenure of Booker T. Washington. When he arrived in Thomasville in 1916, he drew plans for Mount Olive Primitive Baptist Church and helped build the barns at Pebble Hill Plantation.”
The old wooden church was demolished in 1925 and the present structure completed in 1928. Andrew Young, one of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, served as Evergreen’s pastor from 1957-1959, and wrote in his autobiography that the lessons he learned at Evergreen served him during the struggle for Civil Rights.
The first facility in South Georgia where black doctors, nurses, and pharmacists could train, practice, and serve people of color, the Americus Colored Hospital was established by Dr. William Stuart Prather (1868-1941), a white physician who was well aware of the health care needs of this under-served community. He bought the property and built this state-of-the-art facility, with the cooperation and contributions of the Americus Negro Business League and the Americus Junior Welfare League.
According to the Americus-Sumter County Movement Remembered Committee (ASMRC), 33 doctors, 2 dentists, 2 pharmacists, 6 registered nurses, and 18 nursing professionals were associated with the hospital. The resulting black middle class that grew out of this experiment was one of the most vibrant in the state; in fact, Americus-Sumter County had more black professionals and landowners than anywhere else in Georgia from the 1920s-1942.
Though it faced numerous difficulties, it was an important resource for the African-American community until it closed in 1953. At that time, Sumter Regional Hospital opened its doors, and because it used federal funds via the Hill-Burton Act, couldn’t discriminate by race. The act didn’t mandate desegregation, however, and Sumter Regional was racially compartmentalized. Since no black doctors were hired, much of the black middle class left Americus, resulting in a negative economic impact. The Americus Chapter of the City Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, purchased the Colored Hospital building and used it as a nursery and youth center. During the Civil Rights Movement, it also served as a Freedom School and Training Center.
Macedonia Cemetery, Broad Level community, Long County
The Rev. Dr. Horace Clinton Boyd (1926-2016) was born in Long County, the son of Ernest Franklin Boyd and Eula Wright Boyd. His father was a Deacon at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church. After service in World War II, Horace attended Morehouse College and earned a doctorate degree in Divinity. He began preaching at Schofield Barracks in Oahu, in 1946, but went on to pastor numerous congregations, including: Mill Creek Missionary Baptist Church of Ellabell; Baconton Missionary Baptist Church of Allenhurst; St. John Missionary Baptist Church of Waycross; St. John Missionary Baptist Church of Douglas; Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist of Ocilla; and Mother Easter Baptist Church of Moultrie. His longest association, however, was with Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Albany. He began preaching there in 1959 and actively served for 57 years, until his death at age 89 in 2016.
He was a seminal figure in the burgeoning Albany Movement, a significant Georgia branch of the larger national movement. At the time, he was the first in Albany to open his doors to outside activists, and is considered the spiritual father of the Albany Movement for his welcoming stance. Shiloh hosted mass meetings throughout the 1960s, working closely with Old Mt. Zion Baptist Church, across the street. Rev. Martin Luther King drew crowds of over 1500 to the two congregations when he spoke to their members in 1961, at the invitation of Rev. Boyd.
He received many honors for this work during his lifetime and was also involved in leadership in the Albany Ministerial Brotherhood, the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia, the Albany Seminary Extension, and the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Association. He also served on the board of Dougherty County Family and Children Services for 27 years.
Reverend Dr. Horace Clinton Boyd. Public domain photograph via Findagrave.
His daughter Dolores Boyd McCrary writes: Rev. Boyd was married to Mrs. Barbara M. Riles Boyd for 60 years, ten months before her death in 2010. Mrs. Boyd was an educator in the Albany Dougherty County School System for over 30 years. She worked and walked diligently beside her husband supporting him as a faithful, stalwart, loving, and dutiful wife. Her numerous contributions to their marriage, spiritual endeavors and community helped make the path less rough than it might have been without her. She was what some call the First Lady at the churches he pastored and much beloved. Together they raised their two children to adulthood.
While serving as President of the State Teachers and Agricultural College for Negroes, W. M. Hubbard built this Colonial Revival residence for his family. [It’s often referred to simply as the W. M. Hubbard House]. It is still owned by his descendants but at their discretion is not included in the National Register of Historic Places.
