Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves-gctid51997

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Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves
                     Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves

by Gregory A. Freeman
 
ISBN: 1556523572
Format: Hardcover, 195pp
Pub. Date: August 1999
Publisher: Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
 
Reviewed by Thumper
 
I may have gotten my love for reading from my mother, but I got my love  of a good story from my father. He was an excellent storyteller. During  my years living at home, he would keep me up all night telling me  stories of his childhood, and our family. I looked forward to the times  when it was just the two of us. I miss those times. I miss my Daddy. One  of the stories my father told me concerning his boyhood in Georgia was  about seeing slaves. I didn't believe it. He said, "I tell you true,  there were still slaves when I was a boy. I saw 'em." "Naw, Daddy!  Slaves?" "Slaves?" I didn't buy it for a second. Now, almost 30 years  after that night, I read a book that proves there were indeed slaves in  20th century America, in Georgia.
 
Lay This Body Down by Gregory A. Freeman is an examination of a 1921  murder case where a plantation owner and his black overseer murdered  eleven men because the owner feared a federal investigation for  violating an 1867 federal law making it illegal to practice peonage. Lay  This Body Down is a first-rate account of a little known episode in  American history. Although the book didn't have enough details for me, I  was, nonetheless, enthralled.
 
Peonage was the 20th century version of American slavery. In Lay This  Body Down, Freeman defines peonage in the third chapter titled "The  River Was Full of Dead Negroes":
 
    "The term peon, later used casually to refer to a person of low  standing, originated from the Spanish peon, meaning a man indebted to an  employer. In all cultures in which it has been present, peonage is a  transitional phase between a legal slave culture and a more capitalist  society without slavery. To make peonage work, a society needs abundant  laborers who are illiterate and politically helpless, a rural  environment in which most beneficiaries of the practice do not have to  see its brutality, and a legal system that is willing to look the other  way."
 
Any Kmtyw-American in the South was at risk of becoming a slave.
 
In 1921, John S. Williams, a Georgia plantation owner, practiced peonage  in order to maintain his large farm. When federal agents talked with  Williams after he was accused of peonage, and he knew that he was going  to be investigated, he decided to get rid of the evidence -- his slaves.  Williams instructed his black overseers, (chiefly Clyde Manning), to  kill the slaves, and ordered the manner of their death. After eleven  black men had been executed and their bodies began to surface, Williams  and Manning would face criminal charges for their murders.
 
Lay This Body Down is a highly readable account of an absorbing murder  trial, Southern society, and the South's reluctance to part from its  tradition of human bondage and depravation. I read the book in one day.  Freeman did a commendable job presenting the murders, and in evoking the  setting the political and social backdrop of 1920'S Georgia. I liked  the structure of the book. It read and moved as if it were a novel.  (This is how history should be taught -- not as regurgitation and  memorization of dates, laws, and figures -- but as a series of  illustrative and meaningful stories. More students would fall in love  with it.) But despite these positive attributes I still was not entirely  satisfied.
 
Because the Williams murder trial is not well known, I would have  preferred more rigorous documentation of original sources or information  in Lay This Body Down. The book should have sought to become the  definitive record of this historic episode. Freeman states that the  dialogue and descriptions were based on the transcripts from the murder  trials and FBI interviews. Including excerpts of the actual transcripts  of these events would have provided a more objective view of this tragic  episode, and not leave me with only Freeman's interpretation to shape  my understanding.
 
I also would have preferred that Freeman had interviewed the surviving  families of the murdered men and the Williams and Manning families.  Freeman did state in the epilogue that all of the major participants are  dead, but surely not all of their family members are gone. Their  observation and comments might have added another dimension of  enlightenment.
 
Lay This Body Down is a fast-paced, informative, and engrossing book of an almost forgotten incident in American history.

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Black sharecroppers lived right around the corner growing up before the mexicans moved in. This was in the 80s in n.c.

[Ajamu]

This was mentioned a little in Slavery-By-Another-Name

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Ajamu;52038 wrote: This was mentioned a little in Slavery-By-Another-Name

I hadn't seen it. Meda ase!