Robert Edwards

People

Robert Edwards (subject)

Outcome

Lynching

On September 10, 1912, a mob of approximately 2,000 white residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, stormed the county jail in Cumming, dragged 24-year-old Rob Edwards from his cell, beat him with crowbars, shot him repeatedly, and hanged his body from a telephone pole in the town square. Edwards, a Black farmhand from South Carolina known as "Big Rob," had been arrested the previous day as a suspect in the attack on Mae Crow, an 18-year-old white woman found unconscious in the woods near Oscarville. He was targeted primarily because he was a large Black man who lived near where Crow was found and had been seen in the area. His name had surfaced in the coerced confession of 16-year-old Ernest Knox, who had been tortured through a mock lynching until he implicated Edwards, Oscar Daniel, and Jane Daniel. Edwards had been in custody for less than a day when the mob came for him. Sheriff William "Bill" Reid had transported Edwards to the Cumming jail but then abandoned his post, leaving only Deputy Gay Lummus to protect the prisoner. The deputy was easily overpowered. After gaining entry to the cells, the mob beat Edwards with crowbars and shot him as he cowered in his cell. They placed a noose around his neck, dragged his body through the streets, and hanged it from a telephone pole in the Cumming town square for public display. Members of the crowd continued to fire bullets into the corpse as it hung. The Atlanta Georgian reported that the body was "mangled into something hardly resembling a human form." No attempt was made to arrest any member of the mob. No one was ever charged or prosecuted for the murder. Sheriff Reid, who had left the jail unprotected, later joined the Ku Klux Klan. The lynching of Rob Edwards was the opening act of the racial cleansing of Forsyth County. The spectacle of his mutilated body hanging in the town square sent an unmistakable message to the county's Black population. In the following weeks and months, Night Riders carried out a systematic campaign of terror, burning homes and churches, firing into houses, killing livestock, and threatening Black families with death unless they fled within 24 hours. An estimated 98 percent of the county's approximately 1,098 Black residents were driven out. Their property was seized by whites without sale or legal transfer. Edwards' partner, Trussie "Jane" Daniel, was coerced into testifying against her own brother, Oscar Daniel, and Ernest Knox at their trial, having watched from the same courthouse as her partner's body was displayed outside. No one has ever been held accountable for the lynching of Rob Edwards, the Night Rider terrorism, or the theft of Black-owned land. Like all victims of racial terror lynchings, Rob Edwards died without due process of law