Reviewed: “Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery” by Earl Swift

Sometimes it’s necessary to read and understand things that make a person uncomfortable. At the risk of sounding pretentious, those are teachable moments.

And Earl Swift delivers a profoundly important one with his telling of the so-called ‘Murder Farm Massacre’ in Jasper County, Georgia in 1921. It isn’t easy to know that slavery didn’t end when it was outlawed after the Civil War, that countless people actively engaged in it and many more looked the other way while it happened. And it is perhaps even less easy to know that slavery in various ways still exists in America today.

But society needs to know those things. It is the only way it will ever have a chance of ending.

Swift centers the story on John S. Williams, a white farmer in Jasper County who regularly paid the bonds of poor Black men to get them out of jail, often on charges more or less invented to set up the peonage system, in exchange for working on the white owned farms until the debts are paid. Williams, and many others, concocted ways to ensure that the debts were rarely ever paid so the laborers were rarely ever freed. And they were locked up, beaten, and whipped regularly.

In the case of Williams, the slave laborers were also murdered. There is no good way to be murdered but Williams and his sons ensured that the torture of the Black men lasted until their last possible moment of life.

As in so many heinous crimes, it was only the strength and bravery of one man getting away and going to federal investigators that brought anything to light. And it was the strength and bravery of a forced participant in the murders to tell the story so clearly and forcefully that a white jury convicted a white man of murdering a Black man.

John S. Williams murdered far more than one, but it was all he was convicted of.

Swift makes good use of hundred year old court transcripts and newspaper accounts to tell this important story. He sets the scenes in ways that are reminiscent of any Hollywood produced tale of justice in the Deep South a century ago. And he adeptly uses the particular case of the ‘Murder Farm’ to illustrate what came after Reconstruction and how the racial biases of Jim Crow South made it ripe for another round of slavery that few wanted to acknowledge. He shows this through a focus both on the politics of Georgia in the 1910s and 1920s and also on the rise of the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement that would come to know Martin Luther King, Jr. as a leader.

Hell Put to Shame is the vehicle for an important part of American history, one that not enough people know or acknowledge.

I received an advance copy of Hell Put to Shame through NetGalley and Mariner Books in exchange for an honest and original review. All thoughts are my own.