Haunted for generations
Lent Shaw’s family fled Georgia after he was lynched in 1936. His great-grandson returns to cast off the grip of fear.
Going to Georgia was like “reclaiming this space. Me being in this space hopefully helps me and my family reclaim a little bit of what we lost in that moment.”
Evan Lewis, on being the first of his family to return to the town where his great-grandfather was lynched in 1936
COLBERT, Ga. – Ever since he was a child, Evan Lewis’ mother warned him never to go to Georgia. Yet there he was, the first person in his family to set foot in the state since 1936.
“It’s striking how peaceful and serene it feels down here,” he said. “How stark a contrast that is (to) the reality of what happened here, when my great-grandfather was lynched.”
Evan doesn’t recall a time he didn’t know about what happened to his great-grandfather, Lent Shaw. He first saw the gruesome black-andwhite photo depicting Shaw’s death when he was about 7 years old.
“I’ve been haunted by that photo all my life,” said Evan, 38.
At the center of the photograph is Shaw’s bullet-riddled body, the rope barely visible. At least a dozen white men pose by his body, staring at the camera.
That photo is one of the most infamous depictions of America’s appalling legacy of racism, and it appears in history books and museums. The origin of the picture is unknown, but it was run by the
Associated Press, and the Library of Congress houses it as part of a collection on the history of lynching.
On April 10, 1936, Shaw, 42, a black farmer, was accused of attacking Ola Franklin, an 18-year-old white woman, with the intent of raping her along a road in Colbert. Eighteen days later, a mob stormed the jail where he was held in Royston, Ga., dragged him to a treelined creek bed near Mill Shoal Creek and killed him.
He was lynched eight hours before he was supposed to stand trial, on April 28. The mob hung him from a tree and shot him again and again.
The next day, Shaw’s wife, Georgia Hill, was interviewed by the Atlanta Daily World. She talked about how she and her 11 children, ages 15 months to 20 years, were home during the lynching, huddled together in a small room.
“There were so many shots we couldn’t count them,” Hill said.
A shameful history
From 1882 to 1968, more than 4,000 lynchings occurred in the USA. Fivehundred and thirty-one took place in Georgia, which had the second-highest toll in the nation, according to the NAACP. Mississippi had the highest with 581; Texas was third with 493.
“Lynching usually occurred in places where people believed that the traditional legal system would not, in fact, do justice to the criminal,” said Paul Finkelman, a legal historian and president of Gratz College in Pennsylvania. “Lynching has become associated with the suppression of African Americans, usually in the South, and it’s often associated with people who are accused of (certain) crimes.”
The descendants of Lent Shaw don’t believe he had anything to do with the alleged attack on Ola Franklin. They said he was lynched because he was a successful black farmer.
That’s what Alrita Pollard Lewis, Shaw’s granddaughter and Evan Lewis’ mother, said she remembers hearing.
Alrita, 66, said that after the lynching, her uncles were taken out of the house by mob members to see their father’s body.
“They had told my uncles there would be no more Shaws,” she said.
What could have been
After Lent Shaw’s death, Georgia Hill moved their family to Chicago to live with her sister. Hill died in 1958 at age 62.
Lent Shaw “loved his family like anyone else and had big plans for them. But those plans were messed up because of this horrible incident, and it affected more than my grandmother and her 11 children,” Alrita said. “It’s gone down for generations, and it’s almost something you can’t get rid of.”
Alrita didn’t get to hear much about her family’s life in Georgia before the lynching. She doesn’t have many stories to pass down. What she did have was a warning:
“We were always taught that we could never go back to Georgia.”
None of Shaw’s children returned to Georgia. None of his grandchildren has been there.
“It really is a fear factor, and I think this is what they say when you hear the word ‘terrorist,’ ” Alrita said. “It worked on my family, and they passed it on.”
She was the first person in her family to begin looking into her grandfather’s legacy, and when she learned anything new, she shared it.
Otto Pollard, Alrita’s youngest brother, learned everything he knows about his grandfather’s death from his sister.
“The bottom line is the generation of my mother, and Lent’s children, that generation was totally destroyed,” he said. “It destroyed us, too. We missed a whole section of life that most people take for granted.”
Evan Lewis, Lent Shaw’s greatgrandson, is the first person in his family to defy three generations of family warnings and go back to Georgia, driven by a longing for a better sense of where his family comes from and to no longer be afraid.
“I don’t want to live with that fear in myself or tag that down to future generations, so I feel that it’s important for a cycle like that to be broken,” he said.
When his mother found out he was going, it made her uneasy.
“I was not happy. I was very fearful for him,” Alrita said. “He knew he wasn’t supposed to be in Georgia.”
Not even a grave to go to
Evan first visited Georgia in 2015, and he returned a year ago.
Colbert’s City Hall faces a memorial for Confederate soldiers across the street, but there is no remnant of the lynching of Lent Shaw. No one even knows where he’s buried.
There is no paper trail or physical trail, and the exact location of Lent Shaw’s lynching in unknown. All Evan does know is that it happened somewhere along the creek.
Still, Evan is glad he got to ask questions and dig around. His trip, he said, was as much about learning about his great-grandfather’s life as it was learning about his death.
“I was in a place that held some real spiritual significance for me, and that is not something I’ve felt a lot in my life,” he said.
“I’m not even sure this makes sense. (It’s) kind of like reclaiming this space. Me being in this space hopefully helps me and my family reclaim a little bit of what we lost in that moment.
“For so long we’ve only known Colbert as the place where the lynching happened. (We) haven’t been able to get past that and get to the fact that (it) is also the place where so many of my great-uncles, my grandma and my great-aunts were born.
“That is part of the gift in this experience, is to be able to reach into the past and get past the horror and find some of the tenderness and love that is also a part of that space that my family has been sort of cut off (from).”