By: Sami Mastrario

Back in 2022, I went to visit Montgomery, Alabama for a personal trip. I made it my mission to go visit the newly opened Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. This site is a powerful tribute to America’s struggle for racial equality.. The Memorial honors victims of lynching and racial terror. The Legacy Museum, located on the site of a former warehouse where enslaved people were imprisoned, provides a comprehensive and moving exploration of the legacy of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration. These sites educate visitors and inspire a commitment to justice and equality.

As a historian, I am always curious to see how you would begin to even create a memorial for something so haunting and devastating to the culture of the South. But haunting is the correct description for the Museum and Memorial.

Seeing the jars of dirt taken from lynching sites; reading the names of the known victims of lynching crimes by county, some lists just unending, some short… the only other time I have felt a similar feeling was when I visited a concentration camp in Germany.

I also experienced the biggest shock when I found out that my small, beloved home, Turner County, was represented in this lynching memorial. Seeing the two names I have never heard of in any of my research – Albert Royal and Charles Jackson – just threw me for a loop. Their date of death was April 14, 1910. I have been studying Turner County history for a few years and I am still learning so much, even the darkest parts that are hard to reveal.

After taking these photos and returning home, I was determined to learn their story.

So the research began.

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What is a lynching? It is racial terror in the South.

Before we can dive into the details of Albert and Charles’ murder, one needs to know what a lynching is. Lynching is an act of violence, typically murder, carried out by a mob without legal authority, often by hanging but that is not always the case. It is characterized by extrajudicial actions and is usually motivated by the intent to punish or intimidate a perceived wrongdoer or minority group. Historically, in the United States, lynching has been particularly associated with racial terrorism against African Americans, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, serving as a tool of racial oppression and control.

Reading the “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror” report that was released in 2017 by the Equal Justice Initiative (read the 46-page PDF here), through exhaustive research, they have determined there were a little over 4000 known lynchings that occurred between 1877-1950, 595 of those reported in Georgia, and 2 reported in Turner County. Again, this is only data for the reported cases, not necessarily the ones that history will never learn about or the ones where the vigilante mobs were not successful.

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Local Resources for Research

Anytime I want to read more about some event that happened locally in Turner County, I always turn to the local newspapers. Depending on the year, I would look at The Ashburn Advance, The Turner County Banner, or most prevalently, The Wiregrass Farmer. Although not always the most unbiased reporting, especially during the Jim Crow era, the articles found are generally good starting points to get more information.

Since I knew the date of the lynching of Charles and Albert occurred on April 14, 1910, I eliminated The Ashburn Advance since it was no longer being published. I turned to “my” (donated to me for research purposes from David Baldwin) microfilm reels and was saddened to see that The Wiregrass Farmer for the years 1906-1913 was missing. Apparently, the original copies were gone when it came time to create the microfilm reels. I went by The Wiregrass Farmer‘s office because I knew they had a few of the older newspapers in bound books in disrepair and unfortunately, they also did not have copies of 1910 editions. My next step was to check at the Courthouse to see when they started keeping bound copies but that search proved fruitless. The earliest copies they were required to have were from the early 1950s. However, a bit of luck was on my side because The Turner County Banner did have two (very sparse in detail and somewhat damaged) articles.

**Please note: the description of violence against Charles Jackson and Albert Royal is quite brutal to read. Discretion is advised.

(Note: There is damage to the upper portion of the article. Please also note that the article refers to Albert as Albert Royals but the correct spelling is Royal.)

(Note: The article refers to Hattie Johnson but I believe they mean Hattie Jackson, Charles’ wife.)

If one had read those two articles, there is no full picture of what happened. For something so harrowing as point-blank murder, the fact that there were only two articles in the newspaper about this is disheartening but not shocking. The Turner County Banner’s coverage does not even name the accused 5 men.

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The Search Continues

As with many problems when studying local history with a lack of information, I turned to our local public library to see if they had any suggestions for further research. In came the Georgia Historic Newspaper database, a wonderful resource full of digitized and searchable newspaper scans from all available across the state all for free!

With a little searching, I found a few more articles from some Georgia papers, one locally from our neighboring county which quotes the (missing) article from The Wiregrass Farmer!

A fuller picture can be formed when reading the article from The Gazette [Tifton, Ga]. Here are some pertinent details:

• The lynching of Albert and Charles occurred on Thursday, April 14, 1910, after election results were returned. A mob formed for unknown reasons.
• This mob went to the home of Albert Royal, a farmer, and took Albert and his brother-in-law, Charles “Charlie” Jackson.
• Their dead bodies were found near the home of Daniel H. Davis, a prominent citizen and significant landholder of Turner County, bound to two trees the next morning. The bodies were “riddled with bullets” and their hands were tied behind their back. Mr. C.D. Baldwin found the bodies while driving along from one field to another.
• Albert Royal faced a lot of hardships, particularly threats to leave his farm in the Amboy area, which he eventually did. He also faced lawsuits as recent as 3 weeks before the lynching.
• Charles Jackson was beaten and “told to leave the country” in between the lawsuit filing against Albert and the lynching.
• A warrant was sworn out against Charles Jackson that said he attempted to assault a white woman. He was arrested and placed in jail. He was released on bail with Albert Royal placed as surety of bail.
• The wives of the two victims and a daughter (Nancy Royal, Hattie Johnson [note: I believe this is supposed to be Jackson, wife of Charles], and Hattie Lee Sims) asked for warrants charging murder against the following accused men, all who were prominent farmers living near Amboy:
  • J.R. Brock
    • James Robert Brock; died at age 55 by suicide per his death certificate
    • Member of the Turner County Board of Education, 1910-1914¹
  • Perry Hamans
    • Turner County Treasurer, 1912-1914²
    • Member of the Turner County Board of Education, 1918-1922; 1922-1926³
  • Monroe Haman
    • James Monroe Haman
    • Naval Store operator in Irwinville⁴
  • P. Justice
  • Mr. Roberts
• All men were released for lack of evidence. All five men established their alibis.

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Historical Legacy

If the ending seems abrupt, imagine my surprise when that was all I could find about this lynching and subsequent legal proceedings. The newspaper articles are so cut and dry; this occurred one week and the case was resolved within the following week. Nothing else is mentioned. I hit roadblock after roadblock when it came to finding more information.

I attempted to locate the victims’ graves to try to piece together family members and hopefully find descendants but there are no graves according to my tried and true friend, Find A Grave. Even reviewing the Survey of Turner County Georgia Cemeteries showed no mention of either Charles or Albert.⁵ My next step was to locate any records of the victims in the Ancestry database full of census records, death certificates, etc., and try to piece together the family. I found a 1910 census record that was taken just a few weeks after the lynching and it was so sad to see how both Nancy and Hattie had “widow” next to their name. Even sadder, young children were left behind: 4-year-old Albert Royal, Jr. and 10-month-old Lillie Mae Jackson [later Clark].

Historian Grace Hale wrote in her book, In the Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning, that during the Jim Crow period from the 1900s to the Civil Rights Era, black residents rarely appeared in newspapers unless they committed a crime. She mentions how many black communities throughout the South were “faceless and nameless.”⁶ But Hale also writes about how those committing these racial hate crimes learned to navigate remaining outside of the media as well:

The past does not have to be ancient to be made of splinters and silence. In the 1940s, white southerners learned to hide from newspapers and state and federal courts the acts of violence that enforced what they called ‘the southern way of life’; they learned to bury their brutality rather than brag about it.⁷

Hale’s insight, although referring to the specific decade of the 1940s can also easily fit any other decade during the terror of Jim Crow South. It is the deliberate concealment of violent acts in the South that underscores the immense challenges faced by historians and researchers. Uncovering these buried truths requires meticulous investigation and the use of specialized resources. Exploring local history often presents challenges due to limited information, but resources like the Georgia Historic Newspaper database can bridge these gaps remarkably.

Despite diligent research, the tragic story of Albert Royal and Charles Jackson remains murky but it does reveal the brutality they faced and the subsequent lack of legal consequences for the accused murderers. Their unjust lynching and the lack of accountability highlight the systemic issues of the time. As we uncover and share these stories, we not only honor the victims but also need to remind ourselves of the importance of seeking justice and truth. This endeavor underscores the critical role of historical research in understanding and addressing past injustices to pave the way for a more informed and equitable future.

I leave you with this. If you think that because this happened over 100 years ago, we are better today than they were then, yes, that is factually true. Fortunately, at least in our community, we are not witnessing vigilante justice in the face of assault accusations; we are not murdering men by taking them from their homes, restraining their hands, tying them to trees, and leaving their bodies “riddled with bullets.” But just a little over 50 years ago, we were schooling our children in separate facilities up until 1970 despite the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that ordered it much earlier. One sector of our community went as far as attempting to form a private school so that their children did not have to integrate and share a school. In 2007, Turner County High School had its first integrated school-sponsored prom. Even in 2021, students within the Turner County Schools voted to change the mascot from the “Rebels” to the “Titans” to promote the inclusion of all students who attend and several community members were very vocally against the change claiming attempts of “erasing history.” Yes, our community as a whole is better off now than it was in 1910, but we still have so much to learn.

We must remember Charles Jackson and Albert Royal so that we never repeat the mistakes of our past.

Footnotes:

1. John Ben Pate, History of Turner County (Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1975), 98. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 97. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 98. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 70. ↩︎
5. Jessie H. Paulk and Delma Wilson Paulk, Survey of Turner County Georgia Cemeteries (Thomasville, GA: Craigmiles Historical Publications, 1993). ↩︎
6. Grace Elizabeth Hale, In The Pines: A Lynching, a Lie, a Reckoning, 2023. Page xxxi. ↩︎
7. Ibid, page xxxii. ↩︎

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