On July 12, 1947, the New York Times published an article with the headline “Five Convicts Slain in Break in Georgia.” It opened: “Five Negro convicts were shot to death and eight others were wounded, two critically, in an escape attempt at a state highway work camp today, Warden H. G. Worthy said. The article continued, relying heavily on the warden’s account of events:
A group of new prisoners joined the camp yesterday and were sent out today to work on the Jesup Highway. The new men refused to work and were brought back to the camp about 4 p.m. They would not get out of the trucks when ordered and Warden Worthy called county police. Chief of Police Russell B. Henderson of Glynn County talked to the prisoners and told them to do what the warden ordered, “cut out that foolishness.” The men were taken back to the prison camp; when they left the trucks, they were lined up in the prison enclosure. When the police chief finished talking to them they broke, ran to the barracks and dove under the building, which is about two feet off the ground. The prisoners crawled on under the building and ran toward the fence enclosure on the other side. Officers then opened fire with shotguns and rifles. That day, five were killed and eight were wounded. Fourteen prisoners came back and surrendered.
On the face of it, the words are unremarkable. Convict camps were brutal places, and many prisoners tried to escape over the years. However, the initial account of what happened at Anguilla Prison Camp on July 11, 1947 turned out to be remarkable after all: It was a complete lie.
What actually took place at Anguilla was a massacre.
Three days after eight Black men (not five, as the paper had announced) were killed at Anguilla, the Times reported that a grand jury would launch an investigation to scrutinize the killings at the camp. The assistant director of the State Department of Corrections, J.B. Hatchett told the reporter that “his investigations of the shootings had led him to the conclusion that Warden W. C. Worthy was not drunk and had not been drinking, as charged by a Negro convict at a coroner’s jury investigation Saturday.” On July 18th, a grand jury exonerated Warden Worthy and five guards.
Case closed, right? No. Actually, things were just getting started.
Worthy told the grand jury that a prisoner named Willie E. Bell had tried “to charge and disarm him.” In self-defense, Worthy claimed, he shot Willie E. Bell in the leg. But Mr. Bell told a different story. He testified that Warden Worthy was “half drunk” and “wanted to kill me.” Mr. Bell’s story echoed that of other incarcerated men, who, immediately following the events, had spoken of drunk guards gunning them down in cold blood.
The events of July 11th and the divergent accounts that followed captured national attention. Protests erupted across the country. White-owned newspapers swiftly published Warden H. G. Worthy’s account of the events with no other witness accounts or victim statements. Misinformation propagated by media who parroted the accounts of prison officials spread, and a narrative of a prison break led by Black men took hold. Some reports led with an account of a sit-in strike. Faced with this campaign of misinformation, the NAACP undertook their own investigation, initiated by the President of the Brunswick chapter, F. A. Moore, and led by Walter White, who was appointed the executive secretary. The NAACP revealed that prison guards had in fact “ordered the Negro prisoners into a ditch occupied by poisonous snakes.” They were ordered to do this without any shoes. If prisoners refused, the guards shot at them, killing several men.
On July 17, 1947, White wrote to the governor of Georgia, M. E. Thompson, describing how the fabricated stories shaped public impressions of the events at Anguilla. The responsibility of the state was clear, White told Thompson, and as the Chief Executive of the State of Georgia, it was his responsibility to ensure a full investigation and prosecute guilty parties. [1]
That August, a hearing took place. Testifying before the State Board of Corrections, Sam Levine, Glynn County Commissioner, elaborated on what occurred at the Anguilla Prison Camp:
There was no justification for the killings. The chief of county police and two policemen were there, but they didn’t see any reason to shoot the prisoners. They had tear gas guns they could have used.
I saw the Negroes where they fell. Two were killed where they crawled under the bunkhouse and two others as they ran under their cells. The only thing they were trying to escape was death. Only one tried to get over the fence.
Prison officials had contended that the prisoners were planning an escape. Levine rejected this pretense for the violence. Had the incarcerated men really wanted to escape, he pointed out, they could “have overpowered their two guards on the road instead of waiting until they were back in the barracks surrounded by guards and police all heavily armed.”
The State Board of Corrections concluded that the Grand Jury conducted a “one-sided whitewash investigation” of the Anguilla Prison Camp massacre. The Board demanded a new inquiry, abolished the camp, and ordered the seventy prisoners still incarcerated at Anguilla to be transferred to other camps or to the state prison.
Meanwhile, the NAACP and other organizations continued to cover the events and mount protests. Due in large part to the pressure applied via this national spotlight, in October 1947 the warden and four guards at Anguilla were federally indicted for violating civil rights statutes. They were charged with depriving the eight men who had been murdered while incarcerated at Anguilla of their constitutional right “to be secure in their person while in the custody of the State of Georgia and to be immune from illegal attack at the hands of officers and employees of the State of Georgia while in custody, and not to be subjected to punishment without due process of law.”
The federal trial began on October 27, 1947. On November 4th, the jury deliberated about the fates of the warden and four guards for eight minutes—then found all five men not guilty.
— Mariame Kaba
[1] Lynching, Anguilla Prison Camp, Brunswick, GA. 1947. II:A406. NAACP Records. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.