Prison camp labor was a standard in the South in the 20th Century. Southern states loaned them out to help build roads, irrigation ditches, and other semi-public works. Basically, slave labor as convicts didn’t earn anything for a day of heavy labor.
July 11, 1947, Black men refused to go do this free labor for the state because they didn’t want to face ditches full of dangerous cottonmouth snakes. These prisoners refused to get out of the prison truck at the work site and only left the trucks when they were returned to the Anguilla Prison work camp near Brunswick, Georgia. The prison officials had requested the aid of the Glynn County Police Chief (not a sheriff) to help get the prisoners to get off the trucks. There had been a lot of anger by the prisoners for days because of the demand by the warden that they work barefoot in the snake-infested ditches. In fact, some had been shot for trying to escape the work gang because of conditions. However, those reported escape attempts were nothing compared to what happened on this day.
The police chief eventually convinced the men to leave the trucks and lined them up to head into their barracks, this is when the warden and guards opened fire killing 8 of the 27 men in the road gang and wounding 5 more including a man named Willie Bell who was shot in the leg but who testified Warden W. C. Worthy, ”was half drunk and wanted to kill me.”
Worthy swore he wasn’t drunk and that the men had either attempted to rush him and his guards or made to escape. Worthy was the official narrative though and his story of an attempted escape was the story the New York Times and many other papers ran with. The story of the attempted escape became national news with editorials and officials backing the shooting of the prisoners and Worthy.
The story might have died there and just become another tragic story of a prison riot except the NAACP received a handwritten letter from one of the prisoners who survived. Suddenly there were two competing narratives as the NAACP conducted its own investigation and fought against the ongoing reporting supporting Worthy’s story.
A grand jury was convened to investigate the shooting, but Georgia 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.
The NAACP kept pushing back on the official story though and with a well-orchestrated letter-writing and protest campaign forced the state to conduct another investigation. During a hearing looking into the massacre Glynn County Commissioner Sam Levine went on record saying, “There was no justification for the killings, the police had men and tear gas they could have used.” Levine added that he was at the scene and saw two of the Negros fall and crawl under one of the bunk houses to di., “The only thing they were trying to escape was death,” Levine testified before the Georgia Board of Corrections.
The State Board of Corrections determined that the grand jury had conducted a one-sided investigation to white-wash the incident. The board ordered a new inquiry, closed the Anguilla Camp and ordered all 70 prisoners to be reassigned to other facilities across the state.
In October 1947 Worthy and four guards were indicted on federal charges for depriving the 8 men of their lives. The trial began on October 27 and was sent to the jury on Nov, 4th, sadly the jury took 8 minutes to come back with not guilty verdicts.
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