Palmetto, Georgia, was, by all accounts, a quiet and growing town in the final years of the 19th century. Located 25 miles southwest of Atlanta, it had a cotton mill, two warehouses, a hotel, churches, and slow, steady commerce. Its Black residents were part of the working and worshipping community that white newspapers would later describe as one where “there was no bitterness between the races.”
That description belonged to the people with the power to write it. The nine Black men who would become the victims of a brutal lynching on March 16, 1899, had no such platform. This is their story.
The fires
On Jan. 23, 1899, around 3 a.m., fire swept through the middle of Palmetto’s business district. A drugstore, a hardware store, a dry-goods business, and the hotel above them all burned. Whether it was an accident or arson wasn’t clear.
Four nights later, during a rare snowstorm, fire broke out again. A pile of wood soaked in oil was found at the front of one building. The town’s fear hardened into certainty: Someone was trying to destroy Palmetto. Gov. Allen Candler offered a $300 reward for the first arrest and $100 for each subsequent member of “the gang.”
In the weeks that followed, a Black man named Boston Frederick was arrested on suspicion, then released. White merchants pooled money to hire a Black Pinkerton agency detective from Atlanta to infiltrate the Black community.
The town was wound tight.
The Confession
On March 15, 1899, Dr. Hal Johnston, Palmetto’s prominent dentist, businessman, and owner of the Granite Warehouse, claimed that a Black man named Bud Cotton had come to him and confessed. According to Johnston, Cotton admitted to organizing the arson, named eight co-conspirators, and described an elaborate plot: a meeting in the woods, cards drawn to choose who would “apply the torch,” and three light-skinned men instructed to pass as white if questioned.
Cotton had no chance to confirm or deny this account. He would be dead within hours.
Johnston brought the confession to Dr. T.P. Bullard, who organized a posse. By the end of the day, nine Black men were arrested: Edward Brown, John Bigby, Tip Huston, Henry Bingham, Bud Cotton, Isom Brown, Clem Watts, John Jameson, and George Tatum.
Because the Palmetto jail was damaged in the fires, the men were taken to Johnston’s own Granite Warehouse. They were to be held overnight and transported to Fairburn the next morning for a preliminary trial.
The mob
The white men gathered at a church north of town. They bought white sheeting from a local store.
Between midnight and 1 a.m., the mob of masked white men armed with Winchester rifles, shotguns, and pistols entered the warehouse. The guards were overpowered without difficulty and left unharmed. The nine men inside were not as fortunate.
The nine men were lined up against the stone wall. There was a countdown. The mob fired. Then they reloaded and fired again.
Cotton, Edward Brown, Bingham, and Huston died that night inside the warehouse. Bigby, shot nine times, was paralyzed, hiding among the corpses — still breathing, but barely. Watts, Jameson, Tatum, and Isom Brown survived with minor or no injuries.
At the sound of the first shots some Palmetto residents rushed toward the warehouse and encountered members of the mob leaving. “No questions were asked,” one reporter noted. “Silence was demanded on the part of the citizens, and it was not denied.”
The survivors
In the hours that followed, the wailing began. Mothers, wives, and sisters crowded into and around the warehouse.
One woman stood outside, shouting into the air: “Oh Lordy! Oh Lordy! My son is gone! My poor boy’s dead!” When Col. John S. Candler arrived with the state militia later that morning, one of his first orders was to have her silenced. Her grief, in his judgment, was a “public demonstration” that needed to be controled.
Frank Fleming, a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, described the scene inside the warehouse. He wrote of old women, born into slavery, kneeling beside their sons and chanting. He wrote of young wives calling on God for retribution. He noted that when doctors arrived and the women were forced from the room, they pressed against the windows to keep watch.
Bigby, who was paralyzed, was eventually brought before a coroner’s jury. Testifying in agony, he named men he recognized in the mob, including Tom Daniel, a merchant sitting on the jury. The jury dismissed his testimony. Their reasoning: He had been shot in the back, so he could not have seen who shot him. They also noted, without elaboration, that Bigby had a “spite” against Daniel.
Bigby was transported with the militia to Grady Hospital in Atlanta, partly because friends feared he would be killed if he stayed. He died there on March 21, after five days of what newspapers called “horrible agony.”
Tatum, who survived with minor wounds, also went to Grady Hospital. There he wrote a letter to a Black preacher in Palmetto naming men he believed were in the mob. Captain Barker, commanding the militia, described the letter as “wild and incoherent” and claimed it contained “nothing more than a few lines of illegible, indiscriminate scribbling.”
Isom Brown broke his arm during the massacre, falling to the floor and lying still among the dead while the mob walked through checking for survivors. He told the jury: “I did not recognize any member of the party and wouldn’t know one again if I was to see him.” This was survival.
The trial
At noon on March 16, a coroner’s jury of six white men was impaneled, with Bullard, the same man who had organized the arrest of the nine men, as its foreman. The jury heard testimony from two guards and two survivors. It returned a verdict: the men had died from “gunshot or pistol wounds from a crowd of masked men to the jury unknown.”
Unknown. The men of Palmetto who organized and carried out this massacre walked away unnamed, unindicted, and unpunished.
The court stenographer at the later arson trial of Tatum and Jameson, before Judge John Candler, the same colonel who had commanded the militia in Palmetto, offered what may be the most honest sentence in the entire historical record: “There is no doubt in my mind but many of the men who were witnesses in the trials of these cases were in the gang that did the killing of these negroes.” He added that the full story had never been reported by the papers.
In August 1899, Tatum and Jameson were tried for arson in Fairburn. The primary evidence against them was their confessions extracted under circumstances the historical record does not detail. Both men were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, as were Isom Brown and Watts.
Jameson, at trial, stated plainly that one of the state’s key witnesses was among the men who had killed his companions in the warehouse. No one pursued this allegation.
Johnston, whose warehouse held the nine men and whose claim of a confession set the massacre in motion, received $400 in reward money in January 1900 for his role in capturing the Palmetto arsonists.
What remains
Four of the five men who died — Cotton, Brown, Bingham, and Huston — were buried together in a cemetery outside of town in pine coffins on the afternoon of March 17. Their families followed behind the hearses.
The service was “simple” and “was soon over.” The disinterested left. The women remained.
No one was ever charged for the massacre.
And for more than a century, the names of Edward Brown, John Bigby, Tip Huston, Henry Bingham, Bud Cotton, Isom Brown, Clem Watts, John Jameson, and George Tatum have been mostly absent from the history of a state that produced at least 594 documented racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950.
The Granite Warehouse was torn down in the 1960s.
