AFTER THE SUN WENT DOWN

by Randy Reynolds

Fifteen-year-old Violet Appling married seventeen-year-old Gene Reynolds, a smart young man with no particular prospects or ambition, except for his recollection that, at eight years of age he had heard a voice telling him to “go preach.” Marrying into the Appling family, Gene began to see how he would fulfill that calling:  his father-in-law would be his mentor! 

H.R. Appling was not a formally-educated man but who could tell?  Certainly not his mid-20th Century congregations in little country churches and tents throughout Northeast Georgia, people to whom education didn’t (as the saying went) make no never-mind. What mattered to them was inspiration—was he preaching under the “anointing” of God?

Oh, yes!  He was under the anointing all right! It was evident from the way his Bible knowledge, his powerful personal narratives, and his awful prophecies made people burst out crying, shouting, speaking in unknown tongues,  dancing in the aisles, running across bench tops, falling prostrate at the altar.  At the height of a sermon his florid face throbbed like a bright red beacon and his booming voice seemed to make the very rafters (or tent poles) tremble.  

After scaring the bejeesus out of saints and sinners alike and while some cried and  "danced in the spirit,"  H.R. would jerk his fancy mother-of-pearl inlaid accordion from its case and play it like he preached—violently—while, in a loud and beautiful voice, he’d sing some song of redemption from the hymnal, or a song he wrote himself the night before. H.R. Appling was a STAR! H.R. Appling had charisma.  And H.R. Appling had a protégé—my dad E.J (Gene)Reynolds.

When H.R. was on the road, headed home after preaching and singing at some other pastor’s church in Northeast Georgia, it was his habit to stop at a gas station and buy something to replenish his strength.  Some filling stations were general stores where he could get crackers, cheese, buttermilk and a pound of bologna and eat it all while leaning against his car. (He would develop diabetes and begin having heart attacks in his mid-fifties.) Sometimes, all he could find were crackers and Co-Cola and he’d make do with that.

On a night in 1950, driving home with his son-in-law Gene Reynolds after a revival meeting, my grandfather Rev. H.R. Appling eased his new Buick into a filling station in the town of Royston, Georgia, situated in the place the Cherokee had once called Ah-Yeh-Li A-Lo-Hee, “center of the world.”  A commotion was going on over at the gas pump where police cars surrounded an even bigger new Buick than H.R.’s and a little crowd of lookers had gathered, but H.R. and Gene were only concerned with food, so they went on into the station. 

The old man behind the counter saw H.R. and Gene come in with their shined shoes, Sunday suits, bow ties and hats and thought they were detectives from the police department.  “I done told the other officers everything I know.  It was justified,” he said.

H.R. winked at Gene and said in that booming voice of his, “Well, tell it again. From the start.” 

The old man pointed to the gas pumps and said, “That Buick with the New Jersey license plate out there? N***er was driving it.  Pulled in here for some gas. After dark.”

H.R. and Gene looked toward the commotion at the pumps.  

“Another customer, old boy that comes in here all the time, he seen it was a n***er in Royston after dark and went out there and shot him. Pow! Right in the head.”

“Who’s those people they’re puttin’ in the police car?” asked H.R.

“Woman and three little kids that was in the car with him.”

“He was killed in front of his family?” asked H.R.

“Well, yeah! He was in the city limits after dark!  And look at that fancy car, would ya? Prob’ly stole it.”


There were, at this time (and for 20 more years) towns throughout the South and some as far north as Indiana, where signs said, “N***er don’t let the sun set on your head in this town.”  Cumming, Georgia, near where H.R. had grown up, was one. 

Writing this (in 2013) I don’t know whether Royston had the sundown sign or not.  But they had the reputation.  This was the town Ty Cobb grew up in.  Although “Cobb” the movie about his life, showed he was a racial monster, he was not an aberration. He was a man of his times.

Cobb beat up a black groundskeeper at the baseball stadium in Detroit because the man attempted to shake his hand. When the man’s wife complained, Cobb choked her and had to be pulled off her by other ballplayers.  When Cobb stepped in some freshly-poured cement a black worker complained and Cobb assaulted him and got arrested.

Royston’s Ty Cobb, in addition to being a great baseball player—the first inductee of the Hall of Fame—was a successful businessman. He made millions investing in Coca Cola. He developed communities (today, we’d call them subdivisions) in Augusta. He was, for decades, on the board of directors of a bank in Lavonia.  He built (and donated) a string of hospitals in Northeast Georgia. So! He was a bank director, real estate developer, investor and philanthropist who intimidated and beat up blacks in public?  Not a problem if you lived in the America of that time. Especially not a problem in the South.

Card collectors value the baseball cards of Ty Cobb, but, for decades, one of the most popular cards in Royston was the postcard on sale at the drug store featuring a black man, Lent Shaw who was lynched in Royston in 1936. The postcard shows his body surrounded by the good Christian men who lynched him and shot his carcass 50 times.

Fast-forward to 1950:  It was after sundown. The man in the fancy car at the Royston filling station was black. So the white man visiting the station didn’t see that he had much choice.  He did what he felt he had to do: took a gun out of his pocket, walked over to the car and in the presence of the driver’s wife and children, shot him dead.  

Gene Reynolds, (2013):  "There was no reason to do that at all.  The black guy pulled in there and this white guy just walked over and killed him.

"When we got there, they had already moved the guy that had got shot and we didn’t know what was going on. It was a little freaky that the attendant thought we were police and he kept talking.

"They later had the trial and the white guy went free. Preacher Appling and me attended the trial. They let the guy go because he said there had been a robbery in the area a few nights before and he thought this might be the guy that did it."

Gene Reynolds, continued:  "I went to the court two or three times there in Royston.  Little place over there, they didn’t have professional ball or anything, all they had was good revivals and trials. I just happened to go to a few of those, you know.

"Another trial we attended was where a man and his son-in-law, these were white men, had a problem and the son-in-law was running from his father-in-law who shot him in the back with a shotgun and killed him and the father-in-law went free. He was white, you see.  And another trial I saw was where a black man shot somebody during a fight, in self defense, and they found him guilty and gave him the electric chair.

 "In those little old country towns like that they had some strange things that happened like that some times. You know, a lot of prejudice involved there." 


 -------------------------------------------
History is what we choose to remember.   Elliot Jaspin

Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America   By Elliot Jaspin

 

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism    By James W. Loewen

 

The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921   By Tim Madigan



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