Coalition Remembers Cobb Lynching Victim

Bev Jackson’s connection to Marietta began long before she made it her permanent home in the late 1990s.

Growing up in Detroit, Jackson and her family would make the annual drive south to spend each summer with relatives in Marietta.

“I’m a part of the Grogan family which is a long-standing family in Marietta, we go back more than 100 years,” Jackson said. “Our family home still stands on Grogan Street, the home where my mother grew up.”

A distinct member of the family includes Hugh Grogan Jr., who became Marietta’s first Black council member in 1977.

Amid the happy memories of childhood adventures, Jackson also experienced the harsh realities of segregation, like having to enter the side door of the Strand Theatre and sit on the balcony, away from white patrons.

She also recalls stories from her aunt about the Ku Klux Klan meeting in the woods behind their house.

“I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly of Cobb County,” Jackson said.

Throughout her time in Cobb, Jackson has been actively involved in efforts to acknowledge and confront the area’s troubled history, engaging with community projects and historical initiatives.

Creating the Coalition

In the spring of 2023, Jackson co-founded the Cobb County Remembrance Coalition (CCRC) to honor victims of racial violence and spark meaningful dialogue about race and justice.

The inspiration for the coalition came after Jackson met retired North Cobb High School teacher Wes McCoy at a lecture by Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative.

During the 2022 lecture, Stevenson spoke about his plan to engage communities all over the nation, specifically anywhere a lynching had taken place and had not been memorialized, said McCoy.

Together with Amy Reed, director of the Marietta History Center, the group created the coalition and began working to confront the county’s painful history of racial injustice.

Jackson said the team has since grown to include historians, educators, politicians, faith leaders, legal experts, preservationists and community activists.

Since its inception, the coalition has been closely following the Equal Justice Initiative’s roadmap, which Jackson said works toward getting a commemorative marker back to the home community of lynching victims.

The most well-known lynching in the county is that of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was abducted from a Milledgeville prison and brought back to Marietta to be lynched in 1915.

Before visiting The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Jackson hadn’t known about another Cobb lynching on Marietta Square, that of a Black man named John Bailey.

Jackson was one of the speakers during the August program observing the anniversary of Leo Frank’s death at Temple Kol Emeth, where she shared how she was working to bring to light the stories of Black men who were lynched, specifically Bailey.

“He never got his day in court,” Jackson said.

The NAACP reports that Georgia had 531 lynchings, second only to Mississippi, while the EJI and Jackson suggest those numbers could be higher.

About 72% of the people lynched were Black, according to the NAACP.

Currently, the group is focused on understanding the life and death of Bailey and eventually placing a commemorative marker for him.

“We just got to work, and we worked quietly, because we didn’t know how this would be received in a county like Cobb,” Jackson said.

Eventually, through community roundtable discussions and public events like a candlelight vigil for Bailey, word got out, Jackson said.

“We stopped being quiet because EJI pushes that you must have community conversations,” Jackson said.

She said the idea is to make the community aware of the Cobb County Remembrance Coalition and gain their support, which they have.

“We do believe we live in and this happened in a city and county that is now able to give this very ugly chapter air and sunshine and get it out there. And we’re grateful for that,” Jackson said.

John Bailey’s Story

On March 15, 1900, Bailey was arrested after being accused of assaulting a 15-year-old white teenager, Amanda Snellgrove.

A preliminary court hearing was held two days later and the case was referred to trial, however talk of vigilantism had spread through the community, Jackson said.

“As in many instances around the country and in the South at that time, there were people who could not wait for real justice to happen, or some form of justice, I should say,” Jackson said. “Early in the morning on Sunday, which would have been March 18th, about 100 masked white men broke him out of jail and drug him to the Square to be lynched.”

Lacking a rope, the mob first attempted to hang Bailey from a tree with a wire, which ultimately broke, Jackson said.

“He fell to the ground and they pulled out their pistols and started firing. There are reports that 50 bullets were fired,” Jackson said. “Ten of them hit him and he was left in the Square, in what is now Glover Park, for dead.”

Bailey was taken back to the jail, which used to stand behind the Cobb Courthouse, according to Jackson, where he stayed for two days before dying on March 20.

At the time, there were reports that Bailey confessed on his deathbed, a claim which Jackson calls dubious due to the severity of Bailey’s injuries which included shots through his lungs, liver, leg and back as well as a head injury caused by a crowbar.

“That doesn’t sound like a man who’s really talking to me… and the reports are just all over the place,” Jackson said.

The circumstances surrounding Bailey’s death highlight a miscarriage of justice, McCoy said.

“If some judicial process was not followed, if due process was not followed in a case, that needs to be recognized,” McCoy said. “I would say it needs to be apologized for.”

Uncovering the Past

The coalition’s research committee has worked tirelessly to uncover more details about Bailey’s life and his alleged crime, scouring old newspapers, census records and court documents.

One major challenge the researchers face is the lack of documentation about Black individuals during this time.

“A lot of times, the lives of Black people back then were not tracked at all, because we weren’t thought of as really part of the community,” Jackson said.

Sharman Southall, a retired historian for the Department of Transportation for 12 years, has been working alongside Reed and the rest of the research team for the past year to uncover more about Bailey.

For something to be eligible for preservation, Southall said it has to have some significance, which is difficult to determine when there’s a lack of documentation.

“Significance is much easier to argue about a wealthy person and their sway in the county and their influence,” Southall said.

Southall met Jackson through the Cobb Historic Preservation Commission, which they both serve on.

“We realized that both of us felt that in Cobb County, a lot of attention has been made in the preservation world to the Civil War and also white folks with wealth and their old homes, which are lovely, but not a whole lot for African American resources,” Southall said.

When the group started researching, all they knew about Bailey was his name and the date of his lynching, Jackson said.

By scouring through newspapers, court records, census records, Sanborn maps and more, Southall said they were able to uncover a little more about Bailey, including that he was married to a woman named Mary Roberts and was in his 20s.

“Reportedly, his body was given to his family and he was buried in the country, we’re still trying to find out where, wherever it is, it’s probably covered over by a subdivision now,” Jackson said.

After Bailey’s lynching, there is no record of the Bailey family in Cobb County, which Southall said may have been intentional.

She hopes that through their continued research they will be able to one day find surviving ancestors of the Bailey family.

Southall added that both communities have some work to do. The work of the coalition is not just about historical research; it is also about community healing, she said.

“The white community needs to be able to admit that these atrocities happened and commit to never letting it happen again. And the Black community has some healing to do,” she said.

Both McCoy and Jackson emphasize the importance of telling stories — both the joyful and painful ones — to set the record straight and help the community heal.

“By us talking about this, sharing it, putting it out there, it distances us from that crazy mob of more than 100 years ago,” Jackson said.

In fall of 2023, the CCRC became an official coalition in partnership with EJI, which Jackson said has opened a lot of doors and given them financial support to place the marker.

“Our next big project on this roadmap is our student essay contest, which is coming up, and the EJI has the scholarship money for that,” Jackson said.

McCoy hoped that engaging students will ensure that future generations do not repeat the mistakes of the past.

For the members of the Cobb County Remembrance Coalition, their work is not just about looking backward, but about moving forward.

“Things are better,” McCoy said. “But I don’t think we’re done. I think we still have some work to do in our community.”

Jackson added that a line can be drawn from that period of racial terror lynchings to excessive police violence and mass incarceration today.

Earlier this month, the CCRC held a soil collection ceremony at two significant locations — the site where Bailey was lynched in Glover Park, and behind the courthouse where he was held.

“You can’t go forward if you’re not going to deal with the past,” Jackson said.

Jackson hopes to have a permanent marker for Bailey placed by March of next year.

“We want it to be somewhere that people will see it…somewhere that will be viable 10 years from now,” Jackson said.

McCoy wants those in the community with a story to tell to feel comfortable reaching out to the coalition.

“All they have to do is send an email, contact us on our website, and we have caring people who can listen,” McCoy said.

For more information about the Cobb Count Remembrance Coalition, visit https://www.cobbcrc.com.