The City of Watkinsville and Oconee County will unveil a memorial plaque at 2 p.m. on June 29 at the Oconee County Courthouse in Watkinsville recognizing the nine victims of the 1905 lynching on that site.
That date is the 120th anniversary of the lynching, which left eight of the men dead and one wounded in the area behind what is now the Courthouse.
The nine men, eight of them Black and one White, were taken from the county jail by a mob and tied to a fence with their hands tied behind their backs.
The mob fired vollies of shots from riffles, shotguns, and pistols into the line of prisoners, according to a 1998 account of the event by University of Georgia Law Professor Donald E. Wilkes Jr.
The county demolished the old jail in 2017 for construction of the sally port for the secure transfer of prisoners where the jail stood at the rear of the Courthouse.
Discussion of an acknowledgment of the lynching began at that time and has surfaced periodically since.
A news release issued by the City of Watkinsville on Wednesday called the installation of the plaque “long-overdue.” The plaque will be located near the Courthouse and site of the old jail, the release states.
“This memorial is not just about the past--it’s about who we are today and who we want to be as a community,” Watkinsville Mayor Brian Brodrick is quoted as saying in the news release. “I’m grateful to our local elected officials and community leaders who understand the time has come to acknowledge this terribly painful moment in our community’s history.”
Account Of Event
According to the account by Law Professor Wilkes, the event began about 2 a.m. on June 29, 1905, “when a masked mob of around 40 to 100 men in buggies or on horseback silently entered Watkinsville with military precision.”
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| Old Jail 2017 |
The mob forced the town marshal to open the door to the jail and the lone jailor on duty to give up the keys to the cells.
The prisoners in the jail were Lon J. Aycock, Claude Elder, brothers Lewis Robinson and Rich Robinson, Sandy Price, Rich Allen, Bob Harris, Gene Yerby, and Joe Patterson.
All but Aycock were Black.
The nine were marched to a corner of the lot, tied to a fence, and shot.
Somehow, Patterson survived.
The mob missed a 10th prisoner, Ed Thrasher, also Black, who was in a separate section of the jail.
According to Wilkes, the Oconee County lynching “is one of the three worst lynching incidents involving a Black victim in recorded American history.”
“In public the lynchings were universally condemned,” Wilkes writes, “and the members of the mob were accused of being outsiders from nearby counties.”
Grand jury investigations were conducted and subpoenaes were issued, Wilkes writes. “But in the end no one was punished–or even arrested or indicted–for the eight murders.”
Wilkes was a leading experts on the writ of habeas corpus, according to his 2019 obit on the University of Georgia School of Law web page.
Initiative For Plague
The news release issued by the City of Watkinsville on Wednesday said the city and county were partnering with Local African American Leaders to memorialize the lynching victims.
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| Oconee County Marker The National Memorial For Peace And Justice |
Brodrick, in an email message on Thursday, said he and Oconee County Board of Commissioners Chair John Daniell had worked with Rev. Joseph Nunnally and Marvin Nunnally from Bethel Baptist Church in Watkinsville.
The late Sarah Bell, then president of the Oconee County Historical Society, had advocated for a recognition of the lynchings when the jail was being torn down in 2017.
In 2020, about 100 people turned out on the front lawn of the Courthouse in Watkinsville to read aloud the names of the eight victims of the mob violence in 2005.
About half of those present then proceeded funeral-style to a grave of one of those victims in the Watkinsville Cemetery.
John Cole Vodicka of Athens, organizer of the event, said at the time that said he read somewhere that all of the victims had been buried in a mass grave, but then he later read that one of the victims, Aycock, the only White victim, had been buried at the Watkinsville Cemetery.
Vokicka said he subsequently was told that Price’s body had been recovered by the family and buried at the Watkinsville Cemetery as well.
He found the gravestone, broken and turned on its face, and set about restoring the site.
Victims of the 1905 Oconee County lynching, as well as of two lynchings in the county in 1921, are listed at The National Memorial For Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala. Aycock’s name does not appear on the marker at the Memorial.
With the unveiling of the plaque, Watkinsville and Oconee County could become eligible for inclusion in a special section of The National Memorial For Peace And Justice for communities that have engaged in local remembrance and reckoning with the history of lynching and racial terror.
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