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Friend,
It was 1926 and Jim Crow reigned in the American South when James Blaine Smith managed something rare for a Black man in the middle of Georgia: He acquired 600 acres of land. The descendant of enslaved people, Smith was a poor farmer living in a shack just outside a city called Sparta. But he had big dreams for the tract he had been leasing for years, driving a mule to plow its fertile rows and grow cotton.
Eventually, 97 years ago, Smith amassed enough to trade his harvest for the land.
The company the hard-working farmer founded on the property in Hancock County – Smith Produce – became a success, first selling cotton, then peas, butterbeans and corn. Over the years, white men would try to take his land, but Smith held on, becoming the proud patriarch of a prosperous family.
As the family grew, the land was divided among its members. Some lived on their acreage. Some moved away, joined the Army, came back. Still, for almost a century, those 600 acres of rich furrows, pine trees and still ponds have remained Smith family plots, and Smiths have lived on them quietly, staying close to their deeply rooted community of mostly Black families, their church called St. Galilee and the graveyard where their loved ones are buried.
So when Mark Smith, the grandson of James Blaine Smith, answered his door to a white man on a hot day last summer, the visit was unexpected.
Though the visitor, Donald Garrett, lives with his wife, Sally, just down the road on about 90 acres he inherited from his great-grandfather, the two families had never known each other. Garrett brought a gift. And he brought a question.
“He asks my husband, ‘Did you see the letter?’” said Janet Smith, Mark Smith’s wife. “He says, ‘You need to read that, because a railroad guy named Ben Tarbutton is getting ready to run a train through your backyard.’”
Life for the Smith and Garrett families – and for the predominantly Black community whose properties stand in the way of the Sandersville Railroad Company’s plan to construct a 4.5-mile rail line – has not been quiet since.
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SPLC wins Anthem Award for story about mistreatment of Black men in immigrant detention — Read more here.
‘Sacred Ground’: Effort to preserve historic Black Florida community wins key victory — Read more here.
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