Creek treaty & Springfield riots

TREATY OF INDIAN SPRINGS 1825

12th FEBRUARY is a significant date to indigenous ancestors. It was on this day that the Creek nation signed the treaty known as the "Treaty of Indian Springs"

WILLIAM McINTOSH

William McIntosh, the son of a Creek woman and American Revolution hero signed away almost all remaining Creek land in Georgia in exchange for a plantation on the Chattahoochee River. Peace evaded the settlers for many years and the migration proved devasting to the Creek Nations.

SPRINGFIELD RIOTS OF 1908

CLAIM OF BEING DRAGGED AND RAPE BY A NEGRO CAUSED MAYHEM

One Mabel Hallam, the twenty-one year old wife of a respectable city street car conductor, was allegedly snatched from her peaceful sleep and sexually assaulted by a black fiend. The outraged Hallam identified her attacker as George Richardson, a caretaker who worked odd jobs in the her neighborhood. By Friday, August 14, two blacks sat in jail, Joe James and George Richardson both accused and assumed to have raped white women. The local newspaper continued practicing "yellow journalism" stirring up the people of Springfield against the black community.

Scott Burton lynched

On the way, however, a section of the angry crowd encountered the first resistance when they confronted a black barber named Scott Burton. When he saw the mob approach, Burton decided to protect his property and stood in the doorway with a shotgun. The mob wanted to destroy the barber shop because it was owned by a black man and because he had a white wife, but they did not want to get killed themselves. Out of fear Burton fired a blast of buckshot into the crowd. The crowd returned the fire and Burton was killed. His barber shop was burned and his body was paraded from his porch to a place several blocks away where it was hanged from a tree outside a saloon. Burton's corpse became the symbol of the mob's hatred of blacks and was riddled by bullets until the militia came and put a stop to that action.

burnt out baber shop

Mabel Hallam later told the authorities she made up the story about being raped in order to cover up an affair she was having. George Richardson was therefore released from jail, but Joe James was tried and convicted of the murder The riots of springfield resulted in the establishment of the NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which is a prominent civil rights organisation in the USA.

may the misunderstandings and mistakes of our ancestors be forgiven...

oh deity of forgiveness may we learn from these mistakes

we pour libations in your honour