The Early County Massacre
…began on Tuesday, December 28th, 1915 when white overseer Henry J. Villepigue viciously attacked Ulysses Goolsby, a Black teenager who was on his way to a wedding reception with his friends in Early County, Georgia. Ulysses’ father, Grandison Goolsby, went to Henry’s house the following day to find out what caused the attack, and Henry greeted him by shooting at him. Grandison returned fire, fatally wounding Henry. Once the Early County Sheriff heard that a white man had been killed by a Black man, several lynching mobs were formed that terrorized the Black communities and killed members of the Goolsby family over the following three days. The tragedy was covered in newspapers all across the country and in Europe.
This map shows the location of each lynching in the Early County Massacre. The people killed were Simon Goolsby, Early Hightower, Grandison Goolsby, Edmond Law, and Precious Hall. Several of them used gunfire to defend themselves from the lynching mobs. Click on each location for more information about that person and their death.
Grandison’s two oldest sons, Ulysses and Mike, were with him when he shot Henry Villepigue, and therefore also accused of murdering a white man. They were not lynched because Martin “Hash” Jewell and Edward Jewell transported them to Cedar Springs, Georgia before the lynching mobs formed. The Goolsby brothers stayed in Cedar Springs with their granduncle, Edmond Law, until he brought them to the train station at midnight. They escaped to Mississippi, but were caught three weeks later, brought back to Georgia, and convicted of murdering Henry Villepigue.
Mary Hutchins Goolsby, mother of Ulysses and Mike, owned hundreds of acres of land before the massacre. She sold her plantation and hired lawyers from Atlanta for her sons. Counselors William Chenault Munday and Gibson Hill Cornwell kept fighting for the Goolsbys up to the Supreme Court of Georgia and even appealed to Governor Hugh Dorsey.