The day Dawson Police Officers Weyman B. Cherry and Randolph McDonald arrested James Brazier, seemingly without warrant, was not anomalous in Southern history. When the officers walked onto James Brazier’s lawn, blackjacks in hand, they carried with them the weight of Jim Crow and the
| By Dania de la Cruz | Only four months into his lifetime appointment as a federal judge in Southwest Georgia in 1962, J. Robert Elliott came face-to-face with history. Though he was a staunch segregationist – “strident,” one prominent historian would later write[1] – Judge
| By Nicole VanderMeer | Deep into the second day of Hattie Bell Brazier’s lawsuit against the law enforcement officers she believed had beaten her husband to death, her attorney, Donald Hollowell, called his best witness to the stand in a federal courtroom in Americus. Mary Carolyn
| By Christa Nutor | Hattie Brazier was a seamstress, wife and mother of four children who, through a series of violent family confrontations with policemen in Dawson, Georgia, in the late 1950s, was moved to make bold, risky, heat-of-the-moment decisions that challenged the essence of white
| By Rupsha Basu | “Bubba, why don’t you go on and get in the car,” were the words that Hattie Bell Brazier uttered to futilely urge her husband to comply with the two City of Dawson police officers W.B. Cherry and Randolph McDonald.[1] As the
| By Nathaniel Meyersohn & Hannah Coleman | On April 23, 1958, Odell Brazier appeared at the FBI’s field office in Atlanta. His son, thirty-two-year-old James Brazier, lay in critical condition in a Columbus, Georgia, hospital after suffering a brutal beating at the hands of local
| By Erica Sterling | In the hands of Reverend Amos O. Holmes was a letter, one that had been passed along a line of trusted individuals until arriving in the office of the Terrell County Branch of the NAACP in Dawson. The letter was written
| By Ali Chetkof and Scott Schlafer | Dr. Charles Ward arrived at the Terrell County Jail in Dawson, on Sunday, April 20, 1958, at about 9:30 p.m. to examine a new inmate, James Brazier. Dawson police had requested that he examine Brazier. Ward, who with
| By Erika Burgess | Dr. Charles McCuin Ward arrived in the small town of Dawson, Georgia, in 1955 as a young, single man, only three years out of the Medical College of Georgia. A native of Calhoun County, Georgia, Dr. Ward left his position as
| By Lauren Browning | On Thursday October 29, 1970, the front page of The Dawson News greeted its readers with the stunning news that the police chief, Weyman Burchle Cherry, had died instantly the previous Saturday when his car crashed into the abutment of a
