It was a lynching that seemed to disappear from the public consciousness, but its legacy hovered like a ghost in Phelmon El-Amin’s childhood Atlanta home.
No one talked much about it, but there were times when the specter confronted everyone in the house. To this day El-Amin, 61, carries with him the story of his uncle’s lynching.
“Dennis was my mother’s brother, so she would use him to illustrate the point that there were still people out there who hated us,” El-Amin said. “While my father would say, ‘We must stand for what we believe in because what could they do to us that was worse than what they did to Dennis?’ ”
Dennis Hubert’s murder in 1930 and its landmark Atlanta trial will be resurrected during a community forum at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History.
Using court documents, newspaper clippings and interviews with El-Amin, researchers Stephane Dunn, a professor at Morehouse College, and local historian Nasir Muhammad have examined the case and its impact on Atlanta. Dunn and Muhammad are working on a book and documentary about the case. They will discuss their research Thursday.
The general circumstances of the murder hew to the familiar narrative of the racially charged era. On June 15, 1930, Hubert, a sophomore theology student at Morehouse College, was accused of disrespecting two drunken white women in the company of two white men in Atlanta’s Pittsburg neighborhood. The men came back to the neighborhood, along with five others, looking for the black man who’d earlier insulted the women. They settled on Hubert, the son of one of the city’s most prominent black ministers, and shot him in the back of the head. Hubert was left for dead on the campus of the Crogman School for Negroes, which is now the Crogman Lofts.
Lynchings were common for the time. But because Hubert came from a well-known and accomplished black family, his murder sparked an outcry within the black community, as well as among some white business leaders. Yet some sought retribution on the Huberts for pushing the case. Their family home was burned to the ground by sympathizers of the killers.
“For blacks it signaled that if it can happen to the Huberts, there was no protection for good behavior and high achievement for any blacks,” said Dunn.
At a time when whites were rarely prosecuted for killing blacks, seven white men were quickly arrested and tried for Hubert’s murder. The case was covered by national press, particularly the black press. All seven men were convicted of the killing, with the triggerman receiving a 12-year sentence.
For all its notoriety, Muhammad and Dunn were surprised that after decades the case was no longer part of the city’s lore as the 1906 race riots were. The case raises essential questions about the impact of class on the judicial process and speaks to the complex social relationships between blacks and whites in the urban South. Muhammad said he only learned about the case as a footnote in a biography about a former Morehouse president.
“It has been pretty much swept under the rug in the city that’s been too busy to hate,” Muhammad said.
That his uncle’s lynching has faded from public view, if not the history books, suits Phelmon El-Amin, oddly so.
“Even though the perpetrators were punished and even if they had been given life sentences for killing my uncle, and even if they were some of the first whites in Georgia to be sentenced for killing a black man, it’s nothing to brag about that you lost a loved one,” El-Amin said.
He has traced the scars the murder has left on generations of his family. Some are obvious, others are perceptible only to him. For example, he finds it curious that his two surviving uncles never had any children of their own. There could be a host of reasons for that, but the one El-Amin has settled on is that the mental trauma of losing their brother somehow made them wary of bringing their own children into a hostile world.
El-Amin and his two older sisters, both of whom are deceased, came to see the world through a lens of social justice. His sisters became involved in the civil rights movement in Atlanta. El-Amin chose a more radical path aligning himself with more militant movements, he said, until he converted to Islam decades ago. He served as imam of a mosque in East Atlanta for 30 years, until retiring recently.
“A murder like this instills a sense of determination and bravery in you,” El-Amin said. “I was blessed that it didn’t come out into a sense of hate.”
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