On Aug. 3, 1928, Jim Hugh Moss, a former Negro Leagues baseball player, sat in the sturdy oak chair where he was to be electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison Farm in Milledgeville. Just minutes earlier, Clifford Thompson, who was white, met his fate in that same chair. They had been convicted, along with Thompson’s wife, of a murder just a year earlier in North Georgia.
An Atlanta Constitution reporter witnessing the execution wrote that Moss, who insisted he was innocent until the end, strode to the chair like a prizefighter entering the ring, gleamed a “golden smile” and waved enthusiastically at witnesses. Then he said, “I know I am going home. I know this body will stay here, but my soul will go to my savior. I am ready to die.”
In their waning hours on earth, the two men had been counseled by the Rev. Edwin C. Atkins, who was the prison’s chaplain for 14 years and tended to 144 executions. In later years, the pastor wrote that he had grown weary of the frequency of state-sanctioned death at the prison. A yellowed newspaper article about Atkins in 1934 had a headline saying, “Won’t Watch Death.”
Ninety-three years after Moss’ execution, on a hot Saturday afternoon, Atkins’ great-grandson, also Edwin C. Atkins, trudged around a forlorn weedy patch that is surrounded by forest and a cow pasture. He was accompanied by Mary Esther Lord Smith, a local historian, and Rick Williams, a local undertaker who also serves as the Republican state representative for the area.
The site is the final resting place for more than 600 anonymous souls who died at that prison, both from executions and more natural causes. The prison closed in 1937 and was demolished three years ago. Much of the prison land has been turned into a park for Baldwin County, including soccer fields. There are also plans for an aquatic park.
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
Atkins is asking the state to cut a trail to the cemetery, allowing the public and descendants of the dead to access the land and to help them in their mission to upgrade the grounds.
Atkins and Smith brought Rep. Williams on their tour of the graveyard to get some political juice in their effort to get the Georgia Department of Corrections to allow them to more properly tend the graves. They come out to cut the grass and have been trying to identify graves, but they are officially trespassing.
There are about 30 rows of graves, which can be seen by the undulating ground where makeshift caskets have rotted, causing the earth to settle. That is, if they even used boxes in the burials.
“I think they didn’t want to waste a box on them,” said Williams. “They probably laid them in just using a sheet. There could be two or three buried in the same hole.”
Atkins bent down to check a rusted Georgia license plate used to mark a grave. The prison started manufacturing car tags in 1930 and used them to identify the dead. No name, just a number in death. Most of the license plates are long gone, so identifying who lies underneath remains almost impossible. Some graves have rusty iron bars as a marking. “If you trip, look down and you’ll find a metal stub,” Smith said.
Atkins and Smith use small plastic flags on wires as grave markings. A scattering of white Cherokee roses, Georgia’s state flower, give the otherwise ugly patch a sense of decorum. Atkins said his great-grandfather planted those nearly a century ago.
Smith said they know the names of perhaps 300 of those buried here, although they only can establish the actual gravesites of three prisoners. (They say a handful of children born to women prisoners are also buried there.)
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
“There’s got to be a burial record somewhere,” said Williams, as he bent down to pick up a decades-old bottle lying near a grave.
Atkins said their quest to identify the forgotten includes researching in state archives, the local courthouse, and trying to track down families of those perhaps buried there.
“I think it’s a sin to let those prisoners rot forgotten in the woods,” Atkins said. “It’s morally unconscionable that you’re not memorializing dead prisoners. Because they were Black, because they were criminals they were thrown in the woods.”
There are almost certainly white bodies moldering there too, but they are almost certainly a minority. According to his great-grandfather’s typed records noting each execution, Atkins said 118 of the 144 (or 82%) of those electrocuted were Black.
Williams, a mortician, politician and fledgling historian, quoted 19th-century British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone on the subject: “Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”
Back in the 1960s, Atkins, who is now 73, came across a trove of information about the prison when rooting around the attic of his grandmother’s home in Hapeville. In his great-grandfather’s papers were more than 600 sermons written in the course of his prison service. There was also an envelope marked “executions.”
Atkins went off to work in the film industry in New York and Los Angeles, then returned to Georgia a few years ago, settling in a home in Macon built in 1850. Soon he engaged in a mission to save the old Georgia State Prison Farm where his great-grandfather pastored, and where prisoner Leo Frank was abducted by a raiding party in 1915 and brought back to Marietta, where he was lynched.
But in 2018, Baldwin County, without public input, tore down the old building, saying it would cost $5 million to save. While wandering the prison beforehand, Atkins discovered a crumbling mural of the crucifixion on the dining room wall, artwork painted by a prisoner at Rev. Atkins’ urging.
On Monday, Atkins, who runs a Facebook page called the “Georgia State Prison Farm & Cemetery,” set up a Zoom meeting that brought together several people who had ancestors who served time there. Among those were Robert Cobb, the grandson of Jim Hugh Moss, who was executed in 1928.
According to old news clippings, Moss, who came from Tennessee, played for the Chicago Giants, although not a lot is known about his time with the club. One clipping shows a “Moss,” no first name, playing as a right fielder. Another shows him pitching.
The story of Moss and Clifford Thompson, who were bootleggers, made the front page of the Atlanta Constitution probably because of the oddity of two men of different races being charged together in a murder. They were tried in August 1927, two weeks after the killing of a store owner in Murray County. Each was convicted in one-day trials held consecutively.
Credit: Edwin C. Atkins
Credit: Edwin C. Atkins
Thompson’s wife, Eula, who was also convicted but not executed, made a last-minute plea for the two men’s lives, saying they had nothing to do with the crime. But the machinery of death was well on its way.
Published reports had it that Moss’ body would be brought to Tennessee. But his grandson said Monday he can find no marker or record of him being buried in the family plot.
“Wherever he died, I think that’s where they left him,” said Cobb.
So it appears that Moss is one of the indentations in the Georgia clay in that forgotten prison graveyard.
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