‘Without Mercy’ airs Georgia’s dirty political laundry | www.myajc.com

Georgia’s history is a goldmine of corruption, and David Beasley, a former editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has reached in and grabbed a few glittering chunks for examination. “Without Mercy” is his chronicle of the state’s troubled political scene during the Depression years.

Scrutinizing the sleazy reign of Gov. E.D. Rivers — the Democrat once named a “great titan” of the Ku Klux Klan — the author organizes much of “Without Mercy” around the electric chair executions of six black men in 81 minutes at Reidsville’s Tattnall Prison on Dec. 9, 1938. Beasley describes the event as “an assembly line of death.”

For Georgia’s African Americans, “justice” was sudden: A majority of the six condemned at Tattnall had only two months between their arrests and their high-voltage destiny. Their legal defense was minimal. The executioner, an electrician who worked at the Grant Park Zoo, was paid $75 per prisoner. Some of the convicted accepted their fates with equanimity; one warned ominously, “I’m gonna tell God how you done me.”

Circumstances were different for their various white contemporaries – 2,000 of whom were pardoned, including a country preacher who bumped off his son to collect on a life insurance policy; a brazen gunman who rubbed out the boss of an illegal lottery, known locally as the “bug”; and most sensational of all, the murder of a pharmacist by two millionaire fraternity boys from Oglethorpe University: Richard Gallogly, a grandson of the Atlanta Journal’s owner, and George Harsh, who would one day secure minor notoriety in “The Great Escape” World War II saga. All received commutations from Gov. E. D. Rivers. It was a notorious pardons racket, for those who could pay.

via ‘Without Mercy’ airs Georgia’s dirty political laundry | www.myajc.com.