COLBERT, Georgia — Evan Lewis stands on the side of a two-lane road in the backwoods here.
The heat and humidity of the warm spring day engulf him as he surveys the area, shading his eyes from the sun's reflection off the lush vegetation.
He crosses the road, his eyes skimming the landscape for an easy path to the creek below. Lewis picks his way down the slope, the brush crunching under his red sneakers until he reaches the sandy banks of Mill Shoal Creek.
The only sound is the flowing water as he kneels down and gathers a handful of stones to take with him: mementos. Lewis stands up and takes a deep breath.
Ever since he was a child, his mother warned him never to go to Georgia. Yet there he was, the first person in his family to set foot in the state since 1936.
This was his second trip in three years.
"It's striking how peaceful and serene it feels down here," he said. "How stark a contrast that is (to) the reality of what happened here, when my great-grandfather was lynched."
Lewis doesn't recall a time he didn't know about what happened to his great-grandfather, Lent Shaw. He first saw the gruesome, black-and-white photo when he was around 7 years old.
"I've been haunted by that photo all my life," said Lewis, now 38 and an education consultant in the Chicago area.
At the center of the photograph is Shaw's bullet-riddled body tied to a tree, the rope barely visible. At least a dozen white men pose beside his body, staring at the camera.
That photo is one of the most famous depictions of America's gruesome legacy of racism, and it appears in history books and museums.
The origin of the picture is unknown. But The Associated Press transmitted it, and the Library of Congress houses it as part of a lynching collection.
On April 10, 1936, Shaw, a 42-year-old black farmer, was accused of attacking Ola Franklin, an 18-year-old white woman, with the intent of raping her along a road in Colbert. Eighteen days later, a mob stormed the Royston, Ga., jail where he was being held, dragged him to a tree-lined creek bed near Mill Shoal Creek and killed him.
In court documents, Shaw's first name was misspelled "Lint" and his age was listed as 45.
Franklin's name did not appear in any newspaper articles about the attack, but she was named in court documents. In newspaper articles, Shaw's accuser was listed as 22 years old.
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'So many shots'
Franklin picked Shaw out of a crowd as the man who attacked her that day. He claimed he didn't do it, that he was at home with his family at the time.
He never got the chance to prove it. Police arrested Shaw and held him in Madison County Jail in Danielsville, Ga.
What happened next was described in newspaper accounts at the time, both from mainstream papers as well as the black press.
Shaw had not been incarcerated long when a mob of about 150 people surrounded the jail wielding crowbars and hammers, trying to break in, according to the New York Times. Aware of the mob, Shaw said, "You know I ain't the guilty man."
Madison County Sheriff T. L. Henley tried to break up the mob, according to another account in the Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald, When he was unsuccessful, he called on Judge Berry T. Mosley, who was at home sick.
Mosley stood in front of the jailhouse and told the crowd to "stop violating the law by breaking into the jail" and pleaded with them to let the law take its course. He then instructed Henley to deputize the men in the mob, thinking it might stop their illegal behavior if they were sworn to uphold the law.
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Mosley also called on the National Guard to escort Shaw out of Danielsville. Henley admitted he recognized members of the mob but declined to press charges, saying he would leave that up to the judge. No charges were filed.
Shaw was escorted to Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta to be treated for wounds he sustained in transit to Madison County Jail, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune. He allegedly attacked officers who were escorting him, and in response the officers shot him three times.
At the hospital, Shaw shared his side of the whole story with the Atlanta Daily World, a prominent black paper of the day.
“I was on the floor in front of the fire when I heard someone holler. I told my children to keep quiet, so we could hear. When I heard the noise, which sounded as though the voice of a screaming person ... I got up and went to the door. The screaming was a good half mile down the road from our house. “
Shaw took his son's coat and went to the porch, where he saw some cars drive up.
"I got in with the folks and went with them to see if I could be of any help," he said. "At the jail, the girl said I was the man who choked her."
Shaw said he was immediately locked up.
In Atlanta, Shaw was held for 17 days before being taken back April 27 to Madison County Jail. There he was met with another angry mob.
Henley then transferred Shaw to a small jail in Royston, but the mob found out. Around midnight, they came for Shaw, dragged him out of his cell and drove 20 miles back to the area in Colbert where he had allegedly attacked Franklin, the Chicago Defender reported May 2, 1936.
He was lynched eight hours before he was supposed to stand trial April 28. The mob hung him from a tree and shot him again and again.
A local farmer found Shaw's body that morning, court documents state. The Madison County coroner launched an inquest, and six men were appointed to investigate.
"There were no witnesses found at (the) scene of (the) crime," court documents state. The case was closed the same day.
The next day, the Atlanta Daily World interviewed Shaw's wife, Georgia Hill. She talked about how she and her 11 children, ages 15 months to 20 years, were home during the lynching, huddled together in a small room.
"There were so many shots we couldn't count them," Hill said. She described how she knew her husband was being carried to his death by the shouting of passengers in the passing cars.
Hill had not seen her husband since his arrest April 10, and she was too frightened to go to search for him. Shaw's body was turned over to the county because his family was too scared to claim it.
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A grim history
Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 5,000 lynchings occurred in the United States.
Georgia with the second-highest toll in the nation had 531, according to the NAACP. Mississippi had the highest with 581; Texas was third with 493.
The first recorded lynching was in 1835 of a free black man in St. Louis, said Paul Finkelman, a legal historian and president of Gratz College in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park, Pa.
"Lynching usually occurred in places where people believed that the traditional legal system would not, in fact, do justice to the criminal," Finkelman said, "Lynching has become associated with the suppression of African-Americans, usually in the South, and it's often associated with people who are accused of (certain) crimes."
The most common crimes were assaulting or killing a white person, and sex crimes against white women. But about half of all lynchings involved minor offenses — or none at all, Finkelman said.
By the time Shaw was shot and hanged, lynchings were on the decline, Finkelman said. In 1896, 179 people were lynched; by 1936, Shaw was one of eight. The terror of lynching continued long after that. One of the most famous lynchings, the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, occurred in 1955, and the last recorded lynching in the U.S. occurred in 1981, with the killing of 19-year-old Michael McDonald by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
A report by the Equal Justice Initiative states lynching "inflicted deep traumatic and psychological wounds on survivors, witnesses, family members and the entire African-American community." That was certainly the case for the Shaws.
The family’s story
Shaw's descendants don't believe he had anything to do with the alleged attack on Ola Franklin. They believe he was lynched because he was a successful black farmer.
That's what Alrita Pollard Lewis, Shaw's granddaughter and Evan Lewis' mother, remembers hearing.
Alrita Lewis, 66, is the daughter of Mae Belle Shaw Pollard, Lent Shaw's second-oldest daughter. Pollard died in 1975.
When the family talked about her grandfather, Alrita Lewis, who lives in Evansville, Ind., said they focused on how he was a family man who worked hard on a farm with his sons.
"There (were) some people, white people, who were jealous or not pleased that a black man (was) being successful, and they had threatened him," Alrita Lewis said.
"He knew they were coming for him," she said. "They started harassing him. And once they started harassing you, you knew what was going to happen."
The harassment got so bad that Shaw and Hill made plans to get their kids out of town, Alrita Lewis said. But Shaw was killed before that could happen.
The story about Alrita Lewis' grandfather is shared within the family but not as openly as other family stories, she said. She found out about his death by overhearing the adults talk about how Shaw "was shot up to a hundred times, and his body was tied to a tree."
After the lynching, Alrita Lewis said that some in the mob took her uncles, Shaw's sons, out of the house to see their father's body.
"They had told my uncles there would be no more Shaws," she said.
Technically, they were right.
"Only my aunts had children, and we all have the names of our fathers, so there were no more Shaws," Alrita Lewis said.
After Shaw's death, his wife moved their family to Chicago to live with her sister. Hill died in 1958 at age 62.
"Once my grandmother got to Chicago, it was very hard for her," Alrita Lewis said. "She lost everything: her husband, her home, her land — and her children were obviously affected."
On her application for public assistance in Chicago, Hill wrote she needed help "because I have no other way to live and take care of my family."
"(Shaw) loved his family like anyone else and had big plans for them. But those plans were messed up because of this horrible incident, and it affected more than my grandmother and her 11 children," Alrita Lewis said. "It's gone down for generations, and it's almost something you can't get rid of."
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‘Something you can’t get rid of’
Alrita Lewis didn't get to hear much about her family's life in Georgia before the lynching. She doesn't have many stories to pass down.
What she did have is a warning.
"We were always taught that we could never go back to Georgia," she said.
None of Shaw's children returned to Georgia. None of his grandchildren have made the trip.
"It really is a fear factor, and I think this is what they say when you hear the word 'terrorist,'" Alrita Lewis said. "It worked on my family, and they passed it on."
She was the first person in her family to begin looking into her grandfather's legacy, and when she learned anything new, she shared it.
Otto Pollard, Alrita Lewis' youngest brother, learned everything he knows about his grandfather's death from his sister.
"The bottom line is the generation of my mother, and Lent's children, that generation was totally destroyed," he said. "It destroyed us, too. We missed a whole section of life that most people take for granted."
He recalls only one time in his life when his mother actually mentioned her father to him.
"Three days before she died in 1975, my mother Mae Belle told me on her deathbed, 'You know they killed your granddaddy, don't you?' " he said. He recalls nodding his head but quickly changing the subject, so she wouldn't have to relive that pain.
Finkleman, the historian, said it's not unusual for the families of lynching victims to have trouble talking about what happened because "for black people, the lynching is a gut-wrenching, soul-wrenching, horrifying event."
The descendants of those responsible for lynchings have another reason not to talk about it, Finkelman said.
"They're saying there was a bad black person and lynching him solved the problem," Finkelman said. They simply have no reason to bring it up.
Ola Franklin’s family
Alvah Ola Franklin Chastain died April 1, 2017. She was 99, according to her obituary.
Her son, Ward Chastain, said he does not remember ever hearing about his mother's assault or the lynching.
Other attempts were made to contact Franklin's family members. Only one responded, granddaughter Denise Rousey Howard, 59. She said she never had heard any stories about what happened in 1936, and when provided details, she was shocked.
"I wasn't aware of any of this, and I've never really in my life had a reason to research about anything like this happening," she said in a phone call. "We weren't brought up to think of anything like this."
Howard requested documents that offered proof her grandmother was involved.
"I did reach out to several family members, and no one had any knowledge of the event," Howard said in an email after receiving the court records outlining Shaw's arrest that listed Franklin's name as a plaintiff. "My grandmother never mentioned it to anyone. I wish I had known prior to her passing so I could have asked."
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Facing a painful past
Evan Lewis, Shaw's great-grandson, is the first in his family to defy three generations of warnings and go back to Georgia, driven by a longing for a better sense of where his family comes from and to no longer be afraid.
"I don't want to live with that fear in myself or tag that down to future generations, so I feel that it's important for a cycle like that to be broken," he said.
When his mother found out he was going, it made her uneasy.
"I was not happy. I was very fearful for him," Alrita Lewis said. "He knew he wasn't supposed to be in Georgia."
Evan Lewis first visited Georgia in 2015, and he returned a year ago.
The city of Colbert is small, surrounded with trees and farmland. It's easy to miss if you're not careful.
It has one main intersection and railroad tracks run through town.
City Hall faces a memorial for Confederate soldiers across the street, but nothing remains of Shaw's lynching. No one even knows where he's buried.
Two clerks, Vicky Smith and Ann Waggoner, greeted Evan Lewis when he entered City Hall. When asked if they knew any local historians that could talk about the city's history, they said they didn't.
They did offer the city's history book and a visit to their small history museum in the back. The book details history from 1776 to 1976, and the museum was full of pictures and records, but neither has information about the lynching.
Smith and Waggoner had never heard of Shaw. They recommended speaking with City Adviser John Waggoner, who is also the former mayor and Ann Waggoner's husband.
When John Waggoner, an older white man with glasses, walked into the museum, his stance was tall and his voice strong, but as soon as Evan Lewis told him why he was there, his demeanor changed.
The former mayor didn't look Evan Lewis directly in the eye, often gazing at the floor and fidgeting while the great-grandson of the city's lynching victim spoke with him.
"I have a memory of hearing people talk about the Lent Shaw lynching," he said, fumbling with keys in his pocket.
John Waggoner recalled reading it in old newspapers that Shaw was taken from Royston, brought back to Colbert, and hung on a pine tree, but that's it.
John Waggoner said he was only a year old when the lynching occurred. He wouldn't hear about it again until he was about 12 years old in an old barber shop in town.
He remembered overhearing an old white man, who supposedly lived in a house across the street from Shaw, talk to the FBI when they came around investigating the lynching.
"He stated that this fella (Shaw) came up around his house, stole a rope at his barn and went and hung himself up on that tree, sarcastically," John Waggoner said. That was the only direct knowledge he said he has of the killing.
It's not something that people discuss in the community, and when pressed about the lynching, John Waggoner replied, "What I've told you is basically what I know."
Evan Lewis was not surprised at the lack of records related to Shaw.
A lynching is something that you want to cover up, even though the lynching itself may be as public as possible, he said.
"You don't want a public record of it in case someone like me, who pops up over 70 years later, starts asking questions to see them," Evan Lewis said.
No paper trail exists, and the exact location of Shaw's lynching in unknown. All Evan Lewis does know is that it happened somewhere along the creek.
Still, Evan Lewis said he is glad he got to ask questions and dig around. His trip was as much about learning about his great-grandfather's life as it was learning about his death.
“I was in a place that held some real spiritual significance for me, and that is not something I’ve felt a lot in my life.
“I’m not even sure this makes sense. (It’s) kind of like reclaiming this space. Me being in this space hopefully helps me and my family reclaim a little bit of what we lost in that moment.
“For so long we’ve only known Colbert as the place where the lynching happened. (We) haven’t been able to get past that and get to the fact that (it) is also the place where so many of my great-uncles, my grandma and my great-aunts were born.
“That is part of the gift in this experience, is to be able to reach into the past and get past the horror and find some of the tenderness and love that is also a part of that space that my family has been sort of cut off (from).”
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Waiting to be free
Evan Lewis' experience also has been liberating for his family.
His uncle, Otto Pollard, said he even would consider following in his nephew's footsteps to Georgia.
"I had to wait 62 years to be free," he said.
"I'm free to think about my grandfather. I'm free to talk about my grandfather," Otto Pollard said. And for the first time, when he looked at pictures of his grandfather, he didn't feel a rush of sorrow.
Alrita Lewis was the first in the family to research Shaw's death but doesn't see herself going to Georgia.
"I don't think I could take that emotionally," she said. But she does feel a sense of closure.
Shaw's youngest daughter, Reba Shaw Martin, died Jan. 28 in Chicago. She was 83 and had eight children. She was her parents' last living child.
Evan Lewis visited her before she died and told her about his experience in Georgia.
"She was more alive in that moment than she has been in most of the moments toward the end of her life," he said.
Unfinished business
Evan Lewis is working with the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project to look for potential restorative justice measures involving his great-grandfather. The project is based at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston and investigates cold lynching cases.
Obtaining some form of justice always has been a part of Evan Lewis' goal. What form that takes, he doesn't know. He does intend on looking into the land his great-grandfather supposedly owned.
He is open to the idea of a plaque in Shaw's honor or even an official apology. But he wants to be clear: Those are not significant enough responses for what happened.
"I don't think I can stand in front of anyone and receive an apology and pretend that all is forgiven," he said. "I feel just as much of a responsibility to Lent himself that we kind of establish a record and set the record straight. Not just in terms of how he was killed, but how he lived."
Editor's note — Arizona Republic digital producer Shondiin Silversmith conducted research for this story with the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project as part of her master's degree program at Northeastern University.
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