"I'll Come Out Dead"

One hot afternoon last week, the prison trucks pulled up at State Highway Camp 18, a dreary collection of wooden buildings in the piney woods and palmetto lowlands of Georgia's coastal plain. They were bringing back the road gang from its grass-cutting job along Jesup Highway. The Negro convicts were hustled out and herded in front of one of the barracks. There was a confusion of orders and shouting. Then, as quick as a shimmer of summer lightning, something happened.

Warden W. G. Worthy strode toward the knot of convicts, gun in hand. There was a single report from his .38-cal. revolver, then the roar of four shotguns in the hands of prison guards. Convicts scattered frantically, flopping to the ground, diving under the buildings for cover. One made the barbed-wire-topped fence before a cursing guard, kicking loose a jam in his weapon, blasted him down with a load of buckshot.

In less than a minute it was all over. Someone shouted: "Stop shooting." When the thin smoke of high velocity shells had cleared, five dead Negro convicts lay sprawled on the sun-drenched ground. Of the 22 others, eight were wounded, three of them fatally. Said a frightened survivor: "They mowed them down like wheat."

A coroner's jury tried to piece together the story. Warden Worthy, paunchy and thin-lipped, looking more like a schoolteacher than a road-gang boss, said that the trouble had started out on the highway when the convicts refused to work. He said that he had intended only to punish the ringleaders. He was defiant: "I got a right to knock 'em in the head and drag 'em to the hot box if I can't put 'em in anyways else." But he insisted that he had not fired until a Negro lunged for him, grabbing at his revolver.

The convicts, brought in for questioning, told another story. Willie ("Peewee") Bell said that he had been the chief target of Warden Worthy's rage. When the warden told him to step out of the group, Peewee said, he knew what was coming. He remembered his own words to Worthy: "Boss, I ain't gonna come out because if I come out I'll come out dead." Again & again Worthy yelled at him. Then it happened. Peewee dropped with a -38-cal. slug in his leg, which saved his life as the guards' pump guns poured buckshot into the other convicts.

At week's end, the coroner's jury delayed its verdict, pending the convening of a special Glynn County grand jury to look into the whole tragic affair.

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