Flam Belle

Case summary

Incident

Flam Belle died on July 29, 1941 while incarcerated at the Sparta State Highway Prison Camp. Prison physician E.H. Hutchings determined Belle’s cause of death as sunstroke and recorded that Belle died around 2 p.m.

Sanford Crider, a 20-year-old white incarcerated man who ran away from Sparta the day Belle died, spoke to both State Prison Commissioner Royal K. Mann and Atlanta Journal reporter Frank Drake several days after his escape. Crider’s allegations, according to Drake, initiated a “secret” State Prison and Parole Commission hearing on August 6.

In his interview with Drake, Crider stated that on the morning he escaped, he was “working on the road” with other incarcerated individuals. Around 11 a.m., a guard ordered Crider and another white man to hold down Belle, a Black incarcerated man whom he knew as “Wild Cat,” for a beating. According to Crider, prison guard “Boss” Alvin Johnson whipped Belle on the back and hips “50 or 75 times with a rubber water hose doubled up” until Belle collapsed. When Belle got up and tried to walk, he fell again. Belle was later transported in a truck back to the prison.

Aftermath

That afternoon, Hutchings examined Belle’s body at the prison. In an interview with Drake, Hutchings stated that Belle’s “muscles had begun to stiffen even by the time I got there,” suggesting that rigor mortis had set in. Hutchings explained that a quick onset of rigor mortis, paired with high body temperature, indicated to him that Belle had died of sunstroke. Hutchings also told Drake that he tried for 30 minutes to “bring back a spark of life.” When Drake asked if Belle’s body showed any signs of a beating, Hutchings replied, “I examined him to see if he had hurt himself in falling but saw no marks. If he had been whipped to death, I think I would have known it, but I did not examine the body for whip marks.”

Hutchings told Drake that prison officials “tried all day and the next morning” to contact Belle’s family members, but were unable to. Hutchings added, “You don’t think they would have tried to find his people if the Negro had been beaten to death, do you?”

Belle was buried on July 30 at Macedonia Cemetery in Sparta.

Warden Neal Compton told Drake that Johnson denied the beating allegations. Compton also said that he did not believe that Belle had been whipped, telling Drake, “The Negro had just been sent us about a week or ten days before and he was a sorry sort of Negro, didn’t want to work very hard, but so far as I know he wasn’t whipped.”

On August 9, the Atlanta Constitution published excerpts from testimony during the Prison Commission hearing. J.E. Smith, the commission’s inspector, stated that when he went to Sparta Prison Camp, “A good many” of the men incarcerated there “said nothing was the trouble and a good many said a lot of them got whipped.” One member of the commission, Vivian L. Stanley, told the paper that the investigation was ongoing, and would continue with a visit to Sparta Prison Camp the following week.

Newspapers reported on August 16 that the committee determined it had “strong evidence” that Belle died as the result of a “severe whipping by a person known as Boss Alvin Johnson.” The committee called for Johnson and Hutchings’s immediate suspensions and ordered an inquest into both Belle’s death and that of another incarcerated Black man, Lewis Gordon. Several days after Belle’s death, Gordon had died following a punishment at Rising Fawn State Camp on Georgia’s Lookout Mountain. Confined to a seven-by-seven foot “sweat box” with 21 other incarcerated men, Gordon lost consciousness and died.

A Hancock County coroner’s jury began an inquest into Belle’s death on August 19. While jurors waited for Belle’s body to be exhumed, they toured the prison before gathering in the warden’s office. Acting Coroner H.A. Berry called witnesses before the jurors, including guards and prison officials, who denied that Belle had been beaten. According to an August 20 Atlanta Journal article, the inquest lasted seven hours. Pete Craig of the Atlanta Journal reported that Berry attempted to “terminate the inquest” before the incarcerated men who claimed to have witnessed the beating could testify. Craig wrote that these men, who were brought before the jury in leg irons, were given the opportunity to testify only after reporters remarked that “public reaction might be unfavorable unless both sides were heard.”

Craig reported that all but one of the seven incarcerated witnesses who testified stated that Johnson, a guard, beat Belle to death with a hose. Daniel Cox, an incarcerated white man, told the jury:" They called Flam to the edge of the ditch and had four colored fellows hold him. Then they beat him with a rubber hose. They turned him loose, but he couldn’t stand up. He walked backwards, all bent over. Then they told him to get over there. He couldn’t. Then the colored boys gave him a shovel and he fell in the road."

When Johnson began beating Belle a second time, Cox said, “a car came by” and Johnson “threw the hose down.” Two Black men who were working on the highway that day as part of the prison labor gang made similar statements.

Leroy Pierson, the one incarcerated witness who claimed that he did not see a guard “put their hands on” Belle, was identified by several other witnesses as one of the men who had held Belle down during the beating.

The unnamed physician from Sparta who examined Belle’s disinterred body told the jury that he did not see any signs of “violence” but added that the body was so badly decomposed 21 days after Belle’s death that it was not possible to determine the presence of any “lash marks.” Craig reported that upon exhumation, officials determined that Belle’s body had been mistakenly buried on private property and needed to be moved. The location of Belle’s grave is unknown.

After five minutes of deliberation, the jury determined that Belle’s death was the result of “becoming overheated, presumably sunstroke, and not by any unkind or inhuman treatment.”

On August 24, 1941, a woman named Mary G. Bridges wrote a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt asking her to implore Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover to address the conditions of Georgia’s prisons. Bridges, concerned about the welfare of her incarcerated sons, warned, “Outlaws and underworlds are ruling Georgia. The Christian whites will get what Negroes get if they say too much about it.”

Following Bridges’ complaint, the Office of the U.S. Attorney General reviewed the letter and a series of newspaper clippings about Georgia’s prison system, some of which detailed the deaths of Belle and Gordon. In October 1941, Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge wrote that “the Department has determined that it would not be advisable to institute an investigation at this time,” given that the allegations of “inhuman treatment” were “receiving the attention of State authorities.”

Media Gallery

Case summaries are compiled using government records and archival primary source material. These include, but are not limited to, investigative records, arrest reports, newspaper articles, court filings, census records, birth and death certificates, transcripts, and press releases. In many cases, the records contain contradictory assertions.

In addition to the incident files associated with this case, this summary relied on the following:

Sources

U.S., Central Register of Convicts, Georgia, 1940

Certificate of Death for Flame Belle , 1940

Frank Drake, “Prisoner Charges Fatal Beating of Negro Convict at Sparta: Guard Denies Accusation Before Probers,” The Atlanta Constitution, August 8, 1941

Luke Green, “Two-Way Probe of State Prisons Will Be Held: Action is Outgrowth of Alleged Lashing at Sparta Camp,” The Atlanta Constitution, August 9, 1941

“Say Two Wardens Are Ex-Convicts,” The Atlanta Journal, August 16, 1941

“Symptoms of Deeper Ills,” The Atlanta Constitution, August 16, 1941

“Harsh Convict Treatment Reported in Prison Camp,” Ledger-Enquirer (Columbus, GA), August 16, 1941

“Four Murder Warrants Seen in Prison Death,” The Atlanta Constitution, August 19, 1941

“Brutality Disproved by Investigation in Death of Prisoner,” The Selma Times-Journal (Selma, AL), August 20, 1941

Pete Craig, “Prison Camp Exonerated in Bell Death,” The Atlanta Journal, August 20, 1941

“Stroke Cause of Bell’s Death: No Lash Marks Found on Body, Jury Declares,” Atlanta Daily World, August 20, 1941