“But it was not something that was discussed,” Finch-Morris said. “And I guess I can understand—too painful perhaps? However, I wanted them to talk more freely about what happened.”
Her mom was the only one who would talk about her uncle.
“My mother said that he was lynched because he was dating someone white, and that’s all I knew,” she said. “I didn’t know any details about how and who did it.”
So, as we sat at Finch-Morris’s kitchen table, I showed her what I discovered on my laptop.
It’s the investigation into Finch’s death that I found. It was at the Atlanta University Center in the records of an early civil rights group called the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
The commission was part of the anti-lynching movement in the 1930s. It collaborated with the NAACP, although its leaders were mainly white. They were more conservative too.
The narrative in the commission’s report began two days before Finch was shot.
That was when a white woman named Ozella Smith came into Grady Hospital. She had a broken limb. So Finch, who was an orderly, wheeled her to the white emergency room.
Smith was treated, and she left. The next day she came back for more treatment. And, once again, she left.
There wasn’t any sign of a problem until that night when police came to the hospital saying Smith had accused Finch of rape.
Grady’s white hospital staff told the commission the rape couldn’t have happened. For one, the closet where it allegedly took place was between doctors’ offices.
“It is unbelievable that the woman would have submitted silently to such an attack when the slightest outcry would have brought a dozen people to her rescue,” the commission wrote.
But the group was more worried about what happened next.
It said officers got ahold of Finch’s address at about 9 p.m. But they waited until 3 a.m. before showing up Buttermilk Bottom, the black neighborhood near downtown that has since been demolished.
Detectives S.W. Roper and J.W. Cody got Finch out of bed. Meanwhile, a few others—it’s not clear who—were waiting in the yard and several cars had parked down on Piedmont Avenue.
The detectives never took Finch to the police station downtown. Instead, an hour later, they dropped him off at Grady Hospital, his workplace. He had been beaten and shot.
The commission didn’t need to know where exactly he had been during that hour. In a statement, the group made its position clear.
“All taken together, it seems obvious that Finch was lynched either by the police or by persons to whom the police delivered him,” the commission wrote, “and that Tom Finch was innocent of the crime which his accuser tardily reported to police.”
But I had one more thing to show Finch-Morris that wasn’t in the commission’s report. It was a news article from more than a decade later, involving S.W. Roper, the officer who said he shot Finch in self-defense.
The 1949 headline announced that Samuel Roper became the national leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
As I shared all of this with Finch-Morris, she stayed very still. At most, she scrunched her eyebrows as she tried to make sense of the new details.
By the end, her thoughts shifted to the present.
“The question is where can this all lead? Could he be exonerated after the fact?” she wondered aloud.
I asked Finch-Morris if that were something she would want.
“If he was innocent, of course, yes,” she said. “If it could be proven that he was murdered and the people responsible—are dead, I’m sure. But if the record could be cleared or clarified, I would say, yes, I’d go for it.”
The record wasn’t cleared in the 1930s after Finch died.
The commission’s file about Finch included a handful of letters to white pastors at churches that included St. Luke’s and Peachtree Road United Methodist Church. They talked about calling for a thorough investigation in Finch’s case, even a grand jury. The tone was urgent.
Then, the letters dropped off.
The commission’s report never became public. Records from the Atlanta City Council and Grady Hospital don’t show any indication that the city investigated the rape charge against Finch or the circumstances of his death.
I asked University of Georgia professor E.M. Beck if I was missing something. It seemed within the realm of possibility that a city like Atlanta could have looked into Finch’s case. A few years before, the city secured rare convictions against white men who killed a Morehouse student in a case that attracted months of media attention.
But Beck said white people ran Atlanta in the 1930s, and they would have seen the minimal coverage of Finch’s death, especially in the city’s white newspapers.
“Think about it this way: It’s an all-white power structure,” Beck said. “And so you’ve got to ask what is it in their interest to try to pursue these things, especially if it involves the police. And I would say that they have no interest in it.”
Beck has spent the last few decades developing a lynching database—the most accurate one that exists, he said. He was one of the only experts I reached who had any record of Finch, although he hadn’t seen the commission’s report.
He said the fact that the case began with a questionable allegation of rape, according to the commission, was not unusual. Just three decades earlier, Atlanta saw the 1906 race riot start because of allegations that black men raped white women even though there was no evidence that the assaults had occurred.
But the role of police does put Finch’s death in murky historical territory. It even made civil rights groups uneasy at the time. In letters, the NAACP initially wouldn’t call his case a lynching because of the claim he was resisting arrest.
Among the thousands of cases Beck has confirmed, he said he could think of maybe 30 that he would call police lynchings. He said it’s hard to know if there were more because the only written records are often reports from the officers themselves.
The one thing historians are certain about, Beck said, is that the Ku Klux Klan specifically tried to recruit police officers in the 1920s and 30s when the hate group had surged in popularity.
In Atlanta, the Klan’s influence in the all-white police force went well beyond Roper, the officer who shot Finch. A former Atlanta police chief, Herbert Jenkins, said as much in a 1970s oral history recording with the late historian Cliff Kuhn.
The Atlanta Police Department was very different in the 1930s. Back then, the officers working at the Decatur Street headquarters (right) were all white and most were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Today, the force is majority black and known nationally for its diversity. The public safety headquarters is now located on Peachtree Street (left). (Dustin Chambers for WABE, Courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center)
“At one time most of the members of the police department were members of the Ku Klux Klan,” Jenkins said. “And there were some officers in the Klan that were also officers in the Atlanta police department.”
Knowing about the Klan’s influence in the department, it’s hard not to wonder about other police shootings from the time. J.W. Cody, the officer who joined Roper the night of Finch’s arrest, was involved in at least five other fatal shootings of black men during his career, according to newspaper reports in the Atlanta Daily World. In one case, he killed a suspect with a machine gun.
But so many years later, there’s no proof that these were anything other than officer-involved shootings.
That’s what makes Finch’s case stand out. Someone did investigate his police shooting in the 1930s. After Beck, the professor, read the commission on Interracial Cooperation’s report, he said it was the best evidence available today that Finch’s death was a lynching.
But the documents weren’t all that I was interested in. There were other people connected to Finch’s case: Ozella Smith, the woman who accused him of rape, and the two detectives, especially the one who shot him, Samuel Roper. I still needed to talk to their families.
It wasn’t hard to trace Roper’s life. He had another public role before leading the Klan. He led the Georgia Bureau of Investigation under Georgia Gov. Eugene Talmadge.
I looked up his obituary, and, from there, I was able to find his grandson, Kent Giles.
He’d never heard of Finch. At first, he was hesitant to do an interview, but after we talked a few times and went over my research, he agreed. So I drove out to his new house in Marble Hill, a rural area an hour north of Atlanta.
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