Atlanta Daily World

Grandmother Faces Assault Trial Monday
Charged With Throwing Water On Planter

An aged Henry County woman, Mrs. Julia Johnson, will face trial in the Henry County Superior Court Monday, charged with throwing boiling hot water into the face of a Locust Grove planter who allegedly tried to force her to nurse his baby.

The 61-year-old grandmother has been held in jail at McDonough, Georgia for three months, pending trial of the case which was widely discussed last fall. She had been taken into custody, it was learned, from the Scottdale home to which agents of the Georgia Citizens Defense Committee had moved her family, after she had made a desperate and dramatic run for freedom; following an alleged argument with farmer-saw owner W. W. Cleveland Jr., at her isolated sharecropper shack on his plantation.

The elderly woman, at the time of the reported incident, was living with her daughters' family in one of the isolated farm shanties of Wofford Cleveland Sr. provides for his tenants on the plantation located between McDonough and Locust Grove in Henry County. Mrs. Johnson, whose youngest daughter formerly lived at 355 Auburn Ave., here told her pathetic story to the Georgia Citizens Defense Committee of which Rev. William Holmes Borders is chairman, after she had gained temporary freedom from authorities.

HELPING DAUGHTER

She said that she had been helping daughter, Clara, and the children pick cotton all day and dead tired when the younger Cleveland came to the house and asked her to "come mind the baby while he made a trip to Atlanta." She refused.

Later, she said, Cleveland came back and demanded in a gruff tone that she accompany him. "Mr. Cleveland got real mad," the mother of fourteen children and grandmother of five, told the Defense Committee.

When he farm over-seer returned a third time, she declared, she noticed that he "carried both an axe and a gun." At the time Mrs. Johnson was scalding a pot out with boiling hot water: the stove being located between herself and the door. "He began cursing me and I threw the hot water into his face and ran as fast as I could across the fields to the highway," she recalled. One three-year-old grandchild ran crying after her, and when Mrs. Johnson was captured in McDonough she was in stocking feet and held the three-year-old in her arms.

But for the help of Deputy Ira Jones, Mary Johnson, the Atlanta daughter, who is at present keeping the children at Scottdale, believes her mother may have become the victim of mob violence. Deputy Jones, described as a man friendly to the oppressed Negroes of the county, took it upon himself to accept bond papers from an Atlanta company and released her mother just as darkness fell, and after the Sheriff had refused to accept the papers all day. Deputy Jones had warned the Atlanta daughter who went to McDonough to get her mother, "not to get in the dark but to stand in the light of the filling station until the Atlanta bus comes along."

The Georgia Citizens Defense Committee voted funds for Mrs. Johnson's temporary welfare and sent a representative with a transfer truck to remove her family's belongings-all but five pigs which Cleveland refused to permit the representative to take, he said, for a debt. Mrs. Johnson and her family were resettled in Scottdale. That was last November.

For some undisclosed reason, and unreported to the Defense Committee until last week, Mrs. Johnson was rearrested and lodged in the Henry County jail where she has been, according to her daughter for three months. The trial is set for 9 a. m. tomorrow.