A biography can tell us when Wiley Strickland was born, whom he married, where his children lived and when the family appeared in Lansing. Those facts matter. But they do not answer a harder question: what did it mean to raise a Black family in the part of Georgia where Wiley and Dinah spent most of their lives?

To answer that, we have to put the family records on the same map as the racial violence around them.

The result changes the way we should understand Wiley and Dinah’s story. Their Georgia years were not simply a preface to the Great Migration. They were decades spent building a family inside a society where a mob could seize a Black man from his home or from a jail, kill him publicly and often face little or no accountability.

We do not yet have a verified street address for Wiley and Dinah for every year they lived in Georgia, so it would be misleading to say that any event happened a precise number of miles from their front door. What we can do is use the Athens–Clarke County corridor as a reference point. Family tax, census and newspaper research places the Stricklands and Hawkinses across Clarke, Madison, Oglethorpe and the greater Athens area.

That makes the geography important. Watkinsville is only about 9–10 miles from Athens by modern roads. John Lee Eberhart was killed at a site contemporary newspapers placed about seven miles east of Athens. Oglethorpe and Oconee counties were not some distant part of Georgia. They were part of the same regional world in which the family worked, worshipped, traded, visited relatives and raised children.

Wiley was a young man when a band of disguised men in Oglethorpe County seized a Black man named Alfred Turner from his home for the purpose of whipping him. Turner was killed when he tried to escape. Another Black man was seized and badly beaten.

The importance of this episode is not that we can prove Wiley knew Turner. We cannot. It is that organized racial violence was already operating in the counties surrounding the family as Wiley entered adulthood.

Seventeen years later, another Black Oglethorpe County resident, Robert Collins, was attacked by masked white men. Historical research identifies the conflict as economic: Collins had been trying to persuade Black workers to leave local plantations for other work. He was forced from his home, beaten unconscious and died from his injuries.

That detail matters because lynching and racial terror were not only responses to accusations of violent crime. They also helped police the labor system. A Black man challenging who controlled Black workers could become a target.

Wiley and Dinah were raising a large family during these years. Their ordinary records—children, taxes, farming, kinship—were created inside that political and economic environment.

On June 29, 1905, a masked mob entered the Oconee County jail in Watkinsville. Contemporary reporting described the mob as coming quietly from multiple directions and believed many participants came from neighboring counties. The mob removed nine prisoners. Eight were killed—seven Black men and one white man—and one Black prisoner survived.

Some of the prisoners had not even been accused of capital crimes. The mob was not simply carrying out a substitute trial. It demonstrated that the legal system itself could be overwhelmed whenever enough armed white men decided the law did not matter.

Watkinsville sits roughly 9–10 miles from Athens by modern road distance. That is close enough to understand the scale of the world Wiley and Dinah occupied, but distance alone does not prove intimacy. We do not yet know whether Wiley knew any of the victims, whether any were related to the family, or whether he witnessed the event or its aftermath.

Those are research questions worth pursuing. They should not be converted into facts before the records support them.

In 1917, a 27-year-old Black man named Rufus Moncrief was found tied to a tree near Simonton Bridge, south of Athens, with numerous gunshot wounds. A card left near his body accused him of assaulting a white woman. Contemporary reporting also offered a different possible motive, so historians treat the episode cautiously. It belongs in this story precisely because the uncertainty shows how easily accusation, rumor and racial violence could blur together.

Two years later, in 1919, Obe Cox was killed in neighboring Oglethorpe County after being accused of murdering a white woman. Contemporary and later accounts describe thousands of spectators and the burning of his body.

By then Wiley was in his sixties. Racial terror had been part of the regional landscape for essentially his entire adult life.

Then came John Lee Eberhart.

Family records identify Eberhart as Wiley Strickland’s half-brother. In February 1921, Eberhart was arrested after being accused of killing a white woman in Oconee County and was jailed in Athens. A mob numbering in the thousands stormed the Clarke County jail. Contemporary reporting described men from Clarke, Oconee and adjoining counties, and reported that the mob used a blowtorch to force its way into the jail.

They took Eberhart from state custody and carried him back toward the scene of the alleged crime, about seven miles east of Athens. There, he was burned to death before a crowd of thousands. Family research preserves that he maintained his innocence.

This is where the story stops being only regional context. According to our family research, the murdered man was Wiley’s own half-brother.

The distinction is important. We cannot responsibly say that Wiley personally knew every victim of racial terror around Athens, Oconee or Oglethorpe County. But we can say that by 1921 the violence had entered his immediate family.

And it did not stop. In December 1921, three more Black men—Aaron Birdsong, West Hale and George Lowe—were killed in Oconee County. Contemporary reporting placed Hale and Lowe’s homes about six miles from Watkinsville.

Family history identifies Eberhart’s killing as a breaking point in Wiley’s decision to leave Georgia. Research places Wiley and Dinah in Lansing by roughly 1923–24.

We should continue looking for a letter, oral-history recording, newspaper account or other direct evidence that lets Wiley explain the decision in his own words. Until one appears, the most accurate phrasing is that family history connects the lynching of his half-brother to the family’s move north.

But even with that caution, the chronology matters.

The Great Migration is often summarized as Black Southerners moving north for factory jobs and better wages. That is true, but incomplete. For families living under racial terror, migration could also be a calculation about survival: where could children grow up with a better chance that the law would function as law?

When Wiley later appears in Lansing and city-directory research connects him to work as a laborer with Olds Body, the move becomes more than a change of address. A Black man born in Georgia before emancipation had lived through Reconstruction’s collapse, Jim Crow and decades of racial violence, lost a close relative to a mob, and then rebuilt part of the family’s life in an industrial northern city.

Michigan was not free of racism. But it offered a different set of possibilities.

We can say that racial terror occurred repeatedly in the counties surrounding Wiley and Dinah during their adult lives.

We can say that Watkinsville was only about ten miles from Athens and that the Eberhart killing occurred about seven miles east of Athens.

We can say that family records identify John Lee Eberhart as Wiley’s half-brother, and that family history connects his 1921 killing to Wiley’s decision to leave Georgia.

We cannot yet say that Wiley witnessed the Watkinsville massacre, personally knew specific Watkinsville victims, or was related to any of them. Proximity makes those questions worth investigating; it does not answer them.

That is the difference between using history as decoration and doing family history seriously.

The next step should be to test the victims and their families against the Strickland, Watkins, Hawkins, Newton and Eberhart networks: census neighbors, church membership, tax districts, employers, land records, marriage ties, obituaries and DNA-connected branches.

If one of those connections is found, the story becomes even more personal. If none is found, the broader truth remains: Wiley and Dinah did not need a family connection to every victim for racial terror to shape the choices available to them.

The distance itself tells us something.

Ten miles to Watkinsville. Seven miles to the site where Wiley’s half-brother was killed. Neighboring counties with repeated mob violence. Then, within a few years, a family home hundreds of miles north in Lansing.

A biography gives us the route.

This history helps explain why the route mattered.

This draft draws on current DavenportFam family research; the Wiley Strickland video-production research; contemporary Georgia newspaper coverage of the 1877 Oglethorpe violence, the 1905 Watkinsville mass lynching, the 1921 John Lee Eberhart killing and the December 1921 Oconee killings; the New Georgia Encyclopedia’s lynching history; University of Georgia research on Oconee County lynchings; and historical scholarship on racial violence and labor in Oglethorpe County. The Rufus Moncrief case remains historically disputed and should continue to be labeled as a possible or unconfirmed lynching unless stronger evidence resolves it.

If your branch of the family preserved stories about why relatives left Georgia, warnings about Oconee, Oglethorpe or Clarke County, John Lee Eberhart, or people connected to the Watkinsville victims, please share them with the family. Tell us who told the story, approximately when you heard it and which branch of the family preserved it. Oral history should be documented as oral history—not treated as proof until it can be compared with other evidence.

Read Wiley’s biography, explore the family tree, and help us determine what the records still have not answered.