125 Acres

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1:27Phoebe Judge:January 21st, 1897, started like most nights did for George Denning and his family on their farm in southern Kentucky. George had dinner with his wife Molly and their children. There were seven at home with them. The youngest was four months old and the oldest was 12. Then George gathered firewood and stoked the stove. It was a cold night. And then they'd all gotten into their beds, and they were kind of crowded together. They slept, you know, several kids to each bed. And after a period of time, many of them had fallen asleep. Somewhere around midnight, the dogs started barking outside, and this kind of woke them all up.

2:10Phoebe Judge:Author Ben Montgomery. And, you know, this is an event that was recalled in court, in depositions, many times by many different people. And so we have lots of different versions of events. But the clearest timeline is that after George Denning and his family wake up from their dogs barking, they then hear voices outside their home. George Denning and his family had lived in their home for almost 15 years. It was on a plot of 125 acres of land that George had purchased from the family that had enslaved him and his parents. He'd grown up there enslaved by a man named David Denning until he was 10 years old, when the 13th Amendment was ratified and he was emancipated.

3:01In the years after the Civil War, he worked to earn enough money to buy the land,

3:06Phoebe Judge:and by his mid-30s, he had. He also bought two horses, seven hogs, 24 chickens, four turkeys, and a plow. He grew tobacco, which did well in the soil there, and built the two-story cabin by hand. What did it mean for a black man at that time to be able to buy land and build a house on it? It was a big deal. He had been born into slavery and was among the first generation, certainly in the South, the first generation of emancipated people to own property. It would have been a huge deal. It was uncommon. None of his neighbors who owned farms around him immediately in his vicinity were black like he was.

3:55Phoebe Judge:When George Denning heard the voices outside his home that night in 1897, he went to the door, but he didn't open it. He called out, who's out there? And they refused to identify themselves. We're your friends, they said. There were 25 white men outside, and about half of them were carrying guns. The men outside called him by name and said, come outside. We need to talk to you. They demanded he step onto the porch. He's saying, no, who's out there? They're saying, we're your friends. We just want to talk. He says, no, if you're my friends, you'd show your face. By the way, he had seen outside that they had covered their faces.

4:40Many of them had, you know, they weren't wearing hoods of the Klan, but they were wearing bandanas sort of wrapped over their mouths, disguising their identity. And so he said, if you were my friends, then you wouldn't be hiding your faces and you'd say exactly who you were.

4:58Phoebe Judge:The men told George they were there because they believed he'd been stealing meat from their smokehouses. He protested. He said, you know me, I am, I am, if you say you're my friends, then you know that I'm a good upstanding man. And he said, also, I can line up a number of upstanding white people who will vouch for me. So don't just take my word for it, but give me a chance to call upon our upstanding white neighbors to say that I'm a good guy. This wasn't satisfying to them. They wanted him to come outside. And it was somewhere in this quick back and forth, which lasted somewhere between a minute and two minutes, that somebody opened fire from the backside of the house.

5:47The men in the front of the house, then immediately, many of them under the assumption probably that they were being fired upon from someone inside the house, They start returning fire and firing against the house. We know from testimony later that their leader, the guy who'd kind of been doing the talking on the front porch, his name was Doc Moore. He was a Civil War veteran. He said, shouted to all of them, squat and fire. Squat and fire, and the men do. If they've got a gun, they squat and fire right at Denning's house.

6:25Phoebe Judge:There were so many bullets that George Denning first thought someone had thrown dynamite into the house. His children would later testify, a couple of them, that they witnessed bullets sail through the air through their cabin. Denning's 12-year-old daughter would testify in court that a bullet went through her hair. And as soon as the gunshot started, he went for his own rifle. You know, not far away in Memphis, Tennessee, Ida B. Wells, the black journalist, was writing right around this time about the importance for black people in the rural South to arm themselves. Because lynching was so common and was getting, it seemed to her, more frequent.

7:11And she said famously, a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. So whether Denning had a rifle for hunting, which was common, or for his own protection, which may also have been common, I don't know. But he grabbed his rifle and he started making his way upstairs. and as he passed a window on the east side of the house, he felt pain in his arm and his left bicep and looked down and saw blood, but he was on his way up the steps, so he continued up the steps. The top of the steps were a window with wooden shutters.

7:54The window did not have a glass pane, just these two wooden shutters, and as he reached the window, he threw it open and leaned out with his gun at his shoulder and just as he squeezed off one shot of birdshot from a double-barreled shotgun, he took a bullet right in his forehead. What we know is the bullet entered his skin at his forehead and traveled up under the skin but above his skull. It didn't penetrate the skull but traveled under his skin and then came out about three inches from where it had entered his forehead. that he immediately retreats back into the house, the bullet wound to his head and a bullet wound to his left arm.

8:38And as soon as his shot is fired, almost immediately all the guns outside fall silent. And there's stillness for a second, and the men are heard retreating away from the house. and it's at this time that George Denning must have been faced with the decision, what do I do? What is the best and safest thing for us in this moment? And he decided to get out of the house to bolt. He ran outside out the back door to the nearest tall grass he could find and threw himself down and just waited and listened. And when he was sure the men were gone in retreat, he finally got up off the ground. He's in his night clothes.

9:30He got up off the ground and went back to the house. And his wife, Molly, had met him there with his boots and his jacket. They both knew that he couldn't stay.

9:42Phoebe Judge:I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

9:56Phoebe Judge:We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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12:24Phoebe Judge:After he got dressed, George Denning ran half a mile to the house of one of his white neighbors, a man he considered a friend. And he couldn't rouse him. He shouted outside and couldn't get the guy's attention. and if you pause for a second and think about this, this might be a tricky situation, right? He's pretty sure that he trusts this guy but doesn't know for a fact that this guy wasn't among the white people who were there at his house that night, right? So when he calls out and no lights come on and he calls out again and hears no sound, you know, he took off running again. So he tries again, another white neighbor who lives nearby And this neighbor, he wakes and the man examines Denning.

13:11He sees the gunshot wound in his bicep. He sees the gunshot wound in Denning's head. Denning is holding his double-barreled shotgun. He sees that one shot has been discharged from that. He asks what happened and Denning tells him what he knows. So he spends a few hours there. and just as the sun starts to come up, he's going to make a break for it to check on Molly and the kids but on his way, he is met by a black friend who tells him the bad news that that one shot that he squeezed off from the upstairs room had struck and killed a man named Jody Kahn and he must have suspected then because Jody Kahn was the 32-year-old scion of one of the wealthiest families in that region, it would have been very easy for George Denning to predict what might happen next, which was people would be looking for vengeance.

14:14Phoebe Judge:What did he do next after he heard about Jody? Well, he couldn't go home. He realized this would have been incredibly dangerous. What he decided to do was walk nine miles from where they lived in the rural southern part of the county to the county seat of Franklin and turn himself in to the sheriff. This, at the time, was not, you know, there would have been a lot of risk, let's say, involved in turning yourself in to a southern sheriff if you're a black man. To turn yourself over to the sheriff often meant to turn yourself over to the lynch mob. and we see evidence all over the state of Kentucky and northern Tennessee, this very thing happening, black men and women accused of crimes.

15:05Maybe they would be arrested or maybe they would turn themselves in. And the mob would show up outside the jail, demand the keys. The jailer would feign some kind of resistance and then turn over the keys. And the mob would take the accused and carry out vigilante justice, if you will, in the form of lynching. often in some public place, in some public way.

15:31Phoebe Judge:But the sheriff and George Denning knew each other. Sheriff Clark had heard about what had happened at George Denning's house and had started preparing to get George out of town as quickly and quietly as possible. Men had already started gathering outside the jail when the sheriff put George into a carriage and rode with him about 20 miles north to another jail in the bigger city of Bowling Green. And Denning would have known that he had just, through his good fortune or the protection of this man, he had just escaped what would have been an attempt on his life by a lynch mob. And what was happening back at his house with his wife and children?

16:17So Denning had no idea what was going on, But some of the men who had been there that night, the night before, some of the men who had even dressed Jody Kahn's wounds with whiskey and cotton had come back to his house the next morning. And they had found, by the way, his 14-year-old son who had been staying with his grandmother and grandfather. That was Denning's mother and father. The men abducted that boy and they basically held him and the rest of the family at their little home for most of the day on Saturday, hoping that George Denning would return. And when he didn't, when they learned that he had turned himself into Sheriff Clark, they demanded that Molly and the children leave the county and leave the state, in fact.

17:10Some of the testimony would later say they said, ride 50 miles and don't stop until you get at least 50 miles away. They had two horses. Molly loaded her children onto the two horses. She walked. They took what they could, a couple of feather beds. And as they walked away, the men set fire to the house and to any various outbuildings and to the fields.

17:38Phoebe Judge:So they knew as they were walking away that the house was gone. They would have smelled the smoke. Molly later said, I was so badly frightened when I left that I did not take time to put wrappings on myself or children. They hadn't eaten. That night, they rode all the way to Tennessee to Molly's brother's house. On the way, black families came out to the road, carrying food, and handed it up to the children. The sheriff and George Denning arrived at the jail in Bowling Green around 7 that evening. Not long after, the jailer received word that a mob was forming and on its way. And he was so worried about this that he armed some of the prisoners because that's how serious this was.

18:32He wasn't about to let the lynch mob take his prisoner. But they do realize they need to get George Denning somewhere even safer. And so he's once again loaded up, not into a carriage this time, but into a train and sent to Louisville, which is the biggest city in Kentucky at the time and probably offers the most protection. Even though he had turned himself in, George Denning hadn't been charged with anything. because the only people there who could testify to what had happened were men who had armed themselves, disguised their faces, muffled their voices and shown up on the front porch of a black man that they were trying to threaten.

19:22So to testify to what had happened, these men had to go public. They had to say, I was there. I was involved.

19:31Phoebe Judge:George waited in jail in Louisville for more than a month before he was indicted for the murder of Jody Kahn. The trial was scheduled for late June. It would be the first time George returned to the county since he'd been relocated from the jail there for his own safety. Almost 300 soldiers escorted him from Louisville. One officer told a reporter that he'd heard that friends of Jody Kahn were planning to take George away from the troops as soon as he arrived, and that it has been said that a regiment of soldiers can't prevent his being hanged. The lieutenant governor sent soldiers with two cannons to guard the county jail.

20:15Phoebe Judge:The governor banned guns from the courtroom and ordered for everyone who came in to be searched. On June 30th, George Denning arrived at the courthouse in a three-piece suit, Members of a black Baptist church in Louisville had taken up a collection to buy it for him. He was surrounded by eight soldiers carrying rifles stationed there to protect him. The first witnesses to testify were some of the men who had shown up at George's house that night. It almost sounds rehearsed. If you read the transcript, it's like they used the same language to describe what they were doing. Their story was they assembled in the evening because they were concerned about some stealing that had been going on in the neighborhood.

21:03They all claimed that when they got to Dennings, they were ambushed, that they were there peacefully trying to coax him outside so they might have a civilized conversation with him. And he fired on them from an upstairs window. And their story was that they did not fire a return fire until they were fired upon.

21:24Phoebe Judge:When George Denning's lawyer asked one of them, what was the purpose of keeping him from knowing who you were, he answered, we didn't want him to know, I guess. George Denning's lawyer called the jailer at Bowling Green, a white farmer who lived near George Denning and had heard gunshots that night, the white neighbor who George had spoken to that night, and another white farmer who saw the bullet holes in the house the next morning. He also called a black neighbor who agreed to testify despite the risk. He said that he'd heard what sounded like pistols firing before he heard what would have been George's shotgun.

22:06Phoebe Judge:George's 12-year-old daughter, Eva, took the stand and described hearing shooting before her father ran upstairs to her bedroom and shot out the window. She also described bullets flying through her hair. George Denning testified that he'd been scared that night. When his lawyer asked him if he believed when he fired his gun that he and his family were in danger, George replied, Yes, sir, because they shot me first. And of course, I knew I was in danger. By the time the jury adjourned for deliberations, newspapers around the country were reporting on George Denning's trial. People were paying attention outside of this small town, Franklin, Kentucky.

22:51They were paying attention because this case dealt with some fundamental civil rights issues. Could a man protect himself with deadly force inside of his own home if he was attacked? Question one, everyone answers yes, you know, across the board. Question two, could a black man protect himself using deadly force in his own home when he's under attack?

23:26Phoebe Judge:We'll be right back.

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