Four of Erwin's white citizens attacked a Black man named Tom DeVert during a poker game. He fled and they pursued, shooting. In the chaos, a teenage white girl named Georgia Lee Collins, who was passing by, was hit by a bullet. Devert was murdered and posthumously accused of having assaulted Collins. A group of white men dragged his body to the rail yard powerhouse, where they forced the entire Black population of Erwin to stand and witness DeVert's body being burned on a pyre of railroad cross-ties. According to the Bristol Herald, "Men with pistols, shotguns, and clubs stood before the lined up negroes to prevent their running away, and [one man] turned to the cowering crowd and said, ‘Watch what we are going to do here. If any of you are left in town by tomorrow night, you will meet the same fate.'” At the height of this atrocity, the mob leaders planned to burn the homes of all of Erwin's Black citizens, but the local rail yard manager convinced them to forcibly evict them from the town instead. These residents, numbering 131 men, women, and children, were intimidated into abandoning their homes and goods and leaving at once.
Throughout the 20th century, Erwin was considered a sundown town. The "Erwin Expulsion of 1918," as it has been called, led to the town becoming known as "the place where Blacks dare not go," according to the Johnson City Press-Chronicle.
well there you go.
