I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!

By Robert E. Burns and Matthew J. Mancini

I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is the amazing true story of one man's search for meaning, fall from grace, and eventual victory over injustice.

In 1921, Robert E. Burns was a shell-shocked and penniless veteran who found himself at the mercy of Georgia's barbaric penal system when he fell in with a gang of petty thieves. Sentenced to six to ten years' hard labor for his part in a robbery that netted less than $6.00, Burns was shackled to a county chain gang. After four months of backbreaking work, he made a daring escape, dodging shotgun blasts, racing through swamps, and eluding bloodhounds on his way north.

For seven years Burns lived as a free man. He married and became a prosperous Chicago businessman and publisher. When he fell in love with another woman, however, his jealous wife turned him in to the police, who arrested him as a fugitive from justice. Although he was promised lenient treatment and a quick pardon, he was back on a chain gang within a month. Undaunted, Burns did the impossible and escaped a second time, this time to New Jersey. He was still a hunted man living in hiding when this book was first published in 1932.

The book and its movie version, nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1933, shocked the world by exposing Georgia's brutal treatment of prisoners. I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is a daring and heartbreaking book, an odyssey of misfortune, love, betrayal, adventure, and, above all, the unshakable courage and inner strength of the fugitive himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780820343013

Robert E. Burns

ROBERT E. BURNS (1891-1955) was a native of Brooklyn, New York. After his sentence was commuted by the state of Georgia in 1945, he worked as a toy store owner, tax consultant, and veterans' affairs archivist.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

BY THE REV. VINCENT G. BURNS

UNDER A fiery Georgia sun. On a ribbon of red clay road. Glittering like an endless bronze snake among the trees. Throwing dust into your lungs. We are hiking on a broiling summer’s day from the little town of La Grange, Georgia, to a point three miles southwest. To the Troup County convict camp, isolated among the cotton-clad hills of south Georgia.

The Negroes, lounging around their shacks on this hot Sunday afternoon, sit up to stare at the strangers. The shacks in which they live are one-or two-room buildings on stilts. Buildings that huddle together along the red clay road and house the families of the colored folks. Little absolutely naked babies toddle around the doors. Grand-fathers and grandmothers sit silently on steps of houses. Not a single uplifting element surrounds these cottages, except the green of the trees and the blue of the skies.

On we go, down the road. We pass a bend. Hot and tired we sit down on a rock and survey before us the Troup County stockade. A level clay esplanade, blazing under the sun. A well-sweep. Beyond that a long, low, gray building. Windows barred. A black chimney in the back. Beyond that a stockade where one sees mules and wagons. A guard, heavily armed, sits talking with a trusty at the entrance. A few more trusties in stripes walk about the clay esplanade. Red dust on everything, trees, buildings, men.

We get up and go over to where the guard is sitting. He says to us What do you want? We tell him who we are. He sends the trusty inside. After a long wait the trusty comes out. All right! We follow him inside.

We find ourselves in a grim, gray, dungeon-like room. Through the chicken-wire and iron bars, where a number of convicts are talking to relatives, we see about seventy men. On the right-hand side of the room, huddled in little groups or pacing up and down in chains, we see about thirty or forty Negroes. On the left-hand side of the room are thirty or forty white men.

On a raised platform immediately in front we see several burly guards, with heavy six-shooters on their hips.

An intense, awful spell of silence seems to be gripping everything. The only sounds are the clanking of the chains and the whispering of the prisoners, as they converse with their friends.

A burly guard calls out shrilly in the silence, Burns!

Out from among the white convicts steps a slim, short figure.

He walks stooped over, as if each step were an effort. He is thin and emaciated. He lifts his eyes to see who it is, eyes full of suffering and dread, and yet with a degree of expectancy.

Suddenly a sob, half-choked, but distinctly audible, comes to his lips, Mother! He runs to the sad, gray-haired woman who stands behind the chicken wire. Elliott, my boy! she cries. They cannot embrace. They cannot even touch each other’s hands. They look into each other’s eyes. Neither can say a word. They stand looking at one another helplessly.

He turns to me. Tears are blinding his eyes. For God’s sake, Vince, he says, why didn’t you come sooner?

Who was this man? Why was he here? What had he done?

This man was my own brother, and the gray-haired mother my own mother. This tragedy that was enacted before me was partly my own. The steps that led up to it were as I briefly relate them here.

When America declared war on the Central Powers in 1917 Robert E. Burns was a successful young accountant in New York City. He enlisted a few days after the decla-ration of war and arrived in France with a medical detachment of the 14th Railway Engineers in the summer of 1917. From September, 1917, until the armistice in November of 1918 he was almost constantly at the front. He served in Flanders and in the Chateau Thierry, Argonne and St. Mihiel drives. In the medical detachment he was required to attend the wounded and bury the dead. The strain was terrific during the heavy