The final resting place of Pvt. George Bell, a Limestone County World War I veteran who was awarded his nation’s second highest military honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, was a mystery until Friday.

“There he is—there he is,” cried Lt. Col. James Walker, U.S. Army retired, as he knelt at Bell’s graveside in Oak Grove Christian Methodist Episcopal Church Cemetery and planted an American flag.

Walker, a JROTC instructor at Austin High School, has been searching for Bell’s grave for five years after learning through Internet research that Limestone County was the home of two black World War I Distinguished Service Cross recipients.

Walker is a determined man. He believes in military honor and he believes in honoring the accomplishments of distinguished black citizens.

He will not be deterred from either course.

The 1963 Trinity High School graduate retired from the Army in 1985. Eleven of Walker’s Austin High cadets have been accepted to West Point and one to the Air Force Academy.

Walker didn’t start out searching for Bell’s grave. He began searching for fellow Distinguished Cross recipient Van Horton.

“When I first got out of the Army in 1985, I was riding around the southwest part of the county with a cousin of mine, James Dobbins, looking for some of the places we knew growing up,” said Walker. “He told me about a Horton boy who had ‘won a star’ and jealousy over a black person winning it started that 1946 race riot here.

“Well, I had never heard that and I immediately thought he must be talking about the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest military honor,” said Walker.

He said he talked to several Horton family members, but none knew of an ancestor named Van Horton who had been highly decorated in World War I.

“I sort of got to thinking that my cousin James was wrong about Horton, but then when my mother, (the late Limestone County teacher Bessie Walker) told me that I had an ancestor who fought in the Civil War, I didn’t believe her, but I later found that it was true,” said Walker.

Walker unearthed a document from the American Missionary Association in which L. Maynard Catchings had written about an account of the Aug. 10, 1946, Athens race riot as told by the Rev. J. Royster Powell in an Aug. 26, 1946, interview. Powell had been pastor of a Baptist church in Athens at the time of the riot.

He told of coming into Athens on the bus from Nashville at about 5:30 p.m. that day and trying to hire a taxi to take him to his church:

“He tried three times to get a taxicab,” Catchings writes. “The driver of one said, ‘I ain’t riding no niggers today,’ and another said, ‘Get out of town nigger,’ and the third driver told him what was going on and to ‘walk calmly on to his church.’”