Like Edna Chappell before her, Evelyn Cunningham was working for the Women’s Activities department at the Courier at the time of Isaiah Nixon’s murder and trial. She had come to Pittsburgh from the Harlem office, where she had been hired on the recommendation of an aunt who was dating Edgar Rouzeau, the dashing bureau chief turned war correspondent. Evelyn’s first job was to read through The New York Times every morning to identify stories of interest to black readers, then to rewrite them with a Courier spin. Her sharp eye and deft writing touch impressed the editors in Pittsburgh, who offered her a raise to work at headquarters. At first she hated it, finding Smoketown as sleepy as it was smelly and dark. But with her elegant looks and gift for gab, Evelyn quickly turned heads and made friends. Before long she was organizing office parties and playing in the weekly office poker game, the only woman invited to the table.
Pittsburgh wasn’t so bad, Evelyn decided, but she, too, yearned to do more than cover weddings and teas. At thirty-one, she couldn’t remember a time when the news of the day hadn’t been part of her life. Born Evelyn Long in the small town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, she would leaf through the local paper as a toddler to find the name of her Grandmother Ellen, who wrote for the paper’s “colored section.” When she was five, the Long family moved to Harlem, where her father, Clyde, drove a cab and her mother, Mary, sewed dresses. At the dinner table, they discussed the headlines in The Pittsburgh Courier and the Amsterdam News and encouraged Evelyn and her brother Clyde Jr. to ask questions. Evelyn’s interest in writing blossomed as she attended two of the best public schools available to colored students in New York City: Hunter High School for Girls in Manhattan, and Long Island University in Brooklyn. When she landed a part-time job with the Courier while still a student at LIU, her father was so proud that he bought her a secondhand typewriter and taught her how to use it.
By 1948, Evelyn Long had been married and divorced once and had just wed her second husband, a man named Gerald Cunningham. But she had no interest in having children, or in settling down to the life of a housewife. Instead, she began to pester Bill Nunn for more challenging reporting assignments.
“Do I have to cover these card parties for the rest of my life?” Cunningham nagged. “I want to do more serious stories.”
“Like what?” Nunn asked.
To test him, she cited the most horrific story in the paper at the time, the postwar spike in mob killings of Negroes. “Like the lynchings down south,” she said.
When Nunn nodded “Okay” and said that he would keep her in mind, Cunningham suspected he might simply be humoring her. Perhaps he thought that once she had time to mull it over, she would decide that she was happy to stay in Pittsburgh and cover fashion shows. So when she read Sallie Nixon’s letter, she had a bold idea. She went to Nunn and proposed that the Courier start a fund to aid the Nixons, and that Evelyn herself go south to meet the widow and dramatize her plight for the paper.
The week of Christmas 1948, Courier readers picked up the latest edition to find a picture of Evelyn Cunningham on the front page, handing Sallie Nixon a check for $117.48 to help her family celebrate the holiday. Dressed in a tailored short-sleeve dress, her hair professionally straightened and curled, Cunningham towered over the petite widow, who wore a plain white blouse and no makeup. Behind them stood a tiny tree that the children had decorated, and a picture of Sallie’s late husband on the wall, his baby face framed by a farmer’s fedora. “Christmas for the Nixons Will Be Real,” promised the headline on Cunningham’s story, which conjured up the cramped two-room house in which the family was living. In one room, Sallie, her mother-in-law, and five children slept on two beds that had been pushed together, with baby Isaiah in a crib on the floor. In the other room were her unemployed uncle and his wife and child.
The next edition, published on New Year’s Day, announced: “The Courier’s Resolution for ’49: A NEW HOME FOR THE NIXONS!” The paper reported that it had already collected $1,275 and called upon “clubs, churches, civil and social organizations, individuals and groups of all kind” to contribute. In a poignant profile, Cunningham described the state of mind of the five-foot-tall Georgia farm girl who found herself a widowed mother of six at the age of twenty-five. “Sallie Nixon isn’t bitter about the death of her husband,” Evelyn wrote. “The kind of sorrow she bears is in some sense worse than bitterness. She has a pitiful fear of white people, and way deep down I believe she feels that the brutal killing of her husband, at the hands of two white men, was inevitable . . . one of those things that happens to a colored man in the South.” Yet Sallie carried on for the sake of her children. She was still able to marvel at seeing ocean water for the first time, and to laugh when told about the marriage proposals that had come into the Courier since it began printing her picture. “I wouldn’t wish these children on any man,” Sallie said.
The following week, Cunningham profiled the Nixon children, in a story accompanied by adorable photographs of the six in their finest hand-me-downs. She described ten-year-old Mary Ann as a shy but protective eldest child. When Evelyn took her and two-year-old Connie Louise into town and offered to buy them popsicles, Mary Ann told her that she and her sister would share. Seven-year-old Hubert was a budding “lady killer” with his father’s good looks, a natural ease with hugging and kissing but also a habit of picking on his three younger sisters. Six-year-old Yvonne was quiet and kept to herself. Of them all, the most shaken by their father’s death was Margaret, the pig-tailed four-year-old who “clung to her mother like a shawl.” Meanwhile, the youngest, Isaiah Jr., had just turned four months old and would grow up with no memories of his father or of the brutal way in which he died. “He’ll never remember any of it,” Cunningham wrote.
Moved by the family’s plight and Cunningham’s touching stories, hundreds of Courier readers sent donations to the “Nixon Fund.” Wendell Smith led the collection drive in the world of sports, eliciting contributions from several Negro League baseball teams and a $50 check from Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. Billy Rowe worked his entertainment contacts in New York City. But most of the money came from ordinary citizens and community groups, often in amounts of as little as a dollar or two. With Cunningham acting as chaperone, Sallie Nixon traveled north, appearing in black churches in Detroit and Pittsburgh and receiving a welcome from Pittsburgh mayor David Lawrence. By the time the trip was over, the fund had swelled to $3,336.76—enough to purchase a modest 55-by-25-foot lot in the black neighborhood of Jacksonville, within walking distance of a school.
From California, the most famous black architect in America extended his help. Paul Williams was a Los Angeles–born orphan who had grown up to become the first Negro west of the Mississippi River to earn an architect’s license. By the late 1940s, he had developed a reputation as “Hollywood’s architect” after designing the homes of numerous movie stars and marquee properties such as the MCA Building and the Palm Beach Tennis Club. Williams offered to design a home for the Nixons as his contribution to the fund, and within weeks the Courier published his drawing of a modest, five-room bungalow framed by palm trees and a picket fence.
The week before Christmas of 1949, a year after Evelyn Cunningham had proposed the crusade, Jesse Vann traveled to Jacksonville to present Sallie Nixon with the keys and deed to her new home. In the end, it had cost $7,300 to build, under the watchful eye of a Florida contractor named Leroy Argrett who also charged no fee or markups on materials. More than seven hundred individuals, churches, and other organizations had contributed just over $5,000 to the Nixon Fund. Mrs. Vann herself had made up the difference: $2,290.00. A separate fund announced by Cunningham raised several hundred dollars for furnishings, and half a dozen stores in Pittsburgh and Jacksonville donated appliances, tables, chairs, and bunk beds. “I’m too happy to say a word,” Sallie sobbed as she entered the house, before composing herself to thank Mrs. Vann and assembling her children for a picture under a Christmas tree that had been purchased and surrounde
d with presents by Paul Williams’s wife, Della.
Calling the Nixon Fund “one of the noblest campaigns in its history,” the Courier reminded readers of its larger purpose. “It not only was the matter of Mrs. Nixon’s family needing a home,” the paper declared. “It was a direct slap in the face of those who sought to undermine democracy by denying a citizen the constitutional right to vote.”
With time, Evelyn Cunningham’s crusade on behalf of Isaiah Nixon’s widow and children would be largely forgotten in the annals of the civil rights struggle. But it foreshadowed strategies and tactics to come: the broadening of the movement to the cause of voting rights; and the search for sympathetic, press-friendly victims who could inspire blacks and stir the conscience of whites. For Evelyn Cunningham, it was also the beginning of a new life on the road, one that would make her one of the first journalists, black or white, to arrive at the next great battlegrounds of the movement and to introduce the country to two of its towering figures.
• • •
OVER THE NEXT DECADE, Evelyn Cunningham would become the only civil rights reporter in America who dispensed romantic advice in her spare time. Capitalizing on her star power after the Nixon Fund campaign, Cunningham persuaded her editors in Pittsburgh to let her move back to the Harlem bureau and to give her a weekly column. She called it “The Women,” and addressed it to a new generation of female readers. Instead of tea parties, she covered such topics as going on blind dates, conversing with awkward white men, and feigning interest in sports for women who didn’t know “home plate from a hot plate.” The Courier touted “The Women” as “spicy reading,” and in her most provocative pieces Cunningham explored the art of picking up men in bars, the etiquette of accompanying them to striptease clubs, and the absence of data about black women in Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 bestseller Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. (“Since, however, Negro women are women before they are Negro,” Cunningham concluded, “I am inclined to believe—without benefit of a staff of researchers—that there would not have been any drastic differences in the Kinsey findings had he included Negro women.”)
In a column entitled “Race Leaders with Sex Appeal,” Cunningham playfully suggested that vision and eloquence weren’t the only qualities that drew women to leading civil rights figures. For A. Philip Randolph, it was his seductive voice—“one of those deep, resonant, cultured larynxes that goes with the come-wiz-me-to-see-Casbah line.” For diplomat Ralph Bunche, it was his worldly air: “When his cigarette dangles from his lips, when his eyes sparkle and he looks like he’s going to wink but doesn’t, a gal reporter has a tough time concentrating on weighty United Nations problems.” For Congressmen Adam Clayton Powell, it was his wavy mane and rascal charm: “There’s not much he has to say when he is appearing before a hysterical group of women, and a lock of hair falls down to the middle of his brow.”
But it was no accident that Cunningham reserved her most affectionate assessment for Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. “With some very important court victories under his belt and a wealth of prestige and influence around the world,” Evelyn wrote, “Marshall can still walk into a room and stumble over a chair and be assured that it will be put down to his ‘boyishness.’ ”
Cunningham had first met Marshall while covering what became known as the “Groveland Four” case. In 1948, around the time that Isaiah Nixon was shot in Georgia, Norma Padgett, a seventeen-year-old woman from Groveland, Florida, accused four black men of raping her. Three of them—Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee, and Walter Lee Irvin—were promptly arrested. The fourth, Ernest Thomson, fled Groveland’s Lake County but was tracked down by a posse and killed on the spot. An all-white jury found the others guilty after Shepherd and Greenlee confessed. But an NAACP legal team, led by Marshall, appealed the death sentence for Shepherd and Irvin (Greenlee was given life as a minor), on the grounds that blacks had been excluded from the jury and that the confessions were coerced with savage beatings while the suspects were shackled to jailhouse ceiling pipes and forced to stand on broken glass. After three years, the case went to the Supreme Court, which overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial.
On a November night in 1951, Sheriff Willis McCall arrived at Raiford State Prison to transport the three black men back to the Lake County jail. On the way, according to McCall’s account, a tire on his car went flat. When he pulled onto a dirt road to inspect the damage, Samuel Shepherd asked to get out of the car to relieve himself. Shepherd was handcuffed to Irvin, and as soon as they were on their feet they turned on McCall and attacked him. In self-defense, McCall said, he shot both men, killing Shepherd and wounding Irvin, who survived by pretending to be dead.
Walter Irvin was rushed to a hospital in Eustis, Florida, and Cunningham was one of a handful of reporters to be allowed into his room. There, she found Thurgood Marshall and other members of his legal team huddled around the hospital bed as Irvin, gasping for air, gave his version of the shooting. It was after dark, he said, and Sheriff McCall was trailing another car driven by his deputy, James Yates. Yates pulled off onto a clay road, and McCall followed him. They stopped and got out of their cars to confer, then Yates peeled away. As McCall drove farther down the road, he started to complain about a flat tire. Stopping again, he ordered the prisoners to help him fix it. As the shackled pair shimmied off the front bench seat and tried to stand up, McCall pumped a bullet into each of them. Then he threw the men to the ground and fired two more times.
Wounded but still conscious, Irvin saw Deputy Yates reappear. “These SOB’s tried to jump me and I did a good job on them,” he heard McCall say. Yates shone a flashlight in Irvin’s eyes. “This SOB’s not dead,” he said. “Let’s kill him.” Yates fired at Irvin for a third time, at close enough range that he assumed the shot was fatal.
Alex Akerman, one of the defense attorneys, leaned in toward Irvin’s hospital bed. “I know you must be tired, but there are just one or two questions,” he said. “Had you tried to jump him? The sheriff?”
“No, sir,” Irvin replied.
Then Thurgood Marshall spoke. “Did you ever try to escape that night?”
“No, sir, never,” Irvin said.
From the hospital, Cunningham went to Irvin’s home, where she was the first person to describe the nature of his wounds to his parents. Delia Irvin insisted that her “Walt Lee,” a World War II Army veteran, could not have committed the rape because he would never lie to his mother. “ ‘I’m your mamma,’ ” she said. “ ‘Tell the truth. Did you do that?’ And Walt Lee said he didn’t.” Cleveland Irvin just wanted to visit his son in the hospital and bring him cigarettes. They talked of taking Irvin and his three younger brothers someplace else where it would be “good for us,” but that hope was in vain. An all-white coroner’s jury cleared Sheriff McCall of any wrongdoing. Despite Marshall’s best efforts, Irvin was convicted in a second trial, after rejecting a plea deal that would have spared him the death penalty. He spent the next three years on death row until a new governor commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, and another thirteen behind bars before he was paroled. On a visit to Lake County two years later, Irvin was found dead in mysterious circumstances, his body slumped over the wheel of his car.
By the time Walter Irvin’s second trial was over, Evelyn Cunningham and Thurgood Marshall had become fast friends. He encouraged her to keep asking for hard news assignments, and teased her when he saw a man’s byline on a big story. “Why didn’t you write that article?” he asked. Over time, Cunningham became one of the few reporters with whom Marshall let down his guard. To his biographer Juan Williams, Cunningham recalled one night when Marshall accompanied her to an illegal after-hours club in New York. Around three in the morning, police broke in and threw everyone in the crowded, smoke-filled place into a panic. Spotting a familiar policeman, Cunningham pleaded with him to let Marshall escape. “You can’t arrest this man,” she said. “He is very, very important. You have to let him go.” The cop ush
ered the two out a side door, but as they were walking away Marshall tipsily threatened to go back. “I would like to defend these guys—these cops got no right doing this,” he declared, before Cunningham yanked his coat sleeve and suggested that it was time for him to go home.
In the fall of 1953, as Marshall was organizing the NAACP lawyers to argue the case for desegregating America’s schools before the Supreme Court, he allowed Cunningham into their inner sanctum: the cluttered offices of the Legal Defense Fund on 107 West 43rd Street in Manhattan. She described the chaotic informality with which Marshall oversaw a small army of fifty-two lawyers as they raced to meet the deadline that the justices had set for rehearing cases in thirty-seven states. She introduced Courier readers to Marshall’s still largely unknown team of lieutenants: his bow-tied deputy, Robert Carter; Constance Baker Motley, the only woman on the team; and Jack Greenberg, the top white lawyer. (Later, Cunningham would write a strong defense of Greenberg when Marshall was named to the U.S. Court of Appeals and many blacks criticized the Legal Defense Fund for appointing a white man to succeed him.)
When the justices heard the arguments in December 1953, Cunningham was one of four reporters the Courier sent to Washington. Outside the Court, she interviewed blacks who had camped out overnight, warming themselves with Thermoses of coffee, to get one of the fifty seats inside that had been set aside for spectators. Inside, Bill Nunn and two other Courier reporters took notes as Marshall and his lieutenants argued before the justices. Also seated in the gallery, in a section reserved for Marshall’s special guests, was Pittsburgh’s Daisy Lampkin, who had led a joint Courier-NAACP fundraising drive that raised more than $13,000 to pay the Legal Defense Fund’s expenses.
Smoketown Page 33