By the early 1950s, Lipscomb had plenty of nothing. The iron ore mines had shut down, businesses closed, families moved, and the town slipped into a quiet despair. Lipscomb’s limited tax base provided residents with only a few poorly funded community services: a meager street and sanitation department, a crew of dedicated volunteer firefighters, and a seedy group of police officers. Low pay, political infighting, no training, and few opportunities for advancement gave the police force a poor reputation and led to consistent turnover in personnel.
In 1952, Mayor Roland F. Owen fired Police Chief Melvin Little without approval of the city council and with no explanation. “I’m not obligated to explain unless I want to,” Owen said at the time, “and I don’t want to.” Chief Little later claimed that the mayor disliked him because he refused to drive Owen around in a Lipscomb police car “like a taxicab.” Less than a year later, Owen forced Little’s replacement, Robert L. Payne, to resign for what the former chief called pure politics. “Unfair as it may be,” Payne said, “I had no recourse other than to fulfill his demands. I have been, am at present, and will be in the future, on the opposite side of the political fence from him.”
Within weeks of the resignation, Owen hired three new policemen (James Wilson, John Henderson, and Frank Oakley) and appointed R. C. Douglas as chief—all in violation of city law that required approval by the city council. By the end of 1953, all four resigned after being charged with negligence in the death of a prisoner, Vera Fikes Teer, who was found unconscious outside a Lipscomb nightspot and thrown in jail by the policemen. The next morning, officers found Teer dead in her cell. An autopsy revealed that the woman’s unconscious condition, and later death, was a result of a severe blow to the head and not alcohol. Bessemer deputy coroner T. J. McCollom said there was “no question” of the officers’ negligence. “They should have sent her to the hospital or had a doctor examine her,” he added.
In 1957, Thurman P. Avery, a slow-talking Alabamian with ties to the Ku Klux Klan, served as Lipscomb’s police chief. On July 11, Avery received an anonymous tip: a fearless, high-speed, “devil-driving” whiskey runner in a souped-up coupe equipped with a racing motor, heavy springs, and extra tanks for whiskey storage would deliver a carload of moonshine to a house near the intersection of Thirty-third Street and South Bessemer Road, on the dividing line between Lipscomb and Bessemer, in the shot house haven once known as Whiskeytown.
By 1956, the production, transportation, and consumption of illegal whiskey reemerged as a major law enforcement problem. The seizure of moonshine stills in Alabama and other southern states was approaching Prohibition-era levels. Folks with a taste for hooch could purchase a gallon for $3 to $4 and avoid the whopping $10.50-a-gallon federal whiskey tax and the always increasing state taxes. Most thirsty souls ignored the danger of moonshine poisoning from lead, methyl alcohol, or paint thinner. “If death does not occur from such exposure,” author Jess Carr wrote, “blindness is often the result.”
In spite of the dangers, the bargain prices were too great a temptation to switch to the more refined store-bought brands. After World War II, many Alabama shiners moved stills out of the rural deep woods and set up operations in secluded areas near Bessemer to better serve an urban-industrial clientele. During the 1950s, law enforcement officials estimated that moonshine accounted for over 50 percent of all alcohol consumption. In the Bessemer area, some politicians and lawmen ignored bootlegging activities, so those involved in selling and transporting white lightning made big profits. Chief Avery and his partner, James Barney “Cowboy” Clark, hoped to arrest one of these moonshine runners as he made a delivery to a clandestine shot house.
Earlier that July evening, Cowboy Clark dressed for work at his modest home on Avenue F in Lipscomb. His shift began at 5 p.m. He wore his stiffly starched and crisply pressed summer police uniform: a short-sleeve midnight blue shirt and matching long trousers. Once dressed, Clark drove over to police headquarters in patrol car number thirteen—a late model, black Ford Fairlane sedan with a thundering V-8 engine. A Lipscomb patrolman for just a few months, Cowboy was Thurman Avery’s hometown buddy from the untempered mining town of Searles, southwest of Bessemer, in northern Tuscaloosa County. At the time of his hiring, Clark worked for cigar-chomping G. W. Burroughs as a grease-monkey mechanic and a fill-’er-up attendant at a Gulf gas station on the Bessemer Super Highway.
A likable, backslapping country boy with a fourth-grade education, Clark was a tall, fleshy thirty-seven-year-old with dark blond hair, lubricated and combed in an Elvis Presley wave, and overgrown buckteeth with a wide-cut gap between the two front ones. The aptly nicknamed Cowboy had an affinity for horses, cowboy boots, gaudy Texas belt buckles, and sweat-stained Gene Autry Stetsons. According to his sister, Dorothy, his wide-ranging talent and big-toothed grin were legendary: He could rope a steer, bull-whip a cigarette into two pieces from the lips of some fearless soul, shoot buzzing flies from forty yards away, and sing a mournful ballad about laying to rest a poor cowpoke beneath the lone prairie—all skills that might help him capture the imagination of a sin-loaded honky-tonk girl.
A lonesome drifter right out of one of his ballads, Clark learned his western skills and earned his nickname during the Depression as a young circus performer, doing trick pony riding, fancy roping and lassoing, and skillful six-gun shooting. Clark sent most of the money he earned back home to his impoverished, widowed, arthritis-crippled, stroke-ridden mother and his two fatherless siblings. When he quit the circus and came back to Alabama to work as a laborer for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) digging ditches for fifty cents a day, Cowboy also brought an old flat-top guitar and began singing sad songs to the hardworking white folks who frequented dimly lit honky-tonks—with swinging doors, barstools, and sawdust floors—in and around Tuscaloosa and Bessemer. “He came by it naturally,” Dorothy later remembered. “He just picked that thing up, learned a few chords, and went on.” In those smoke-filled joints, Clark earned a meager living singing traditional cowboy ballads and imitating the popular western performers of his day, including Tex Ritter, Gene Autry, Rex Allen, Roy Rogers, and Marty Robbins.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Cowboy Clark worked all day as a laborer, mechanic, carpenter, or some other hands-on job (he never stayed in one place too long), and at night he sang those lonesome western ballads, including one of his favorites, “The Cowboy’s Lament (Streets of Laredo),” which included the lyrics:
I spied a poor cowboy wrapped up in white linen,
Wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay.
“I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy.”
These words he did say as I boldly stepped by.
“Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story
I’m shot in the breast and I know I must die.”
The good looks and bravado of this singing cowboy attracted the attention of several fun-loving honky-tonk angels, and in 1941, Cowboy began a stormy five-year marriage to Gladys Josephine Green that ended in divorce in 1946. Soon afterward he married an overbearing divorcee, Linann Elledge Orr. They divorced in January 1957.
When Thurman Avery asked Cowboy Clark to join the Lipscomb police force in 1956, he seemed to find the perfect job to fit his western persona. Clark drove to the Bank Pawn Shop (so named because the building once housed the Citizens Bank) in downtown Bessemer and purchased a new Smith and Wesson Combat Masterpiece: a nickel-plated, pearl-handled, .38-caliber revolver with a reputation for deadly accuracy. The total cost was $88.05, which he would pay in weekly installments, and it included a leather “quick-draw” holster for prominent display. Everyone around town, at least the white folks, seemed to like Clark, and he often showed off his gun-twirling skills to Lipscomb’s young and old alike.
Sometime after he became an officer in Lipscomb, Clark stopped a vivacious twenty-seven-year-old raven-haired widow, Florence Hobson Talley, for speeding through his territory. When she went to city hall to pay her fine, Talley, the mother of two young
daughters, handed the clerk her money and left a note with her telephone number for the lawman who gave her a ticket. The two began a whirlwind courtship and were married within days of his divorce in January 1957. During the summer of that year, Cowboy drove his new family up to Toledo, Ohio, to visit his mother, brother, and sister, who all moved north in search of a better life.
Always the performer, Clark wanted to show off his pretty young wife, his new car, and his crisp, pristine lawman’s clothes, with badge and gun. “Oh, he always loved to dress immaculate and look just perfect,” his sister Dorothy later recalled, but that day when he modeled his new uniform and twirled his guns, a foreboding spirit washed over her and she began to cry. She ran to the bathroom to hide her tears. Clark found her sobbing and asked, “What’s the matter with you?” She responded, “Oh Barney, I’ll never see you alive again. I just know it.” He told her that she was just being silly.
Clark was back at work from his vacation in Ohio just a few days when Chief Avery told him about the bootlegger stakeout. The assignment had ominous and personal undertones for Cowboy. His late father, Dick Clark, was a mean-spirited, no-count moonshiner who lived near the murky waters of the Black Warrior River in the far western reaches of Jefferson County. Born in 1893, in the nearby mining town of Adger (so named for Andrew Moffett Adger, the secretary and treasurer for the DeBardeleben Coal and Iron Company), Dick Clark worked for several years as a coal miner and supported his wife Lula Luella Townson, a pious, spirit-filled Pentecostal Holiness believer, and three children. But the long hours, low pay, and dungeon-dark work were too much for him. He began moonshining, quit mining, and ran afoul of the law, gamblers, and his devout wife.
The stiff-necked Lula kicked him out of the house soon after Dorothy’s birth, and Dick took up residence with a like-minded river woman in a handcrafted shiner’s shack on the banks of one of the tributaries of the Black Warrior. The pair made and sold corn liquor for several years, until Dick met an untimely death from drinking a pint of his own ill-brewed poison whiskey. His brothers drove a logging truck down to his shanty, loaded Dick’s body into the back, and hauled his pickled corpse to the old family home in Adger; there the Clark women groomed and dressed him in clean clothes, while the menfolk made a coffin out of cedar. They laid him to rest in an unmarked grave in the Adger cemetery.
CLARK AND AVERY had whiskey on their minds that evening in July 1957. As they approached their destination, the houses along the street became cheaper and meaner, but all appeared quiet. Cowboy Clark stopped the patrol car in the curve above Thirty-third Street, where the pair had a clear view in every direction. He shut off the engine and turned off the lights. Where Avery and Clark were sitting, they could see that two corners of the intersection were empty neglected lots with tall weeds growing. Across the road on the southeastern corner was a dried-out, brown, $20-a-month rental house with unlevel floors, out-of-sort windows, a sagging roof, a leaning chimney, and a chicken coop in the backyard. Across Thirty-Third Street was a five-room bungalow with a poor roof and no bathroom facilities that rented for $12 a month.
Avery grew restless and decided to take a look around the area on foot, breaking a basic rule of a two-member surveillance team: stick together. “Do not split up a team,” one investigator wrote in 1951. “They are more effective both in observation and in apprehending the criminal when working together.” Avery opened the car door. As he stood, he reached down and grabbed a flashlight. He closed the door and leaned through the open window in front of Clark and spoke in a low voice: “You wait here. If you see anything, honk the horn three times.”
With a prominent limp in his left leg from a coal mining accident in Searles, Avery slowly wandered up the steep hill, around the sharp curve, and disappeared behind the houses. Avery peered around corners and shined his meager light into the dark shadows of the neighborhood. A few minutes later, the chief heard a car crank and speed off. He heard no siren, and at the time, he thought nothing of it. He continued looking for the shot house and the whiskey runners for another thirty minutes, before walking back to wait with Clark again.
As Avery walked down to the bottom of the hill, he realized that the patrol car was gone and that the sound of the speeding car he heard earlier was Clark. The chief stood in the middle of the street unsure where to go. After a few moments of indecision, a befuddled Avery began searching for a telephone to contact the dispatcher. Lipscomb shared the radio frequency with Bessemer, and Avery hoped the dispatcher on duty that evening, Sergeant H. E. Williamson, could reach Clark and send him back to Thirty-Third Street.
A half hour before, as Cowboy Clark began pursuit of the two-tone Chevy, he lifted the microphone from the hook on the dashboard and reported his position on Dartmouth Avenue (South Bessemer Road) and Twenty-Ninth Street coming into Bessemer city limits. Williamson acknowledged Clark’s radio transmission.
CALIPH WASHINGTON GLANCED in his rearview mirror and saw a car fall in behind him with bright round headlights glowing. He looked back at it without much interest, until the lights suddenly grew larger as the car closed in on his bumper. The young man stepped on the gas, but the other car matched his speed. He grew concerned.
Violent reprisals against blacks in the area were an ever-present danger, especially in the late 1950s. In the wake of an economic downturn in heavy industry following World War II and the U.S. Supreme Court’s attack on the foundation of segregation in its Brown v. Board of Education decisions in 1954 and 1955, many working class whites in and around Bessemer, and throughout the South, felt threatened and pushed to the margins of society. With the “southern way of life” and the industrial economy collapsing around them, white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan provided these whites an opportunity to vent their “frustration and insecurity” through ritual and violence. Bessemer’s Klan Klavern was large, powerful, and particularly violent. The Klan’s “repressive influence” seemed omnipresent, not just in its overt expressions of violence but also in the terror engendered in the knowledge that the Klan’s distinct form of vigilante justice, lynching, “lurked around every corner.” With so many Bessemer law enforcement officials also members of the Klan, the hidden hands of terror and law enforcement were one and the same.
Washington understood this as he studied the car in the rearview mirror. No red lights flashed; no siren wailed. This was not a police car, he assured himself. He had done nothing wrong. Still, he didn’t like the look of it, because blacks lived, as historian Pete Daniel observed, “in a world of uncertainty, bound to careful behavior that still did not guarantee safety.” Then Washington heard the crack of gunshots and the sound of bullets whizzing by his open window. Someone was shooting at his car, but who? “It scared me,” Caliph later recalled. “The first thing I thought was, Ku Klux Klan—some night gang or something—somebody after me.” He stomped on the accelerator, and the straight-six Chevy lurched forward as it gained speed. The other car stayed right on its tail.
While fear told Caliph Washington that Klan hoodlums were on his bumper, Cowboy Clark’s bravado informed him that he was tailgating a moonshine whiskey runner in a two-tone 1950 Chevrolet. For reasons still unknown, perhaps in his excitement, he failed to switch on his siren.
Washington, looking in his rearview and side mirrors, could see nothing but bright round headlights. He sped down Dartmouth Avenue, a broad street lined mostly with large, well-built homes occupied by the city’s elite. At Sixteenth Street, he took a hard left. His tires squealed as he rounded the corner and drove up the hill in the direction of his brother’s house.
Clark, on his bumper, yelled into the microphone where he thought his location was. Several Bessemer patrolmen, including A. J. Wood and his partner, J. R. Pace, heard Clark’s radio transmissions. Officer Wood thought Clark was lost. “He didn’t know the city streets too well.” Regardless, Wood and Pace, in patrol car number eight, were writing a speeding ticket almost thirty blocks away, on the north side of Bessemer near the intersection
of Fourteenth Avenue and Thirteenth Street. “It is customary on a call coming in like that,” Wood explained, “where they are chasing a car, we all give assistance without being asked.” Wood made a U-turn and began traveling at a high rate of speed southeast toward the chase.
Caliph tried to elude the car on his tail. He swung the big car wildly as he took a hard right on Exeter Avenue and then a quick right on Short Fifteenth Street. He sped past the shotgun shack where he once lived. “I wasn’t going to stop,” Caliph later recalled. “I couldn’t see nobody. All I could see was a bright light.” He turned right on unpaved Dartmouth Alley and kicked up a cloud of dust on his way back to Sixteenth Street, where he turned right and then right again on Exeter and back down to Short Fifteenth Street. This time he honked the horn as he drove through the neighborhood. “I wanted people to come out,” he remembered. “In that neighborhood down there, there was some bad black people, and they didn’t take nothing off of nobody. I was honking the horn to get them woke up. I knew they would come out and have something to protect themselves with.”
After passing by two or three times, he got back on Sixteenth Street and sped up the steep grade to Fairfax Avenue and took a right. Just before the Atlantic Coast railway underpass at Fourteenth Street, he took a fast right on to the unpaved Exeter Alley. Halfway up the alley, he looked in his mirrors again, and through a cloud of dust he saw a red light revolving on top of the car. He pulled hard to the left, slammed on his brakes, and came to a stop against a chinaberry tree near the corner of John Adams’s house at 1502 Exeter Alley.
JOHN ADAMS WAS a sound sleeper. A mover for Continental Van Lines, he worked ten- to twelve-hour days beginning at 6 a.m. “We moves [sic] everywhere,” Adams once said. “There ain’t no telling where we’ll be if we are on the job.” That July night, Adams pushed his full-size bed next to the open, front bedroom window, hoping to gain some relief from the sweat-soaking heat wave. He lived in one side of a dried-up old double tenant house, with rotten pine siding and a steep, rusted tin roof. Located at 1502 Exeter Alley in Bessemer, Adams shared his side of the shack with his longtime live-in girlfriend, Mary Davidson.
He Calls Me by Lightning Page 5