Caliph Washington was now out of Bessemer and out of Alabama. Perhaps there was a chance he would get to New Mexico after all.
4
“IN BESSEMER, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN”
Caliph Washington arriving at the Jefferson County jail in Bessemer—escorted by deputy sheriff Clyde Morris (left) and police chief George Barron (right).
MORE THAN ONE hundred law enforcement officials throughout central Alabama searched for Caliph Washington. With the assistance of federal, state, and military officials, police followed every lead on the fugitive’s whereabouts. On Saturday morning, July 13, Birmingham lawmen pulled “two suspicious Negroes” off a Greyhound bus bound for Nashville and handed them over to Bessemer officials for interrogation. Birmingham and Lipscomb officers searched inbound and outbound passenger trains at the Terminal Station in downtown Birmingham. Lawmen warned the public that the suspect was dangerous and “armed with the dead officer’s .38 service revolver.”
Officers in the Bessemer Police Department were a ragtag crew of poorly paid, ill-trained, and hot-tempered individuals. The department’s annual operating budget was only $44,270, well below that of other departments. On average, the city’s thirty or so officers earned about $350 a month, less than Bessemer street and sanitation workers. In 1950, one Bessemer politician complained that the salaries of the “street department” were more than the combined salaries of the police and fire departments. “Street department employees work eight hours a day,” he noted, “while employees of the Police Department have one day off every two weeks. . . . This condition should be corrected immediately.” For unknown reasons, the city commission kept the pay low and the hours long.
Most policemen walked one of the three beats (upper, lower, back) in the business district. These foot patrollers often faced “untold dangers,” one observer noted, because they had no radio communication with headquarters. “On the midnight shift,” an officer later recalled, “there were only two locations where the beat men could contact headquarters by telephone.” When a policeman made an arrest, he had to walk his prisoner several blocks to the jail, located on the second floor of city hall. If the jail warden ever had trouble with a rowdy prisoner, he could turn on a red light mounted atop a four-story building nearby and pray that one of the beat men would come to the rescue.
The officers walking the city’s dimly lit streets were witness to the seedier elements of Bessemer’s grim, desperate, and helpless culture. “The new cop was weary of the endless grind,” one Bessemer beat walker wrote in 1934. “Last night it had been a riot among the celebrants at a birthday party. Some dusky swain had looked twice at a woman other than his own.” His woman, fearful of losing her man, offered a protest in the form of “sudden, violent, and ghastly efficient flourishes” from a switchblade knife. “When the din of battle quieted enough to count the casualties,” he continued, “the chocolate-colored disciple of Mae West whose overabundance of feminine allure had caused all the trouble, was out of the picture, permanently.
Most of the others present, having allied themselves with one of the other contestants, and joined gleefully in the row, were in jail nursing sundry cuts and bruises—not to mention a healthy respect for the new cop. That queer person [the Bessemer police officer], feeling that a fight of such proportions should not be a private affair, but open to all comers of descent social position, had joined in with a baseball bat.
Those not walking the beat rode in one of Bessemer’s two patrol cars. By the early 1950s, the city installed one-way radios in the cars. If an emergency call came into police headquarters, the warden would call the Birmingham Police Department and give the dispatcher the information to send out to the Bessemer officers. “The only way to determine if the call had been received,” a lawman later recalled, “was when the officers . . . brought a prisoner to headquarters and informed the warden the arrest arose from their last complaint.” By 1957, however, Bessemer had installed its own two-way radio equipment and hired a dispatcher.
It took little skill or training to become a police officer in Bessemer. In the 1950s, regulations required the applicant to have a high school education or equivalent, be at least twenty-one years of age, and score 70 or above on the civil service examination. In the decades before the department elevated its standards, any white man willing to bust heads and hate blacks was eligible. “If you looked right and acted right,” one officer later recalled, “you got the job.” Too few men, too little money, and too much crime led to constant turnover in personnel. Those with seniority were former railroad bulls or steel company security officials who practiced the same two-fisted violence they used in removing hobos from boxcars and breaking up union meetings in the mining camps. An editorial writer for the Birmingham News complained in the 1940s that Bessemer policemen were “so used to aiming their clubs at helpless skulls that they instinctively use them before they had time to take stock.”
Violence and corruption dogged the department throughout the twentieth century. Officers considered Bessemer’s majority black population a “bad lot” and justified vicious beatings in a manner so cruel, one observer noted in 1915, “that it would bring discredit and shame upon the most uncivilized and barbarous community.” That same year the Birmingham-based Jefferson County circuit solicitor (the term then used for district attorney) ignored the dividing line between the two judicial districts and crossed into the Bessemer Cutoff to conduct a grand jury investigation of the racial brutality of the city police department. The high-minded Hugo Lafayette Black was the twenty-nine-year-old crusading solicitor who looked to bring law, order, and justice to a city that had never embraced those concepts. Black, who would one day serve as a U.S. senator from Alabama and as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, discovered that Bessemer police officers, who had sworn to uphold the law, chronically violated the “fundamental rights and constitutional privileges of its citizens.”
Bessemer’s lawmen, however, had a different perspective. Those who testified before Black’s grand jury viewed beatings, whippings, and other forms of torture of black suspects as such a routine part of police duty that they saw nothing morally wrong with such treatment. “I have slapped some of them pretty hard,” one officer said. “I slapped them because you can slap harder and you don’t hurt your fist.” Black suspects could do nothing to defend themselves, the officer admitted, but he was never cruel enough to “hit any with a pistol.” Another officer described how police would beat the blacks and then whip them with a thick strap. “It was a belly-band strap,” he added. “It had a buckle at one end and a strap, or ‘cracker’ on the other. They usually had that at hand.”
Tobe McCoy was one of the few blacks brave enough to appear before the grand jury to tell the story of his violent encounter with Bessemer police officers. According to McCoy, he was out for a Sunday afternoon stroll when officers raided a gaming house near to where he was walking. One of the lawmen, an officer with a nasty reputation for shooting black suspects, took aim at McCoy, and the bystander took off running. “I didn’t hear him say to stop,” McCoy recalled, and as he ran, the officer shot the “fleeing suspect” in the buttocks. “I wasn’t in the game at all,” he added. “I didn’t have any weapon of any kind. I never owned a pistol.”
In the end, the grand jurors and Hugo Black agreed that Bessemer police officers routinely took “helpless prisoners in the late hours of night, into a secluded room . . . and there beat them until they were red with their own blood, in the efforts to obtain confessions.” Black’s report added:
We find that this cowardly practice in which four big officers with pistols safely strapped on their bodies would thus take advantage of ignorance and helplessness has been continuously in operation for a long number of years. A leather strap with a buckle on one end, and a big flap on the other, was invested for this purpose. . . . In this room were none present but the officers and the helpless prisoner, often innocent of the crime of which he was charged, arrested without a wa
rrant, on vague suspicion.
It was a scathing indictment on the city and its police force, but Bessemer’s political establishment rejected it. “It would have been more manly,” Mayor I. A. Lewis proclaimed, “had the grand jury reported the good they saw. I know there is much more good than bad in every officer.”
In the decades that followed, the lawlessness of Bessemer’s policemen continued unabated. A few officers took payoffs and ignored places like the Blue Bird, the Southern Night Club, Club Reo, the Barn, and Hollywood Plaza, as well as shot houses, gambling establishments, and prostitution rings, especially one run by an elderly black woman who kept a .38 Special in the front pocket of her apron. “There may not be any more vice in Bessemer than other places,” another officer explained, “but it sure is easier to find.”
During the 1950s, when one investigator from the circuit solicitor’s office probed shot house payoffs, someone tossed a dummy grenade into the front seat of his automobile as a warning. “This is Bessemer,” Police Chief George Barron once proclaimed, “and experience has taught us that in Bessemer, anything can happen.”
GEORGE BARRON JOINED the Bessemer Police Department in 1947 as motorcycle patrolman after working for a time as an electric bridge crane operator at U.S. Steel’s Ensley works. In 1954, he earned promotion to lieutenant and was named chief in late 1956 at the age of thirty-three. Barron, a fit, 6-foot-2 and 180-pound former World War II marine, possessed somber gray eyes, a stone face, and a close crop of rapidly retreating brown hair. Born on August 3, 1924, in Jefferson County, he was the son of Rondle and Myrtle Barron of Adamsville.
Most whites in Bessemer held Chief Barron in high regard for his “good moral character” and excellent leadership skills. One local judge believed the department under his leadership was free of scandals and “unusually well administered,” perhaps the best the city had ever known. In 1959, an FBI agent noted that Barron dressed neatly, was well groomed, and made a “fine appearance.” The chief was “friendly by nature” and easily made friends and quickly established rapport. “His personality reflects a maturity based on a varied background,” he wrote, and exhibited “all the necessary qualifications of an efficient officer and has sufficient administrative ability to command a small department.”
Barron was also a steadfast segregationist who had no qualms about violating the civil rights of black citizens. At times, an FBI agent suggested, the racial climate in Bessemer necessitated this practice and justified violence. “Chief Barron is a police executive in a city which has a very large percentage of Negro population,” the agent wrote, “and it is most politic for him to keep this segment of the population in line and not permit it at any time to rise to a position of prominence.”
Black citizens seemed to be a frequent target of Bessemer police officers’ belligerent inclinations. “When the police arrested a black man,” civil rights leader and union activist Asbury Howard later recalled, “they were known for whipping up on them.” A frequent technique was to kick suspects down the backstairs of the city jail, which allowed officers to claim they had never “laid a hand” on a bruised and battered prisoner. Bessemer policemen also enforced a “regular departmental policy” of requiring blacks to walk in the middle of the downtown streets, not on the sidewalks, after dark—presumably to keep them from any close contact with white women.
In 1944, Bessemer policemen forced black prisoners to participate in an Independence Day watermelon run. As sociologist Charles S. Johnson reported, white citizens cheered as firefighters blasted the inmates with high-pressure hoses to make the race more challenging. Winners received reduced sentences and the watermelons.
Adding to the violence and intimidation was the strength of the Ku Klux Klan in western Jefferson County. Local FBI agents made note of members of the Bessemer department “giving information to Klan officials.” One FBI agent during the civil rights era emphasized that most of the older city police officers and county sheriff’s deputies working in Bessemer were “former or present Klan members.”
ON THIRD AVENUE North in Bessemer, directly across the street from city hall and police headquarters, stood the Jefferson County Courthouse and the sheriff’s office. In 1957, Clyde W. Morris was the chief sheriff’s deputy for the Bessemer area. A hard-living lawman with an affinity for Tampa Nugget Cigars, Morris supervised a small staff of seventeen deputies (“guardians of human rights,” the Birmingham News called them) to serve and protect ninety thousand people living in the four hundred square miles of the western end of Jefferson County.
This area included the steel-driving municipalities of Bessemer, Lipscomb, Fairfield, Brighton, Midfield, Brownsville, and Johns, as well as dozens of unincorporated communities. “While it is true that residential areas of the Bessemer Cutoff are not getting the patrolling needed,” Morris once said, “we feel we are doing a good job.” Nevertheless, he agreed that the Cutoff had an unusually high number of capital and felony cases to investigate. “There is not a Saturday night,” the chief deputy added, “that we do not get so many calls we cannot answer them all.” In 1955, one local leader told the Birmingham News that the Bessemer Cutoff had more major crimes each year than any other county in the state and, in some cases, more than a dozen counties combined. Morris estimated that it would take at least one hundred lawmen to “adequately patrol” the crime-ridden Bessemer Cutoff.
IN THE MINDS of most whites in 1957, crime was not the most serious threat to law and order in Alabama; it was the prospect of black political and social equality and the loss of white status and power. In a place like Bessemer, with a sizable black majority, any threat to the social order, as in Caliph Washington’s case, would elicit a swift and brutal response. Just like every other officer in the county, sheriff’s deputy David Orange wanted in on capturing the presumed police killer. “We followed every report that Caliph Washington might be hiding here or there,” he recalled, “and searched many places trying to find him.” The twenty-six-year-old Orange was on the force for less than seven months, and the intensity of the manhunt unnerved him. The deputy’s superiors warned Orange that Caliph Washington was a desperate, violent, armed fugitive who would shoot any officer who got near him. As he searched abandoned houses for Washington, the deputy expected to hear a gunshot and see a bullet whizzing toward his head.
Adding to his anxiety, Orange found himself riding in a car driven by Murphy Farley, an officer for the Alabama State Beverage Control Board. Murphy drove a black late-model Ford police interceptor with a 312 cubic-inch V-8 engine that he used to chase down fast cars hauling moonshine. When a call came over the radio that Caliph Washington was spotted on the other side of the county, the big, red-faced Murphy stomped the accelerator. Orange hung on tight. “We hurtled down the curving hillside on Rock Creek Road,” Orange remembered, “reaching speeds close to one hundred miles an hour, where fifty was breathtaking. I knew what anxiety really was . . . a euphemism for fear.” Murphy’s cross-county race, however, proved to be for naught—just one of many false sightings of the suspect. Late Saturday evening, July 13, Orange’s colleague Walter Dean announced that “if Washington is not found by Monday, a nationwide search will be started.”
According to black residents in and around Bessemer, city police officers and Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies bullied, beat, and arrested Washington’s friends, family members, and potential witnesses. As one attorney later proclaimed sardonically, the police harassed and intimidated “every black person in Jefferson County who had ever known Caliph Washington.”
On Friday evening, July 12, when Elijah Honeycutt stopped by the Washington home in Pipe Shop to console Caliph’s mother, he found no one at home. As he got back in his automobile, “police cars came from everywhere,” he later recalled, and Honeycutt found himself surrounded by ten or more officers. “I got out of the car, and they went to searching me and asking me what I was going to that house for,” he said. “I broke down and told them.” The officers grabbed Honeycutt, handcuffe
d him, and pushed him into the back of a squad car. For the next two hours they drove him around Bessemer, Lipscomb, and southwestern Birmingham as he showed the lawmen the route he used to help Caliph Washington make his initial escape. When the officers finished with him, they drove him to the Bessemer City Jail and held him for several more days.
Information from Honeycutt, in combination with other sources, led police to Tommy Silmon’s home on Park Avenue in southwestern Birmingham. That Saturday evening, a dozen or so officers surrounded the house and waited in darkness. A heavily armed “police posse,” the Birmingham News reported, was “pulling the net close around” Washington. “Officers at the search scene believe an arrest will be forthcoming shortly.”
A few hours later, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Silmon returned—presumably from the drive to Adamsville and a subsequent stop for a few beers. He was alone in his own car and not with a stranger in a Ford sedan. Officers watched as Silmon’s Buick crept down the street and stopped in front of his home. The engine shut down and the headlights went out. The lone figure leaned over and picked up an item from the front seat, wobbled to a standing position on the side of the car, and closed the door. A voice pierced the night silence: “Stand still and drop what is in your hand.” Silmon froze in a drunken stupor, unable to find where the voice was coming from. The voice repeated the command. Silmon raised the object in his hand, flicked on the switch, and shined Cowboy Clark’s flashlight into the eyes of the shotgun-toting officer barking the orders. The officer fired, and shotgun pellets struck Silmon in the legs, sending him to the pavement, screaming in pain. Chief Barron defended his officer’s trigger happiness as proper protocol, arguing that he had no choice, “not knowing what move Silmon might take next.”
He Calls Me by Lightning Page 7