He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  Justice Lawson provided a bewildering review of the constitutional issues raised in the defendant’s brief on whether juries that excluded blacks denied a defendant equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawson argued that the burden of proof was on the defendant to prove the alleged racial discrimination, and the facts proved otherwise. The grand jury that indicted the defendant included a black. In addition, four members of Washington’s “own race” were in the jury pool. The defendant’s lawyers never charged “fraud or irregular practice” in the method of selecting the grand jury. “The fact, if it be a fact,” Lawson wrote, “that Negroes were excluded from prior jury rolls and boxes because of their race can only serve to shed light on the conduct of the members of the Jury Board in making up the jury box of August, 1957.” This was not sufficient to show systematic exclusion in the indictment of Caliph Washington.

  Regardless, Lawson conceded that “few, if any,” blacks served on Bessemer Cutoff juries. This was a federal question, he added, and the U.S. Supreme Court “should determine whether or not the lower court denied Washington’s federal rights.” At every turn, Lawson circumvented constitutional issues. In short, he and the rest of the Alabama Supreme Court did what most southern courts were doing: sidestepping the race issue and finding other reasons to overturn a lower court decision and avoid a constitutional showdown.

  Lawson reviewed the damaging evidence against Caliph Washington: the witnesses that placed him at the scene of the shooting, the “voluntary” oral confession he gave to Lawton Grimes, and the testimony of Furman Jones and Elijah Honeycutt that Washington admitted killing a policeman. From the witness stand, Washington denied making statements to Grimes, Jones, and Honeycutt.

  During the defendant’s cross-examination, Justice Lawson pointed out in his opinion, the lower court allowed the prosecuting attorney to question him from a written statement. The defendant, however, was never allowed to see the document in order to “refresh his memory or to explain any inconsistency, although his counsel requested that he be permitted to do so.” According to Lawson, the rule of law was clear: a witness was not bound to answer questions about a writing produced by him unless he first had the opportunity to read the document. In Parker v. State, the Alabama high court had ruled that if a statement was to be introduced as evidence to impeach a witness, the “statement must be first shown to the witness in order to allow the witness to refresh his memory and to explain any inconsistency.”

  In the Washington case, however, attorneys for the state of Alabama never argued that the prosecutor admitted the statement correctly into evidence. The error was “harmless to the defendant,” they believed, and should not compel the high court to reverse the lower court’s ruling. Lawson admitted that the written statement contained much of the same account that Washington related from the witness stand. Regardless, the document contained “numerous statements which were apparently in contradiction of other aspects of the defendant’s testimony on cross-examination.” This placed Caliph Washington in the position of having told the jury “untruths either on the stand or in the making” of the written statement.

  In addition, the state used the “oral confession” given to Stud Grimes in the same way. Particularly damaging was the statement attributed by Grimes to Washington that “I just whirled in under him and grabbed his pistol and then stepped back and shot him two or three times.” The defendant countered with testimony that provided an “entirely different situation, which if believed by the jury might well have resulted in a different verdict.” The prosecutor, Lawson believed, used Grimes’s testimony improperly, and it too “reflected upon the defendant’s veracity.” The state had no basis in arguing that this was of no injury to the defendant. “We do not feel,” Lawson added, “that the rule of error without injury should be applied to this case where a man’s life is at stake.”

  To the contrary, for this error, Lawson concluded, the “judgment of the trial court is reversed and the cause is remanded.” Caliph Washington would stand trial again for the murder of Cowboy Clark. He would get another chance, not because of discrimination in the jury pool, but because of procedure related to evidence—an incremental stop, at best, toward civil rights and equal treatment.

  For now, he returned to his Bessemer jail cell. Many residents of the city’s black community grieved at Caliph Washington’s plight. “The Washington family were very heavy laden,” a neighbor later recalled, “as were the rest of the black citizens of Bessemer. To be accused of killing a policeman stirred everyone up.” Yet most blacks felt powerless to force city officials to exert justice, fairness, and equality in the case. It was as if, one resident recalled, that the entire civil rights movement was bypassing Bessemer.

  8

  “THERE ARE LOTS OF WAYS TO FIGHT”

  Asbury Howard (third from left) with leaders of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in 1954.

  THE QUEST FOR justice and civil rights was deeply engrained in the culture of Bessemer’s black community. By the late 1950s, the civil rights movement in Birmingham had a foundation in the churches, where Christ’s followers sought justice through nonviolent direct action. Influenced by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, words and deeds in Montgomery, many black preachers in Birmingham, especially Fred Shuttlesworth, encouraged their church members to shine the light of truth on the injustices of segregation with love and nonviolence.

  In marked contrast, Bessemer’s most recognizable civil rights leader, Asbury Howard, embraced violence as a necessary means for achieving racial equality. “Armed resistance paid off more than a peaceful approach,” he said. Blacks in Bessemer would fight back with guns instead of nonviolent actions and words because the “majority . . . understood that type of talk.” Since the early 1930s, Howard was an outspoken agitator and one of Alabama’s most controversial radicals. He embraced unionism, avowed Communism, and proclaimed Christianity—an ideal antagonist for the fascist-like white power structure in Bessemer. A longtime friend described Howard as “cagey and smart” with above-average intelligence who exerted “considerable influence” over other black miners.

  Born in Autaugaville, Alabama, on January 18, 1907, Howard moved to Bessemer as a youth. In 1924, he was hired by Tennessee Coal and Iron’s (TCI’s) Muscoda red-ore mines as a mucker—a backbreaking job, shoveling iron ore into mine cars deep underground in ten- or twelve-hour shifts. During the early years of the Great Depression, Howard, like many other blacks in Bessemer and Birmingham, embraced unionism and soon became imbued with Communist ideals. At weekly meetings, he was exposed to literature including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done, and perhaps most important for Howard, James S. Allen’s 1938 Negro Liberation. Allen argued that blacks must embrace Communism to achieve self-determination, destroy Jim Crow, and gain the “right to be treated on a plane of equality with the whites; in political life, the right to vote, to hold office, etc.” Only then would the “Negro toilers and the white masses” be united in the struggle against capitalism.

  In June 1933, restoring capitalism was on President Franklin Roosevelt’s mind as he signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which recognized the workers’ right to organize unions and obligated employers to bargain collectively with workers (but not with unions). The passage of the NIRA led to a boom in unionization throughout the county, including Bessemer. And when white Bessemer attorney Jim Lipscomb initiated an organizing drive for the radical, left-wing International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW), Asbury Howard joined the effort. Large groups of black miners (and a few whites) flocked to sign up, giving the organizing drive, as one historian observed, “an air of civil rights activism.”

  In addition, as historian Robin Kelley has shown, these gatherings seemed more like spirit-filled revival services than union meetings. In Bessemer, one participant at a Mine and Mill meeting observed that “if you substitute “God” for “union,” “devi
l” for “employer,” and “hell” for “unorganized,” you would have a “rousing sermon.” The stories the speakers told, minus their vulgar language, “might well have been used to show the power and goodness of God instead of the union. And his ‘why not join’ was so much in the church tone, I was afraid he was going to have us sing the hymn of invitation.”

  In May 1934, with membership booming, union leaders called a strike in the mines operated by the Bessemer district’s largest iron and steel companies: TCI, Sloss-Sheffield, Woodward, and Republic. After eight thousand men walked off the job, a wave of violence swept through the mining camps and Bessemer. When the companies ignored the workers’ demands for union recognition, a seven-hour workday, and a wage increase, union officials went to war. For several weeks in May and June, firebombings, dynamite explosions, and gun battles with company lawmen were frequent. Even after Governor Benjamin Miller ordered in the Alabama National Guard, dozens of fistfights continued throughout Bessemer, including a large street melee that guardsmen had to halt.

  In response, industry leaders, local politicians, and vigilante groups resorted to strong-arm tactics to keep the unions and the Communists out of Bessemer. The Ku Klux Klan experienced a revival of membership and began terrorizing suspected union leaders and Communists. Party leader Saul Davis was kidnapped from his Bessemer home, stripped, and flogged for several hours. Blaming the violence on the failure of local law enforcement, TCI officials hired “special deputies” to protect the life and property of the company from union activists and Communist radicals like Asbury Howard.

  Following an investigation, FBI agents concluded that Howard was the primary instigator of the violence at Muscoda and was responsible for the plan to shoot any employee who crossed the picket lines. Miners adopted the slogan “No Union Minor Move—All Scabs Off Red Mountain.” When the bloody strikes ended on June 27, 1934, two strikebreakers were dead, several company employees were wounded, and the IUMMSW remained unrecognized and weakened. Nonetheless, police intimidation and vigilante violence continued for months.

  In 1935, after the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) introduced the more comprehensive National Labor Relations Act. Approved by Congress and signed into law by President Roosevelt, the Wagner Act, as it was soon called, restored workers’ rights to join unions, outlawed unfair labor practices by employers, and forced businesses to bargain collectively with labor unions. The act also created the powerful National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to resolve labor disputes and intervene if employers retaliated against workers who organized, joined, or led unions.

  In Bessemer, tensions reached another boiling point on May 31, 1936, when miners in the IUMMSW (now affiliated with the new CIO—Congress of Industrial Organizations) organized another strike. Once again, FBI agents maintained, labor agitator Asbury Howard planned all the strikers’ “dirty work” in open meetings on TCI property. The FBI held Howard responsible for the acts of violence committed by blacks in Bessemer because his radical rhetoric “inspired” his people to fight for their rights. “He was imbued with Communist ideology,” one agent wrote, “and would do anything for the present Communist leadership in the IUMMSW at Bessemer.” According to informants, Howard used the union office to mimeograph and produce Communist literature for distribution among the black population in Bessemer.

  Bessemer police officers apprehended several suspects (most likely including Howard) under the 1934 seditious literature law (similar to an earlier ordinance in Birmingham), which banned any publication “advocating the overthrow of organized government by force or any unlawful means.” In 1936, when Bessemer police arrested black IUMMSW member and Communist organizer Bart Logan (he used the alias Jack Barton) for possession of these unlawful materials, he was taken to the city jail where a TCI employment manager “abusively” questioned him. “He wanted to know all the [names of] Communist leaders of the country,” Logan said, and specifically asked him about First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. When Logan was brought before Bessemer municipal judge W. Frank Ball (Judge Ed Ball’s uncle), Ball refused to read the literature before announcing a guilty verdict, ordering a $100 fine, and sentencing him to 180 days of hard labor. “It is all Communist stuff and you cannot have it in Bessemer,” he said.

  Horrified by the suspect’s treatment, white Alabama native Joseph Gelders, head of the southern branch of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, arrived in Bessemer to arrange legal counsel and bond for Logan, though he was ultimately unable to secure either. On his return to Birmingham, as he stepped off the bus near his home, several men grabbed him and shoved him onto the floor of a car. While the vigilantes stomped and kicked him, they read literature found in the victim’s briefcase and laughed sadistically. Several hours later the men stopped in an isolated area, dragged Gelders from the car, tore off his clothes, and lashed him with a leather strap until he was unconscious. When Gelders later identified his attackers, one of them turned out to be a “special investigator” for TCI.

  In the end, the IUMMSW lacked financial support to sustain the walkout, and in a few weeks the strike ended. TCI retaliated by firing Asbury Howard and more than 150 other workers in Bessemer. Howard appealed to the NLRB for relief. Following a lengthy hearing in Birmingham, the board ordered the company to reinstate all the fired miners and provide them with back pay. Howard received $1,004. The NLRB’s decision paved the way for union recognition.

  In 1937, after the last skull was cracked, the last house bombed or shot up, and the last radical meeting disrupted, organized labor won bloody recognition from U.S. Steel’s Tennessee Coal and Iron division. “Every year we hammered away to change life some more,” Asbury Howard later recalled. “We fought and gave of our blood . . . and we did change it.” Although the fight was over, Bessemer’s boilersuit culture of violence was so deep-rooted that night riders, roaming gangs, and other vigilantes continued to commit acts of terror, especially against those challenging the social or economic order. Many in Bessemer’s political establishment endorsed this “ridiculous and arousing” violence and intimidation. “Such invasion of fundamental human and civil liberties,” one newspaper writer complained, “cannot be dismissed with a light touch.” But few citizens demanded an end to such practices. “The amazing thing,” one Birmingham journalist noted in 1940, “is that unless the power of public protest and pressure is brought to bear to check the further development of these stupid and intolerable excesses, they apparently may go on. That simply must not be!”

  In this milieu, Asbury Howard solidified his reputation as Bessemer’s most fearless civil rights leader. “I and my union stand for racial equality,” he said, “and through trade unionism, Jim Crowism will eventually be broken in the South.” These words were not hollow. For Howard, the fight for union recognition was the beginning of a broader plan to achieve racial equality through voting rights for the disenfranchised black majority. He organized and taught schools for blacks in Bessemer on how to become registered voters and to persuade them, once they received the franchise, to cast their votes for Franklin Roosevelt. When Bessemer’s Democratic Party executive committee decided to bar blacks from the polls, Howard organized a delegation to march on city hall in protest. When word reached the committee about the planned march, they rescinded the order.

  During World War II, Howard took leave from his mining job to work full time for the union. Considering the IUMMSW leader a security threat, the FBI stepped up its investigations and described him as a mainstay of the Communist machine and a person who was “very necessary to the Communists who controlled the union because of his large following.” Howard continued to duplicate and distribute Communist literature in Bessemer and was a member of such Communist front organizations as the Good Neighbor Club and the Alabama People’s Education Association. When FBI agents examined his mail, they discovered that he received both the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, and literature f
rom the Baptist Sunday School Board. Howard had somehow reconciled his Christian beliefs with his Communist ideals.

  Following the war, during the Red Scare, the IUMMSW lost significant membership. One observer emphasized that the union survived only by “appearing to champion” the cause of equal rights for blacks. Howard continued his IUMMSW work, but the Cold War’s anti-Communist fervor compelled him to hide his beliefs and activities. Informants explained to FBI agents that Howard now “avoided open espousal” of party rhetoric and anything that would arouse suspicion. He was quite clever to give no indication of Communist connections, which made it difficult for investigators to “pinpoint” his Red activities. “We’ve all got to be lily white right now,” Howard said at the time. “They are just waiting to catch us with literature or anything that can be connected with the Communist Party. There are lots of ways to fight,” including at the ballot box. The FBI, however, concluded that he continued to pay his Communist Party dues to a union office in Denver.

  In 1947, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Labor Management Relations Act, which placed restrictions on unions’ ability to strike, gave employers more flexibility, and required all union officials to sign an annual sworn statement that they were not a member of, or affiliated with, the Communist Party or any organization that advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government by “force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means.” In 1949, the CIO expelled all individuals and unions suspected of membership in the Communist Party, which included the entire IUMMSW and Asbury Howard. The mostly white United Steel Workers of America seized the opportunity and won the right to represent the mine workers in Muscoda, but only, as one historian noted, “after resorting to racist and anti-Communist propaganda, KKK-style intimidation, and physical assault,” which were the norm in Bessemer. The battle between the rival unions would continue for the next decade with frequent violent clashes.