He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  February 22, 1952, was the eve of an election called by the NLRB to determine which union—CIO United Steel Workers or the IUMMSW—would represent employees at Republic Steel’s Spalding and Edwards iron ore mines. Throughout the Bessemer area, representatives from both unions engaged in fierce campaigns to win the votes of workers. Asbury Howard and other IUMMSW leaders drove around spouting union propaganda from a big loudspeaker mounted atop a panel van. An interracial group of rank-and-file members followed close behind in an automobile caravan. When Howard’s parade reached the Jonesboro section of Bessemer, a car filled with white CIO representatives zoomed in front, slammed on the brakes, and blocked the road. A few seconds later, seven more carloads of steelworkers arrived. The IUMMSW group was surrounded and vastly outnumbered. Someone, presumably Asbury Howard, spoke through the loudspeaker and warned the steelworkers not to attack. “We will defend ourselves,” the voice announced. “You steel people go about your business.” A man from the CIO fired a shotgun at the side of the van. In an instant, men from both unions were out of their vehicles and engaged in what observers described as a “pitched gun battle.” Almost a hundred men were shooting pistols, shotguns, and rifles at each other from behind cars, trees, and dirt mounds.

  Bessemer police officer W. J. Moore arrived on the scene a few minutes later and witnessed no shots fired, just a hundred or more union workers “milling around the area” and scores of spent shell casings littering the ground. The air smelled of gunpowder. As Moore and at least a dozen city police and county deputies tried to restore the peace, they discovered that the only injury was to John Harper of the steelworkers, who received a non-life-threatening shotgun blast to the seat of his britches. Asbury Howard later claimed that he was “shooting for the engine but hit the caboose.”

  Bessemer police officers arrested twelve workers from both unions, including Howard, who was charged with disorderly conduct, discharging of firearms, and assault with intent to murder. Howard quickly posted bond and within weeks was on a nationwide speaking tour to raise money for the defense fund supporting those IUMMSW members who were jailed following the “Battle of Jonesboro.” FBI agents followed his every move—watching, listening, and reporting—as he spoke to unions and Communist organizations. He told an audience in Spokane, Washington, that blacks were fighting for equal rights and equal pay and against Jim Crow and discrimination. “Negroes are getting tired of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan,” he said, “and we have decided to defend our rights by taking matters into our own hands.”

  He told those listening to avoid coming into the South and stirring up trouble. “Outside workers have gone into the South to organize,” he added, “but they were run out. The only ones who can do this job are the people who live there.” He asked them to simply provide “financial and moral support” in the civil rights struggle. Union workers in Bessemer, he explained, were standing firm in their fight against the United Steel Workers and the Ku Klux Klan, who were often one and the same. Black and white workers in the IUMMSW, he added, were fighting together against “Jim Crowism” in the South and setting into motion forces of “peace and real democracy” throughout the region. An informant told FBI agents that Howard was raising not only money but also getting the “Communist Party line regarding discrimination and civil rights before the rank and file members of the union.”

  BACK IN BESSEMER, Asbury Howard continued his push for voting rights for the disenfranchised black majority. While some members of the black community registered and voted during the 1920s and 1930s, that number dwindled to a scant few in the 1940s. Howard organized and served as president of the Bessemer Voters’ League, a group dedicated to increasing voter registration, not just for union members but for blacks throughout Bessemer. “Discrimination is everywhere against the Negro in the South,” he complained, especially for those wanting to vote. An informant told FBI agents that the league was a loose organization of black laborers who were primarily members of the IUMMSW. Asbury Howard served as the “guiding spirit,” the informant added, and the purpose of the organization was to “control votes in union as well as in general elections.”

  Howard and other local black leaders, including Caliph Washington’s attorney David Hood, coached league members on how to pass the tortuous “understanding test” that the Bessemer Cutoff Board of Registrars used for black applicants seeking the franchise. “White registrants,” one newspaper editor noted at the time, “were assumed to know all the answers without any quiz” or were given a question such as “Who was the first President of the United States?” The “choice questions,” the editor explained, “were saved for the Negroes.” The Bessemer registrar asked as many as thirty-five questions about constitutional issues, legal statutes, and governmental structures. In addition, black registrants were expected to know the correct answer to questions about specific politicians, judges, civil servants, and lawmen:

  Who are the Circuit Judges of Bessemer? Who is the Civil and Criminal Judge? Who is Solicitor in the Bessemer Cut-Off? What form of government does Bessemer have? Name the Commissioners, their titles, and their terms of office. Who is the City Recorder? Who is the City Attorney? What form of Government does Birmingham have? Name the Commissioners and their titles. Who is Chief of Police? Name the Circuit County Judges sitting in Birmingham. Who is the Judge of Misdemeanors and Felonies?

  Eight years later, voter registration among blacks in Bessemer increased from seventy-five to two thousand—much to the dismay of local white officials—and the Bessemer Voters’ League emerged as the city’s dominant civil rights organization.

  By 1956, with the ongoing Montgomery Bus Boycott garnering widespread attention, fear of black activism in Bessemer increased the anxiety among white residents. Throughout an entire week in February of that year, rumors of an “impending racial clash” sent white citizens into a frenzied panic. As the great terror spread, hardware and sporting goods stores sold out of weapons and ammunition. No protests, however, materialized. “Police were at a loss,” observed a newspaper reporter, “to explain how the rumors began and whether they were circulated maliciously.”

  The following year, a few weeks before Caliph Washington’s confrontation with Cowboy Clark, dynamite exploded at the Bessemer home of Asbury Howard and at the nearby Allen Temple AME Church. Luellen White was sitting on the front porch of her house when a late-model gray sedan, filled with unrobed white men, stopped near the church. A man in the front seat lit an object and threw it toward the church building. “I then saw a flash of light,” White added, “and heard a loud noise. The next thing I knew I was sitting on the floor with glass being thrown all around me.” In the church, the Alabama Association for the Advancement of Human Rights was holding a mass meeting and a Sunday evening church service when the blast shattered the stained glass window over the choir loft. A handful of people ran from the building, but most sat still while the twelve-year-old keynote speaker, evangelist George Hawkins, led the group in prayer. When he finished, Hawkins preached a sermon on “Abiding in God.”

  A few minutes after the Allen Temple bombing, an explosion occurred outside Asbury Howard’s home. Neighbors reported that a carload of white men stopped near Howard’s residence and tossed something near the house. The explosion broke windows and left a large hole in the ground—neither Howard nor his family were home at the time. Police Chief George Barron assigned detectives Lawton “Stud” Grimes and Andy Eubanks to investigate. Barron seemed surprised at the incident, because Bessemer had no racial trouble. “We actually don’t know,” he added, “the cause of the bombings.”

  The blasts were presumed to be racial bombings, but an unnamed FBI informant from Bessemer told investigators that the explosions were only made to look like the work of segregationist vigilantes. The Allen Temple blast was only a distraction from the real target, Asbury Howard. The bombings were the work of an official with the United Steel Workers of America and his “henchmen” who targeted Howard because of his standing as
an “influential member of a rival labor organization” and his popularity among black working-class citizens in Bessemer. “This situation is a disgrace to our nation,” one union leader proclaimed, “and lowers our moral standing in world affairs.”

  While Howard’s Communist activities alienated some blacks in the Marvel City, for many, his work with the Bessemer Voters’ League overshadowed his Marxist philosophy. As more and more black residents passed the intricate examination and voted, white Bessemer officials increased their efforts to intimidate Howard. In January 1959, police arrested the leader on charges of violating the Bessemer City Code, Section 27.72, which prohibited anyone from printing, publishing, circulating, selling, offering to sale, giving away, delivering, or exposing to view, within the Bessemer city limits, “any newspaper, publication or handbill of an obscene, licentious, lewd, indecent, libelous, or scurrilous nature . . . or any abusive or intemperate matter tending to provoke a breach of peace, or any matter prejudicial to good morals.”

  A few weeks before his arrest, Howard saw a political cartoon captioned “Hands That Can Still Pray,” drawn by a white Southern Baptist artist named Jack Hamm from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Hamm’s stark black and white drawing depicted a handcuffed, kneeling black man, hands clasped in prayer. A card attached to the cuffs read: “You Can’t Enter Here; You Can’t Ride Here; You Can’t Work Here; You Can’t Play Here; You Can’t Study Here; You Can’t Eat Here; You Can’t Drink Here; You Can’t Walk Here; You Can’t Worship Here.” The praying man, his eyes in a heavenly gaze, pleaded, “Lord, help all Americans to see that you intended human beings everywhere to have the same rights.”

  Asbury Howard was so moved by the image that he asked a white Bessemer sign painter, Albert McAllister, to reproduce the cartoon on a yard and a half of square canvas and add the words “Vote Today for a Better Tomorrow.” Howard planned to place the banner on the walls of the Bessemer Voters’ League meeting hall to encourage more blacks to register to vote. He never had the chance. A “confidential source” tipped Chief Barron that Howard commissioned “a sign painter of Caucasian descent” to paint a poster depicting “a Negro bound with chains with slogans encouraging Negro political activity.” On January 21, 1959, Barron confiscated the unfinished artwork and arrested Howard and McAllister for violating the city code because he felt that “probable violence . . . might result from [the] appearance of such a sign before the public.”

  At police headquarters in Bessemer City Hall, the local black radical and the befuddled white printer were booked and released on bond. “I wasn’t informed of the charge against me or what law I had violated until the next day,” Howard said at the time. Prior to the January 24 trial, Chief Barron received “indications that groups of agitators” might disrupt the legal proceedings. He stationed most of his police force on duty that day along the second-floor corridor, to screen everyone going into or coming out of James Hammonds’s courtroom.

  After the judge gaveled his court into session, both Asbury Howard and Albert McAllister pleaded not guilty before a room of mostly empty chairs. From the witness stand, Chief Barron explained in detail how Howard and McAllister had violated the city code. Bessemer’s prosecuting attorney summarized the case against the two men with the simple phrase, “It is my opinion that showing a man in chains is prejudicial to good order.” David Hood, the defendants’ attorney, told the judge, “If an attempt to induce or cause people to register to vote is an offense, then the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution are void.”

  Nonetheless Judge Hammonds convicted the pair of provoking a “breach of peace” and undermining public morality in Bessemer. He fined each defendant $105 and sentenced them to six months in jail. Both men appealed their convictions and posted bonds as they awaited the outcome of their appeal across the street in the Jefferson County Circuit Court.

  As Asbury Howard left the courtroom and walked down the stairway to the first floor of the city hall, he noticed forty to fifty white men lining the walls of the small lobby. As he cleared the last step, he was struck in the back of the head with such force that it slammed him to the floor. A few days later he recounted:

  The crowd of men around the wall rushed towards me. They closed in and pounced upon me. They lashed out with their feet in an effort to stomp and mutilate my face, head, and body. I struggled the best I knew how even though my back was on the floor. I finally managed to reach a corner.

  His thirty-year-old son, Asbury Jr., punched, kicked, and gouged his way through the white crowd in a fruitless effort to reach his father. “My son put up a furious battle against unequal odds,” the elder Howard recollected.

  The mob, most likely Bessemer Klansmen and union thugs, pushed the lone city police officer on the first floor—identified only as a tubercular runt with thick eyeglasses—into a corner. The officer later told Chief Barron that he “could not observe any activity” in the lobby because someone knocked his glasses to the floor. Apparently, the policemen on duty outside the courtroom either ignored the noise from the fracas or returned to police headquarters at the rear of the building. Barron later claimed that he heard a “rumbling sound” and then someone shouted, “There’s a fight,” and he ran immediately with a group of Bessemer police to the lobby. Howard estimated that some fifteen minutes passed before Barron and his officers arrived, just as the white assaulters exited through the front doors and scattered.

  “I was badly shaken up, bruised, and bleeding badly,” the elder Howard recalled. Weak from loss of blood, he staggered through the front doors of the city hall and waited for someone to treat his injuries. He claimed that a city police officer told him to “get away from here,” or he would be arrested for vagrancy. Chief Barron later told FBI investigators that he asked Howard repeatedly for the identity of the persons who attacked him, but Howard only asked to “see a photographer.”

  Two of Howard’s friends drove him to Bessemer General Hospital, where he needed ten stitches to close the gaping wound in his head. Barron later recalled that Howard never identified any of the assailants, provided any information, made a statement, or filed a complaint concerning the attack.

  But Howard did contact the ACLU in New York, and the incident received national publicity. Citizens from all over the country and prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN), Eleanor Roosevelt, and Reinhold Niebuhr urged the U.S. Justice Department to intervene in the Howard case. Even the usually aseptic Birmingham News complained that the incident gave the community an “additional black eye” and scolded the Bessemer police for not upholding “law and order.” Investigators from the FBI office in Birmingham argued (based on the “best available information”) that the Bessemer officers “did not stand by idly and allow the beating of the Howards to take place.”

  Clarence Kelley, the special agent in charge of the Birmingham FBI office, suggested in a report to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, that the arrest of Howard was justifiable because a “large portion of the white population of Bessemer was composed of coal miners and steel workers who may well have caused serious trouble had a poster of the type purchased by Howard been displayed there.” Kelley, who sixteen years later would become FBI director, emphasized that the Bessemer Police Department failed to conduct a complete, thorough, and exhaustive investigation to identify and arrest the assailants. “No proof has been brought out that the Bessemer police department condoned the activities of the attackers,” Kelley wrote. “However, a reasonable implication might be inferred that such was case.”

  The only arrest police did make that day was of Asbury Howard, Jr., charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. “I didn’t believe in the nonviolent philosophy,” the younger Howard said many years later. “We didn’t know if we could practice nonviolence,” especially in a town like Bessemer. “I think maybe some look down on us for that, for not really being people that were nonviolent. I just couldn’t handle that. I had to retalia
te, whether it meant life or death.”

  Ultimately, both Howards (and the printer) served several months on a Bessemer chain gang—with the elder Howard digging ditches dressed in a coat, tie, and dress slacks. On the way to and from the city jail each day, black convicts were chained to each other in a caged truck and driven through black sections of Bessemer for “educational purposes.” In other words, chain gangs served as a reminder to all black citizens to avoid challenging the racial status quo and to stay in their place on the bottom rung of the social ladder.

  Those black citizens who dared speak out did so anonymously for fear of retaliation. “We’ve got so little,” a mother explained, “they might take that from us too, if they knew what we said.” Most of the city’s black population lived in areas with no streetlights, no sewage, running water that seldom flowed, streets made of dirt, and dilapidated houses. “Look at this place,” said a tenant living in a crumbling shotgun shack. “These houses are killing people.” Some whites recognized how bad the living conditions were for blacks in Bessemer. “If I were you,” one white woman advised a black woman, “I’d move out of here, even if it’s no farther than Birmingham. Bessemer is a terrible place for a Negro.”

  9

  “I JUST SAY I AM INNOCENT”

  In the second trial, Caliph Washington claimed that Mississippi state troopers tried to hang and shoot him.

  LIKE MANY WHITE elites, Judge Gardner Foster Goodwyn, Jr., had a provincial and Pollyannaish view of Bessemer. He was “made of good material,” one acquaintance wrote in 1937, but had the odd notion that Bessemer was a city of “exemplary morals” and gracious living. “He has indeed,” the writer continued, “lived a very sheltered life.” Born 1914 in Bessemer to Judge Gardner Goodwyn, Sr., and his wife Lora, he earned a law degree from the University of Alabama in 1938 and practiced law in Bessemer for several years before serving on the legal staff in the Alabama Attorney General’s Office from 1945 to 1950. In 1950, voters in the Bessemer Cutoff elected him a circuit judge.