Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Marshall’s associates didn’t need Walter White to warn them of any danger they might be in. They were local Tennessee lawyers who had investigated enough lynchings in these parts to know that the death threats they received from the citizens of Columbia were to be taken seriously. Sitting to one side of Marshall at the table was a forty-seven-year-old poker-playing highbrow with a faint Caribbean accent named Zephaniah Alexander Looby, who came to Tennessee by way of the British West Indies. At fourteen years of age and living in Dominica, Looby found work as a cabin boy aboard a whaling ship, and two years later, in 1914, “broke and bedraggled,” he jumped ship in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with the dream of becoming a lawyer. He eventually received his degree from Columbia Law School in New York and taught economics at Fisk University in Nashville until the call of civil rights law beckoned and Marshall put him on the Columbia case.

  To Marshall’s left was the lone white attorney on the case, the young, hotheaded Maurice Weaver, who reveled in the danger of standing up to white authority and racism; on more than one occasion throughout the Columbia Race Riot trials he had nearly come to blows with prosecutors. Marshall and Looby enjoyed having Weaver around, in part because the two black attorneys were inherently polite and gracious in court whereas Weaver was something of a lightning rod for white anger. Whenever prosecutors or witnesses referred to a black as “that nigger,” Weaver loudly interrupted with objections, insisting that the person be referred to as “Mr. or Mrs.” for the record. Bumpus seethed.

  Weaver also endeared himself to Marshall because the Tennessee lawyer liked to drink, though at one point during the trial, his provocative nature had become not only distracting but dangerous, and Marshall was forced to intervene. Weaver’s teenage and very pregnant wife, Virginia, decided that she’d like to see her husband at work and asked to ride along with Looby’s associates and black reporters. Locals were speechless when the pregnant white girl hopped out of a car packed with Negroes and marched straight into court. Marshall, observing the commotion, pulled her aside and told her to take a Greyhound bus to court next time. “You almost started another lynching here in the courthouse,” he warned.

  As the jury of twelve began filing back into the courtroom, Looby and Weaver searched their tired, sullen faces for a hint of the verdict. Marshall was on edge; he remembered how colleagues and friends had urged him not to return to Columbia. Over that “terrible summer of 1946,” he’d been running a constant fever while working in courtrooms that had no bathrooms or drinking fountains for blacks. The long hours, relentless travel, and Tennessee heat were taking their toll, but Marshall would not slow down. By July the lawyer’s body had finally wilted. Mid-case, he succumbed to exhaustion and a debilitating pneumonic virus that led to a long stint in a Harlem hospital, followed by weeks of doctor-ordered bed rest. Still, from his bed, and against everyone’s wishes, Marshall continued to lead late-night telephone strategy sessions with Looby and Weaver until he could no longer stay away—and no one was going to stop him from boarding a train to Nashville. “The Columbia case,” he said, “is too important to mess up. And I, for one . . . am determined that it will not be messed up.”

  MARSHALL WAS IN New York on February 26, 1946, when a desperate call from Tennessee came into the NAACP offices, describing a full-blown race riot in Columbia. An emergency meeting was called and Marshall learned that the trouble began the previous morning when a black woman, Mrs. Gladys Stephenson, went into a Columbia appliance store with her nineteen-year-old son, James, to complain about being overcharged for shoddy repairs to a radio. After loudly proclaiming that she’d take the radio elsewhere, Gladys exited the store with her son. But twenty-eight-year-old radio repair apprentice Billy Fleming did not appreciate the threatening look he got from James on the way out.

  “What you stop back there for, boy, to get your teeth knocked out?” Fleming asked, before racing over and punching James in the back of the head.

  James’s boyish looks were deceiving. A welterweight on the U.S. Navy boxing team, he barely flinched and countered with several punches to Fleming’s face, sending him crashing through a plate-glass window at the front of the store.

  Bleeding profusely from his leg, the army vet came up fighting, and other whites joined the melee, shouting, “Kill the bastards! Kill every one of them!” One man went after Gladys, slapping and kicking her to the ground and blacking her eye. A few minutes later police arrived and carted mother and son off to jail. After pleading guilty to public fighting and agreeing to pay a fine of fifty dollars each, the two were about to be released when Billy Fleming’s father convinced officials to charge both Gladys and James with the attempted murder of his son; the two were held by police in separate cells. As the news spread that James Stephenson had gotten the better of Billy Fleming and sent him wounded to the hospital, Maury County became galvanized. A mob began to gather around town and outside the jail, and by late afternoon the sheriff was hearing talk that a group of men were planning to spring the “Stephenson niggers out of the jail and hang them.”

  Carloads of young, white workers from the phosphate and hosiery mills in nearby Culleoka (where the Flemings lived) began arriving at the square, and more volatile World War II veterans joined them. Rumors that rope had been purchased had reached the Bottom, and Julius Blair, a seventy-six-year-old black patriarch and owner of Blair’s Drug Store, had heard enough. He’d seen firsthand what white mobs in Columbia were capable of in recent years, around that courthouse down the block. He’d been there when they’d taken one man out of jail and lynched him back in ’27, and more recently, there was young Cordie Cheek. The community was still raw over Cordie’s killing. The nineteen-year-old had been falsely accused of assaulting the twelve-year-old sister of a white boy he had been fighting with. The boy paid his sister a dollar to tell police that Cordie had tried to rape her, but a grand jury refused to indict and Cordie was released and abducted that same day by county officials, who took him to a cedar tree and hanged him. Julius Blair was well aware that it was Magistrate C. Hayes Denton’s car that had driven Cordie to his death; yet, undeterred, Blair marched into Denton’s office and demanded that Gladys and James Stephenson be released. “Let us have them, Squire,” Blair told him. “We are not going to have any more social lynchings in Maury County.”

  Blair managed to convince the sheriff to release the Stephensons into his custody and arranged for them to be dropped off at his drugstore early that evening. By then, though, blacks in the Bottom had gone past being intimidated by the hooting and honking of armed whites circling the area in cars; they weren’t going to stand passively by this time while another Cordie Cheek lynching unfolded. More than a hundred men, many of them war veterans, took to the streets with guns of their own, determined to fight back at the first sight of a mob moving toward the Bottom. Armed and angry, they told the sheriff in no uncertain terms that they were ready if whites came down to the Bottom. “We fought for freedom overseas,” one told him, “and we’ll fight for it here.”

  True to his word and hoping to avoid any more trouble, the sheriff released the Stephensons that evening, and Blair arranged for the two of them to be whisked out of town, “blankets over their heads” for their protection. “Uptown, they are getting together for something,” Blair told them.

  The nearby white mobs meanwhile did not disperse, and blacks in the Bottom were growing more fearful as the night progressed. Drinking beer and circling in cars, whites fired randomly into “Mink Slide,” as they derisively referred to the Bottom. Blacks, drinking beer on rooftops, were also firing in response and by bad chance hit the cars of both a California tourist and a black undertaker. When half a dozen Columbia police eventually moved into Mink Slide, a crowd of whites followed behind. They were welcomed by shouts of “Here they come!” and “Halt!” and then, in the confusion, came a command, “Fire!” and shots were exploding from all directions. Four police were struck with buckshot before they retreated.

  Reports of the ski
rmish roused whites around town. Columbia’s former fire chief headed toward Mink Slide with a half gallon of gasoline and the intent to “burn them out,” but he was shot in the leg by Negro snipers as he stole down an alley. With the arrival of state troopers and highway patrol reinforcements, the whites finally outnumbered the blacks and moved into Mink Slide, where they ransacked businesses until dawn, fired machine guns into stores, and rounded up everyone in sight. “You black sons of bitches,” one patrolman shouted, “you had your-alls’ way last night, but we are going to have ours this morning.”

  Just after 6 a.m., gunfire from the street rained into Sol (son of Julius) Blair’s barbershop. “Rooster Bill” Pillow and “Papa” Lloyd Kennedy, hiding in the back, saw armed officers coming and were said to have fired a single shotgun blast before they were overpowered and taken into custody. They were stuffed with other blacks from the Bottom into overcrowded cells at the county jail and interrogated without counsel for days. Two prisoners were shot dead “trying to escape.”

  Mary Morton had watched helplessly as state patrolmen barged into her family’s funeral home on East Eighth Street and arrested her husband. From the street she heard the sound of breaking glass and the building being ransacked. A short time later she saw the same officers, laughing and joking, return to the street. Once they were out of sight, Morton went inside to discover the parlor furniture broken and slashed, clothes torn to pieces, and the entire interior doused with embalming fluid. With horror, she laid eyes on a defaced casket. Photographed soon after, the image of that casket would be published in newspapers across the country and ultimately come to symbolize the Columbia riot of 1946. Across its lid, in large letters, “KKK” was crudely scrawled in chalk.

  Mary Morton tried to pick up the phone, but patrolmen caught her, cursed her, and threatened to throw the phone out on the street. Police had declared war on the black citizens of Columbia, and the highway patrolmen, instead of trying to bring order to the town, had joined in with vigilante mobs. The Tennessee State Guard had cordoned off the area, but they did nothing to stop the destruction and violence in Mink Slide. The Maury County jail had become a deadly destination for Mary Morton’s husband and other leaders of the black community. Officials would soon shut down telephone service into and out of Mink Slide, but not before Mary Morton managed to make her call. After the police moved on, she phoned a friend in Nashville. She implored him to get word to the NAACP immediately.

  Nine hundred miles north, in New York, a lanky lawyer in suspenders was called into a meeting. He grabbed his coffee and settled into a chair. He heard another all-too-familiar story of violence and cruelty in the South, and he knew that once again order would be restored, as always, with blacks’ “blood running in the gutters.” An editorial in the Columbia Daily Herald proclaimed that the “situation is in the hands of the state troops and state police. . . . The white people of the South . . . will not tolerate any racial disturbances without resenting it, which means bloodshed. The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realize this, the better off the race will be.” In Marshall’s early days at the NAACP, emergency meetings would sometimes end with the unfurling of the ill-omened black flag, alerting New Yorkers that yet another man had been lynched. The flag’s gloomy stain over the city usually meant that Marshall would be back on a train, alone, again riding toward trouble.

  And nine hundred miles south, in Columbia, Tennessee, where the town’s blacks were holed up in their homes and jail cells, there rose whispers of relief: the lawyer was coming.

  THE TWELVE white men on the jury took their seats in the box, and the foreman rose to announce the verdict against Rooster Bill Pillow for shooting and wounding a state highway patrolman. The courtroom was still.

  “Not guilty.”

  Marshall, Looby, and Weaver sat in quiet shock. In the last acquittals, Weaver had loudly slapped a defendant’s knee in excitement and leapt from his chair to shake hands with jurors who appeared to be just as stunned as everyone else in the courtroom. “This makes me proud to be an American!” he’d shouted. Marshall wanted no celebratory outbursts this time.

  Papa Kennedy’s verdict was next. Marshall was expecting Kennedy would be going to jail, for unlike Pillow, Kennedy had been surly and impudent throughout the trial—at one point telling Bumpus to “shut up” in open court. But the jury rejected the charge of attempted murder and convicted Kennedy on a lesser count that enabled him to leave the courthouse free on bail.

  Marshall and his lawyers rose from their seats, wanting nothing more than to leave town quickly. Because of the constant threats and concerns for his safety, Marshall had been staying in Nashville, almost fifty miles to the north, and driving back and forth each day with Looby and Weaver. Tagging along was reporter Harry Raymond, who’d been covering the trial for the Daily Worker, a New York newspaper published by the Communist Party of the USA. He described the moments after the verdict as tense, and he expected “something serious, something of a violent nature, to happen.” On his way to telegraph the verdict to his newspaper, Raymond noticed one agitated, heavyset spectator rushing out the doors and declaring that something must be done about the failure of the jury to convict.

  Raymond knew the NAACP lawyers had been threatened with lynching, and had been told their bodies would “wind up in Duck River,” which they had to cross each day on the way to court. The white reporters covering the trial pleaded with Raymond to leave town with them, but he had a feeling the story of the Columbia Race Riot hadn’t ended with the verdicts, and he chose to ride back to Nashville with Marshall and the NAACP lawyers.

  With their heads down, the lawyers humbly exited the courtroom. Gone was Marshall’s usual swagger. There were no pictures or proclamations on the courthouse steps. Marshall walked briskly. Looby tried to keep up with him as best he could on his bad leg; he’d spent months in a cast after being struck by an automobile and was still limping noticeably. Marshall waited impatiently as the lawyers, with Raymond tagging along, hopped into Looby’s car. They drove a few blocks to Mink Slide, where they picked up soft drinks and crackers at Julius Blair’s drugstore—the epicenter of the race riots nine months earlier. After some congratulatory handshakes, Blair urged them to get moving. Marshall, though, wanted to do some private celebrating.

  Maury County was a dry county, but Marshall had become acquainted with the local bootlegger, so there would be just one stop to make before they headed north to Nashville. The sedan stole down a dirt road at just about eight o’clock in the evening. The bootlegger, however, had disappointing news. “I just sold the last two bottles to the judge!” he told Marshall. The four men headed for Nashville, empty-handed.

  With Marshall at the wheel, Raymond beside him, and Looby, in part because of his bad leg, in the back with Weaver amid piles of law books and case files, the four men heaved a collective sigh of relief as they headed out of Columbia. They had seen the signs posted around town during the trials:

  NIGGER READ AND RUN. DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE. IF YOU CAN’T READ, RUN ANYHOW!

  To Marshall, they recalled a message he had received mid-trial from Walter White: “Take care of yourself and keep your feet in running order.”

  The sedan had just crossed a bridge over Duck River when they came upon a car parked in the middle of the road. Marshall honked the horn and waited, but the car did not move, so he drove around it and headed for Nashville. Inside the sedan it was quiet; unspoken went the fear that something was amiss. Then, piercing the silence, the sound of a siren screamed from behind.

  “Thurgood,” Looby said. “That siren. It’s a police car!”

  “Is it following us?” Marshall asked.

  “Yes. It’s coming after us fast.”

  “You’d better stop the car, Thurgood,” Weaver said.

  Marshall turned his head and was troubled to see three cars following them. The first, carrying highway patrolmen, roared p
ast the sedan and forced Marshall to jam on the brakes. Quickly, eight men, some in police uniforms and some in civilian clothes, converged on the sedan. Marshall saw that a few of them had their hands on their guns while others shone flashlights on the men inside. Reporter Harry Raymond kept his mouth shut, but he knew this wasn’t a routine police stop.

  The lawyers and Raymond were ordered out of the car. They froze as one cop approached.

  “You men the lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?”

  “Yes, I’m Thurgood Marshall. This is Maurice Weaver and this gentleman is Alexander Looby.”

  The cop looked them over. “Drinking, eh?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Marshall replied.

  “I said you’ve been drinking. Celebrating the acquittal. Driving while intoxicated.”

  Weaver interjected that this stop was a civil rights violation and, furthermore, it was obvious none of them had been drinking.

  “Stay out of this, Weaver,” the cop said. “You’re a white man and have no business in this car anyway.”

  The police then asserted their right to search the car and Weaver demanded that they produce a warrant. Using flashlights, Marshall was able to read the “John Doe” warrant signed by a deputy sheriff, charging the lawyers with transporting whiskey in violation of “county local option law.”

  “Look,” Marshall told Weaver. “Let’s watch him. Don’t let him put any liquor in there, ’cause this is a dry county.”

  The police search of the car turned up nothing, so they decided to search the lawyers.

  “You got a warrant to search us?” Marshall asked.

  “No,” the officer responded.

  “Well, the answer is no,” Marshall said.

  The police let the lawyers return to their vehicle, and this time Looby took the wheel.