The Grace of Silence

by Michele Norris

  What must it have been like to pick up the paper and read about scandalous violence against black men who had fought for human rights abroad? News stories covered the murder of army veteran John C. Jones, who was tortured to death with a blowtorch and meat cleaver in Minden, Louisiana, and the shooting of army veteran George Dorsey along with his wife, sister, and brother-in-law in Monroe, Georgia. That my father’s brush with Birmingham law enforcement occurred in 1946, a year when violence against black veterans raged across the land and in his own hometown, deepened the mystery of his silence about the event.

  I’ve since spoken to black World War II veterans who, like Belvin Norris, endured slights and indignities while and after serving their country. To a man, they’d kept their stories to themselves, refusing to discuss them with their lovers or their wives, their children or coworkers or fellow church members. Tales of bitterness or victimization did not jibe with the narratives of themselves they’d created. As I delved deeper into the matter, I was consumed by anger and confusion: not only because I’d been deprived of my father’s story but because the collective story of the black World War II veteran had been slighted in the popular history of the period.

  Every February, when Black History Month rolls around, the country honors black achievement in newspapers and magazines, on TV shows and in schools. These tributes tend to focus on a time line that starts with slavery and fast-forwards to the mid-fifties through the mid-sixties, as if Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass passed the baton directly to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights icon Julian Bond has said that the protest for equal rights by black World War II veterans and the blinding of Isaac Woodard marked the beginning of the modern-day civil rights movement. You would hardly know it, judging from the scant attention given to these events.

  The treatment of black veterans during and after World War II is a hard truth for America to embrace. Unlike the civil rights struggles of the sixties, which enshrined clear-cut heroes and villains, discrimination suffered by black veterans challenges the country’s core values, the offending party being the federal government itself, which had insisted on its moral authority in the fight against xenophobia overseas. This is perhaps why Black History Month emphasizes the Martin Luther King era—its marches, sit-ins, and protests—even as it all but ignores the earlier struggles of men and women who worked hard to underscore the country’s untenable moral contradiction. The story of these men and women instances a special brand of grace: they had every reason to stoke their anger at America but chose instead to seek a higher ground. While they hoped for and, in some cases, demanded the right to vote, fair wages, and equal housing, they were also asserting a much more basic claim. They wanted the right simply to be ordinary: to be able to walk into a Woolworth’s, order a ham sandwich, and savor it on the spot; to be able to fly a kite with a son or daughter anywhere in a park without fear of retribution; to be able to pass a white woman on the street without her trampling on their pride by clutching her pocketbook a little closer or, worse, threatening their lives by crying disrespect.

  Chances are you’ve encountered these veterans, men and women, at work or church or Walmart without knowing it. And probably, like me before I started writing this book, you knew little if anything about their sacrifices and triumphs in the quest for a better America.

  On the frigid Tuesday morning of Inauguration Day 2009, old black men in uniform made their way to Washington, D.C., to witness the nation’s first black president, the commander in chief, taking the oath of office. Many were clutching old photographs of themselves and others during their service, or had pictures in small frames or encased in plastic, taped or pinned to their lapels or winter hats. I hosted National Public Radio’s live coverage that day with my colleague Steve Inskeep. I usually host in the afternoon, but on that day I had to keep Steve’s early morning hours. At 4:45 a.m. on January 20, I encountered a stooped old man in a tan triangular army hat on Massachusetts Avenue. He was inching, slow as molasses, on his way to the Capitol, but he lifted himself upright and leaned against a younger man who could have been his son to salute me as I passed. “I can barely walk, but I am going to be standing proud today,” he said, his words punctuated by puffs of condensation in the predawn cold. “Stand all day if I have to, to see this.”

  I wondered if he was actually going to make it to the Capitol grounds to see the ceremony, not only because he moved so slowly but because he seemed to pause and salute almost every person he met on the street. The distance that stooped old gentleman had already traveled had once been unimaginable: from when, as a young man, he first put on his army cap to this morning, when he pulled it over his now graying hair to watch a black man raise his hand to take the oath of office as president of the United States. Eric Holder, soon to become the attorney general, told me that all day he harbored thoughts of his father, an immigrant from Barbados who fiercely loved the United States and fought in the war but who, on his way home, had to stand for hours on end during his train ride, while German prisoners of war, all white men, sat comfortably in cushioned seats.

  January 20, by tradition, is the day American presidents take the oath of office. January 20, 1946, was my father’s last full day in the navy; he was discharged on the following morning. I, too, thought of my father on Inauguration Day, wondering what he would have made of the ascension of a black president of the United States, a black commander in chief. The answer brought tears to my eyes.

  11

  A Date with Justice

  THE MAN ACCUSED OF BLINDING Isaac Woodard, Police Chief Lynwood Shull, pretty much disappeared from the historical record after his acquittal in November 1946. He stayed in and around Batesburg for most of his life. He had a daughter and worked for a time as the county road commissioner. He died in December 1997, at the age of ninety-five. Eager to know more about him, I called up some of his relatives: not a one had a clue that Lynwood Shull had been a figure in the national news for his involvement in the Woodard case. They had no idea that Shull had been the subject of a series of radio tirades by Orson Welles, the creator of Citizen Kane and The War of the Worlds. Most were dumbfounded to discover that their relative had been accused of a crime so heinous as to prompt executive action by a sitting U.S. president. Some were eager to get me off the phone, but others wanted to hear more.

  Patsy Quarles, who married into the family, learned of the story from news clippings she discovered while cleaning out her in-laws’ farmstead. “It was hush-hush,” she said. “I was married thirty years before I even heard it mentioned. At that time a newspaper article turned up and I said what was this about and [my husband] said it is not something the family talks about.” Quarles told me that she wants to know more but is afraid to press the subject.

  Hugh Shull, who lives in Lexington, South Carolina, is a nephew of Shull’s. His father, Cothran, was the youngest of the six Shull siblings; Lynwood was the oldest. When I asked Hugh if he had ever heard of Isaac Woodard, he said, “Never heard a word of any of this, and I am fifty-seven years old.” In one of the most uncomfortable conversations I’ve been party to, I read Woodard’s affidavit to Hugh Shull on the phone; he gasped time and again at the other end of the line.

  “He is my uncle Lynwood,” Hugh Shull said. “It is a shock to me. Yes, ma’am. Not so much a shock that things like that happened in that period. But a shock that he would do that.” I explained that my father was a black veteran also wounded in a police shooting, and that he, too, had kept the story to himself to avoid passing his pain on to his loved ones. Shull told me, “They say that was the greatest generation, the ability to try to protect their family, and I guess that is what they did. They protected their families.” The Shull family had also been burdened, it appears, and in some way shaped, by the weight of silence. Hugh Shull seemed conflicted about what he’d heard. “It makes me feel ashamed that something like that happened, and I don’t know if I should apologize or what, but I just don’t want to talk about it anymore.�
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  Davis and Betty Shull live in nearby Aiken County, South Carolina. They were not close to Lynwood Shull; they last saw him at a livestock market years before his death. They, too, were in the dark about Lynwood, but, as they see it, the connection of their family name to the Woodard scandal is no cause for apology. “It does not bother me,” Davis Shull, Lynwood’s cousin, said. “I did not know it. I would assume the man could have been at fault. If he [Shull] was acquitted, [Woodard] probably did something.”

  Davis Shull is troubled by the notion that all Shulls—all southerners, for that matter—should be besmirched by any one incident. “We’re all supposed to be haters,” Davis said. “But hey! We have relatives who are black. We know who they are. Goes back to my great-granddaddy. We knew who they are and one of them was even raised up in the same house with my grandmother. In some ways we see things more clearly.” His wife, Betty, noted that the South’s tortured history vis-à-vis race makes it hard for whites to wade into racial discussions. “Nowadays everything is racist,” she told me. “No matter what you say. You can’t tell the truth without being racist. You can’t say anything.”

  Listening to Davis and Betty Shull, I couldn’t help but think of the newsreels from the civil rights era’s most vicious conflicts. Lynwood Shull is dead, but many of the people who threw bricks at college students, or spat at ballplayers, or yelled awful things at schoolchildren are still alive. And if America is as determined as it appears to be to have a frank conversation about race, these very people, who’ve been denounced and derided—demonized—must have a seat at the table, so that they can be a part of that dialogue. For often discussions about race are one-sided, driven only by those who have experienced directly or through family ties the burden of rampant and vicious discrimination. The “success despite oppression” trope is quite common in politics, business, and the media. Less common—more muted, perhaps—are the viewpoints of people who enforced, enjoyed, or evolved past presumed white privilege. Their stories and sentiments, too, must be considered for greater understanding, as all of us try to explore and explain a country that has moved from the legislated marginalization of people of color to their predicted attainment of majority status in less than forty years.

  It was my need to hear from the other side, as it were, that spurred my quest: to search out either the policemen involved in Belvin Norris’s shooting or their relatives. From the police docket and the court records, I knew the names of the officers. I knew what they looked like, having examined their faces in Alabama law enforcement convention programs. I knew what they wore to work: a shiny dark uniform, with a gold-colored badge affixed. I knew where they lived in 1946. I knew their wives’ names. And, with not as much success as I had hoped, I tried to track down their children as well as distant family members because, while I was obsessed with piecing my father’s story together, I also needed to know as much as possible about who these policemen were as human beings and what they told their children, if anything at all, about that fateful February night—fateful, at least, for me and my family. I would encounter mostly dead ends and death notices. All five men involved in the incident had passed way.

  Bradley Pate, Carl Baggett, and Tremon Lindsey were married to women with names that seemed to spring from southern popular fiction. Names that adorned a lady like a brooch or a bouquet. Zelphia. Aleen. Ruby. Even though the policemen’s families had lived on the opposite side of the color line, I was surprised by how similar their lives were to the Birmingham Norrises’. Carl Baggett, for instance, lived on Avenue Z in Ensley, not far from my grandparents’ house. George Neil, who died in Florida in 1967, was one of six sons, like the Norris brothers. The officers had moved to Birmingham from rural areas and lived in squat one-story wooden bungalows on the West or South Side, most of which, like my grandparents’ house, have since been torn down.

  They were older men who’d stayed behind in Birmingham while thousands of youth headed off to war. They worked for a police department riddled with corruption and subject to derision. A detailed examination of the department by the Birmingham Citizen’s Committee found that the four-hundred-member force suffered from “impaired morals” in the late forties and early fifties, partly because large companies like the steel giant TCI had their own police unit and tended to siphon off the most qualified applicants with better pay and benefits. Starting pay for a Birmingham police officer was $259.88 per month, slightly less than what could be earned in the mills or the mines.

  The men were required to provide their own flashlights and pistols. The resulting motley array of firearms confused ballistic analysis whenever officers were involved in a shooting. New police recruits often got their pistols from pawnbrokers, which is to say that firearms used by criminals could easily wind up in police holsters. And when policemen got their guns through conventional retailers, they often used money borrowed from loan sharks, a practice that the Citizen’s Committee understandably found troubling, noting, “We see the possibility of serious detriment to the service when young officers are forced into such contracts.” The Citizen’s Committee’s investigation of the Birmingham police concluded that “most of the force are decent, well meaning men who earnestly try to be fair and considerate in the discharge of their duties”; but they also determined that its leadership left much to be desired. Bull Connor, then a thin man with slicked-back hair and a salty tongue, was sternly criticized. He was rated as “deficient in executive ability” and charged with practicing favoritism.1

  Of the five officers involved in Belvin Norris’s shooting, so far as I know, two left the force early to pursue other work. George Neil moved to Panama City, Florida, where he became the city clerk. Detective Macon Espy moved to Joplin, Missouri, to work for a company that hauled dynamite, and later ran a motel with his wife in Gulf Shores, Alabama. Espy had a notorious career as a policeman. In 1940, he was mentioned in a “Goofy Gazette” newspaper column for having served his own wife, Eleanor, a warrant for reckless driving. And in 1948 he was suspended from duty for thirty days; it appeared that a handcuffed suspect he was driving from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Birmingham had managed to reach over to the front seat and snag Espy’s pistol sixty miles or so outside Birmingham.

  Espy’s sister-in-law Betty Koonce is one of the few relatives directly connected to the officers who was willing to talk. In her eighties, she still lives in Birmingham and describes herself as the “sole survivor” of her family. Betty remembers when William Macon Espy started courting her older sister, Eleanor. Once married, they lived in a house next to her parents’. He was a simple man, she said. Not very tall and not a real talker. He liked straw hats and fiddle music. And, Betty said, he was a good friend of Bull Connor’s, one of “Bull’s boys.” He’d get a call from Bull, she recalled, and he would be off running at all hours of the night.

  As was to be expected, Espy never mentioned a shooting involving young black men in a downtown Birmingham office building, Koonce said. He never talked about his work at home, period. Betty Koonce did remember reading about him in the paper once. She was fuzzy about the details but recollected that the item involved a shooting at the courthouse. Indeed, in 1938 the Birmingham News carried a story about a shooting: a thirty-five-year-old salesman named H. E. Coburn shot a “negro” being escorted through the Birmingham courthouse by Espy, shortly after the “negro” was convicted of a crime against Coburn’s daughter.

  From Betty Koonce I learned little of factual relevance about the Birmingham police officers who’d confronted my father in the Pythian Temple, but from what she said I was able to etch the arc of their lives. My conversation with her and other relatives helped me to understand segregation from the other side of Birmingham’s color line.

  Betty has seen a lot of changes in her life and was at first reluctant to talk about the role of the Birmingham police during the push for racial equality. She referred to it as “the unpleasantness,” revealing discomfort about discussing America’s version of apartheid. “I
t always makes us look so bad, but it is just the way it was,” she said. “You know, we didn’t know anything else.”

  “I am from the old school,” she added. “I had to accept these blacks as my next-door neighbors. It used to be easier. Back then, we had our own. But you know things changed, and some of the best friends I ever had were black. I don’t have anything against them, only the ones who are snooty or trying to prove themselves.”

  I asked Betty to clarify what she meant by the ones who are trying to prove themselves. “It is still a shock for me to pick up a paper for the last year and see that a black man is a leader of this country.… I just can’t get used to it. But they have accepted it. The people I never thought would stand for it have accepted it. You can’t stand in the way of progress.”

  It’s what she wants to believe, and she does, but she also has an inkling of a reservation that she just can’t shake. “I have a gut feeling—and I have had it for a while—when they brought up Obama, I thought, ‘Oh me! Some of those rednecks are going to get their sights on him.’ I have a feeling that boy better watch his back because someone is going to put their sights on him.” When I asked her to be more expansive, she told me, “I’ve said enough.” To make sure I got the point, she added: “No more!”

  I still wanted to know more about the role police officers played in Jim Crow Birmingham. The Citizen’s Committee report suggests that Birmingham’s police department was defined by Bull Connor’s rough-and-tumble leadership long before the 1960s. What is not clear is whether all the men under his command subscribed to his politics or his tactics. After realizing I would never be able to confront any of the policemen involved in my father’s shooting, I turned to someone who knew more than a thing or two about the Birmingham police force in the 1940s.