Water Tossing Boulders

by Adrienne Berard

  Brewer wanted justice, but there was no judgment a jury could render that would fix a system so wholly broken. Once so full of hope, Brewer left office a defeated man.

  During one of his last exchanges as governor, Brewer corresponded with a Jewish immigrant from Russia named Phillip Seigel. Seigel had been arrested on vagrancy charges in Vicksburg and put to work on a nearby farm. While in the custody of the state, Seigel was severely beaten. After his release, he contacted the governor, detailing his abuse.

  “It is against the law for the superintendent of the county convicts to brutally whip or mistreat prisoners in his care,” Brewer wrote in response. “It is a matter for investigation by the grand jury and he could be convicted for brutality.”

  Rather than show gratitude, Seigel’s reply was an indictment against all Brewer held dear. He questioned the very bedrock upon which Brewer had built his life.

  “Your honor,” wrote Seigel. “How could I explain my self to the grand jury about them mistreating me or make it known to any of the grand jury when I come out of the county farm I did not have money to go home?”

  How can the rule of law govern society, Seigel asked, when the justice system itself has been corrupted? How can you ask a man to stand before the very jury that placed him in chains and beg for sympathy? What do they know about this suffering?

  “If the grand jury should happen to call for me, would I be protected by the law from being hurt or arrested again?” he asked.

  Seigel told Brewer he would not testify before a grand jury. He would not place his faith in the courts. There was no ruling that would restore what had been taken from him. The American dream had been beaten from his flesh and no lawyer, no judge, no jury could bring it back.

  “How could a man stand gettin whipped and not to wriggle and beg for mercy?” Seigel concluded. “The more he begs the harder he parts the 4 in. leather on the body. I know it with the experience which he made the blood come of my body. . . . I thought to myself if you call that justice or law of the civil country of liberty, a man better go to Europe. They don’t beat up a prisoner like they did me.”

  An immigrant came to America and was placed in chains. He wanted his governor to know that this America, the one he witnessed on the county farm, was not worth all he had sacrificed to reach these shores. A decade later, Brewer had not forgotten Phillip Seigel. His unfinished wars, waged inside a marble citadel, followed him back to an old law office in Clarksdale. By taking this case, the case of the Chinese girl, Brewer would fight for the tacit promise made to every immigrant arriving at the nation’s gates, that they would find democracy on the other side.

  As Brewer’s horse slowed, its coat stained with rich soil, the aging man looked upon his land. The Delta had taken everything from him. Brewer was one of many cotton planters caught in the extreme deflation of 1920. During World War I, both the price and production of cotton increased, adding extra value to the worth of Delta farmland. Then, at the close of the war, both the value of the land and the price of cotton began to decrease in conjunction with one another.

  The effects were devastating for planters and sharecroppers alike. Brewer had wagered everything he owned, and then some, in investments in the Delta’s cotton fields. When the crash hit, Brewer was forced to borrow $375,000 from the Canal Bank and Trust Company of New Orleans to pay off his other debts. When Brewer’s loan payments began to dwindle, the bank sought to relinquish his collateral, which consisted of the deed to Brewer’s land and his only stable income.

  The collapse of Brewer’s estate provided the editors of the Clarksdale Register with endless amusement, which they masked in an air of sympathy. “The Register learns with regret that Hon. Earl Brewer has been forced into financial embarrassments,” read one article from late February 1924. “The slump came in 1921 and tied up everything he owned, including his home. . . . The bad conditions have overwhelmed him, and as a result of it his creditors on these endorsements have taken judgments against him. . . . We hope that the clouds will yet clear away and that this man will not be crushed by the noble efforts he has made.” The article was recirculated in several other papers throughout the county. Brewer came to read it in a newspaper edited by his own daughter, his eldest, Minnie Elizabeth. Even the bonds of family were broken in the crash.

  Turning his back to the fields, Brewer followed the road that led home to Clarksdale. The air was cooler now, brought up from the draws and low places by the night. Occasionally the dancing lights of a motorcar would plunge past and the thin white path of the road would swell with dust. Then it would settle again and Brewer could see where the familiar low country unfolded gently, receding from the riverbanks as if it had been smoothed out by the tide. Beside the road, the warm shadows of poplars pointed the tired man home.

  Brewer entered his mansion at 41 John Street with an air of resignation. Nothing had changed since the morning. Hardly anything changed anymore. After the children left, Brewer and his wife sank into the routine monotony of the life they once dreamed for themselves. Brewer stood gazing at the Persian rugs, the chandelier, and the Spanish tapestry chairs—all the same. The table lamps, flaunting their Victorian fringe, still rested on burnished brass bases. The gilded grandfather clock stood in its corner as usual.

  At the end of the hall, opposite the front door, a wide master staircase spread into the edges of the room. Mrs. Brewer and her three daughters used to make entrances there, blooming forth in elegant evening gowns before crowds of dignitaries and celebrities. Now only the weight of Brewer’s footsteps echoed through the house.

  On the right side of the reception hall was the dining room, where the colored servants were readying the table for dinner. The banquet area was as large and empty as any other room in the house. Polished wooden chairs lined the walls, relics from a time when guests would arrive in droves.

  A wide chiffonier sat plumb against the wall opposite the doorway. Its engraved drawers rang with the soft clatter of silver. Hanging over the table, the stained glass of a mosaic lamp cast a dull glow over the room. At the dinner table, Brewer and his wife brought their hands together in prayer. Bowing his head, Brewer recited the words his mother had spoken each night at the small table she shared with her six children: “Our Heavenly Father, we thank thee most kindly for this and every blessing in life. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  After decades, Brewer still didn’t tire of going to his office. Anyone unfamiliar with the bedraggled lawyer would assume that he was drowning in cases, for there was no other explanation for why a man his age would continue to keep such hours. The reality was that, until recently, Brewer barely had any kind of caseload at all. Still, he enjoyed his routine and kept it despite the dearth of casework. Each morning, he strolled into town, passing the picture theater, the boarding house, the filling stations and dress shops. As Clarksdale came alive, Brewer entered the small corner office he had maintained for nearly twenty years.

  The office was located at the intersection of Yazoo and Third Street, directly across from the New Alcazar Hotel. The hotel, named after the Spanish word for “fortress,” was an elegant, four-story structure, built during the fleeting period of prosperity when escalating crop yields and wartime cotton prices created a new class of royalty in the Mississippi Delta.

  The hotel’s marble-clad lobby was lit by a giant skylight that towered over a second-floor mezzanine, which contained a restaurant, a kitchen, and a ballroom. Now, years after the cotton market had collapsed, the hotel served as an extravagant mausoleum for all the grandeur the town once promised itself. Brewer’s office, inside the aging brick walls of a bank, faced the facade of Grecian friezes that lined the Alcazar. His fortune had been built and lost in the shadow of a castle.

  Stationed at his desk, Brewer turned to the case of the Chinese girl. He paused to light a cigar, which soon became another cigar followed by another. The smoking helped Brewer think. He wasn’t going to be able to file a civil suit. The couple was not seeking damages.
This left Brewer little room to make a deal with the few local judges who still regarded him favorably. Brewer’s recent failed race for the Senate had significantly lowered his social standing. Now was not the ideal time to be asking favors. Maybe it was better this way. All or nothing.

  Brewer’s first order of business was to figure out exactly who the defendants would be. Any person responsible for keeping the child out of school qualified as a defendant, meaning Brewer would have to go all the way up to the state level. It so happened that the state superintendent of education had a long and bitter history with the onetime governor.

  Willard Faroe Bond had been appointed by Brewer’s greatest rival, Theodore Bilbo. Tapping Bond for superintendent of education was one of Bilbo’s first actions as governor of Mississippi, after he was elected in a landslide victory in 1916. Two terms later, Bond still held the post, despite the fact that Bilbo was no longer in office.

  Before Bilbo became governor, the short, paunchy man with round glasses and an even rounder face had served as Mississippi’s lieutenant governor under a relatively unknown Progressive named Earl Brewer. From the very beginning of Brewer’s administration, Bilbo worked to build allies in the legislature, eventually turning the entire legislative apparatus against its executive.

  By the end of Brewer’s governorship, the two men did not speak to one another. It was understood by every Mississippi politician that to align oneself with Bilbo was to markedly side against Brewer. Bond was deeply aligned with Bilbo.

  Bond was born the only child of a poor housekeeper in Stone County, Mississippi, during the winter of 1876. In 1881 his mother, Nancy, died suddenly, leaving her son orphaned at the age of five. Since the boy had no other living relatives, he was left in the care of his mother’s employer, a farmer and stockman named Loamie A. Batson. Batson readily accepted the child as his son, but more bad luck befell the boy when his guardian died in 1882, just months after the death of Bond’s mother.

  In his will, Batson stipulated that his adoptive son would receive $500 for his future education and would be placed under the care of Batson’s younger brother, Lewis Cass. With the generous funds left to him by Batson, Bond attended various rural schoolhouses and eventually graduated from Purvis High School in 1897.

  In the fall of 1898 Bond entered Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee. He boarded with a gregarious twenty-one-year-old named Theodore Bilbo. Bilbo was also studying at Peabody, but was on track to become a Baptist preacher. After Bond received his bachelor’s degree in 1902, he was hired as the superintendent of a boarding school in his hometown of Wiggins, Mississippi.

  One year into the job, Bond received a strange request from his old classmate. Theodore Bilbo had struggled in his courses at Peabody and eventually left Nashville to return to his home county and go into politics. By 1903 Bilbo had been defeated in his campaign for circuit clerk and was ready to try his hand at teaching, an occupation in which he had no experience. In the manner of an old friend requesting a favor, Bilbo asked Bond for a job at Wiggins.

  Out of loyalty, Bond offered Bilbo and his wife, Linda Gaddy, positions teaching at the school for a salary of $55 per month. Despite the benefits of his new employment, Bilbo did not last long at Wiggins. He was dismissed during his second year on charges of seducing an orphan girl in the dormitory. Upon his dismissal, Bilbo worked at the local drugstore for several months before entering Vanderbilt Law School in 1905.

  Bond, on the other hand, remained at Wiggins for close to a decade, until he was hired to teach history and Latin at the newly established Mississippi Normal College in Hattiesburg in 1912. Four years into his tenure at Hattiesburg, Bond heard again from his old friend Bilbo, who had recently been elected governor.

  Bilbo was facing allegations of immorality, as the seduction charges from his short career as a teacher had resurfaced during the campaign. Bilbo offered Bond the position of state superintendent of education, and Bond quickly accepted his offer, in turn proclaiming Bilbo innocent of all charges. A lifetime of trading favors had landed both men in two of the highest positions of power in the state.

  Brewer was not a man to hold grudges, but he did have a long memory. Bond was as close a friend as Brewer’s enemy ever had. He decided the best course of action for the suit was the one that would hit Bond the hardest. Brewer would file a writ of mandamus. The writ was essentially an order demanding the local court prosecute an individual, or in this case individuals, for violating the constitutional rights of another citizen. If successful, Mississippi’s school board would be forced, under court order, to permit Martha Lum into Rosedale Consolidated High.

  Of course, the case ran the risk of being thrown out immediately. If the defendants could argue that there were no constitutional grounds for Brewer’s suit, his case would never even go to trial. It was a risky move, but a dramatic one.

  Once a writ is filed, the court must summon every named defendant, sending an officer of the law to their doorstep. The day after Brewer filed the suit, police would visit the homes of politicians all over the state. Bond would answer his door at the capital one bright autumn morning to find the Hinds County sheriff serving him a summons to face trial for violating the United States Constitution.

  As for which part of the Constitution the men would be charged with violating, Brewer chose to build his argument around one amendment, the Fourteenth. This was the first time Brewer employed the Fourteenth Amendment so strongly in a suit, and his interpretation of its statutes was a stroke of brilliance. With the Fourteenth Amendment as his brick and mortar, Brewer would build his case.

  Drafted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was created with the lofty promise of granting the rights of citizenship to every person born in the United States. Its goal was to ensure that the nation’s four million recently liberated slaves would be afforded the same rights as their fellow United States citizens.

  The notion of turning a massive population of slaves into equal members of American society was as radical a concept as the creation of the Constitution itself. But the Congress that shepherded the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment was the same Congress that saw the nation shattered by civil war. For those men to guarantee the rights of citizenship to freed slaves was to make sense of a devastated nation and to bring justice to one of the largest injustices the country had ever known.

  At the opening of the Thirty-Ninth Congress on December 4, 1865, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, a prominent Radical Republican from Pennsylvania, introduced a resolution to establish a joint congressional committee on Reconstruction. The committee would be tasked with outlining the means by which the nation would restore unity and guarantee the protection of freed slaves. Along with proposing the new committee, Stevens also proposed a constitutional amendment declaring that “all national and state laws shall be equally applicable to every citizen, and no discrimination shall be made on account of race and color.”

  Congressman John Bingham of Ohio was in favor of the measure, and within twenty-four hours wrote and introduced a more comprehensive amendment based on Stevens’s suggestion. On December 13, 1865, Stevens’s proposal for a joint congressional committee on Reconstruction was approved, and fifteen men from both the House and the Senate, including Stevens and Bingham, got to work drafting versions of a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the rights of citizenship to freed slaves.

  In the end it was Bingham’s final proposal, submitted to the committee on February 3, that laid the foundation for what later became the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. The language, which was approved by the committee a week after it was introduced, read, “The Congress shall have power to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper to secure to citizens of each State all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and to all persons in the several States equal protection in the rights of life, liberty and property.”

  On May 10 the House passed the Fourteent
h Amendment by slightly more than the required two-thirds majority in a vote of 128 to 37, sparking applause in the House galleries as well as on the floor. Then the amendment opened for debate in the Senate, where Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan began the discussion by suggesting that the Fourteenth Amendment pass, but with an added citizenship clause reading, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.” Scarcely had Howard finished introducing the amendment when a senator from Pennsylvania with a penchant for controversy took the floor.

  Edgar A. Cowan of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, was selected as an elector for his state in the volatile presidential election of 1860. As the nation erupted into civil war following Lincoln’s election in November 1860, Cowan’s stubbornness and unwillingness to negotiate made him extremely unpopular both in his home state and in Washington.

  According to one of Cowan’s biographers, “few men in our Congress at any time have so completely lost the confidence and support of those who elected them.” An article published in the Pittsburgh Gazette in the spring of 1862 read, “Among the members of the large convention of Republicans which met in this city on Monday, there was not a man that had a word to say in defense of Edgar A. Cowan in the Senate of the United States. There was a universal feeling of execration against the ingrate who had so basely deceived his political friends who had elevated him to a seat so much beyond his capacity.”

  Despite widespread unpopularity, in 1864 Cowan was elected to the Thirty-Ninth Congress, and on the afternoon of May 30, 1866, took the Senate floor in an attempt to break apart the proposed Fourteenth Amendment and Howard’s notion of citizenship.

  “The honorable senator from Michigan has given this subject, I have no doubt, a good deal of his attention,” he began. “And I am really desirous to have a legal definition of ‘citizenship of the United States.’ What does it mean? What is its length and breadth? . . . Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? . . . If so, what rights have they?