Water Tossing Boulders

by Adrienne Berard

  The telephone in the parlor room rang without pause. Minnie Marion Brewer held the mouthpiece in her hand, directing calls in the same manner a captain might steer a ship. She answered questions from the governor, from United States senators, from newspapers throughout the country.

  “It was high-handed murder,” Marion shouted through the telephone at a reporter from the Associated Press. “The women of Coahoma County are outraged at this mob violence in the heart of our city.”

  Brewer had never seen this side of his wife’s character. When he was governor, Marion received accolades for her success as a dutiful homemaker. “She has made an especially gracious mistress of the Mansion,” a biographer wrote after visiting the Brewer family in Jackson. “Mrs. Brewer is a considerate helpmeet to her husband . . . and has kept his home life serene and sweet, and afar from the bitter turmoil of public life.”

  It was not like Marion to take up causes. She was faithful and loving, but never political, never outspoken. This was a changed woman sitting on the small wooden chair beside the telephone. He loved her now more than ever.

  On the Tuesday following the murder, Mrs. Brewer held a meeting at City Hall, inviting over one hundred women from across the county. She stood before a packed house and appointed a committee of women to investigate the lynching of Lindsey Coleman. She dictated a resolution that was printed in papers throughout the state. “Be it resolved that we unqualifiedly condemn all acts of lawlessness,” she announced. “That we pledge ourselves and call upon every other citizen to uphold the law and aid in every way possible the officers of the court in its enforcement and in the punishment of those responsible for the murder.”

  Meanwhile, Brewer tried to determine the means by which he could conduct a trial. Such a case had never been tried in the county. It would be the first time a white man had gone on trial for his life in the murder of a Negro. If Brewer wanted Coleman’s killers to face a jury, he had to first find a credible witness to testify against them. He knew there were dozens of men who were present when Coleman was taken, but no man in Coahoma County would risk his social standing, and possibly his life, to testify against the lynchers. Determining that it would be impossible to turn a citizen into a witness, Brewer came up with another idea. He would make a witness out of the sheriff.

  The day following the lynching, Brewer spoke with Judge Alcorn and arranged to have the county sheriff indicted on two counts of “failing to perform his duty.” One count was for failing to protect Coleman as he was leaving the courthouse and the other was for failing to intervene when John Fisher was tortured in jail. For both indictments, Brewer invoked Section 1024 of Mississippi’s Hemingway’s Code, which stated, “If any judge, justice of the peace, constable, member of the board of supervisors, sheriff, coroner or other peace officer, shall willfully neglect or refuse to return any person committing any offense against the laws committed in his view or knowledge . . . he shall upon conviction be fined not less than $100 nor more than $500 and may in the discretion of the court be removed from office.”

  In reality, Brewer didn’t want the sheriff’s case to go to trial. It would have likely resulted in a hung jury and an elaborate string of appeals that would have gone on for months. Of course, this was not what he told Sheriff S. W. Glass. Brewer and Alcorn explained to Glass that if the jury found him guilty, he would be removed from office, destroying any chance he had for reelection. For a man whose only pride was in his occupation, the threat was a death sentence. Glass quickly struck a deal with the judge that he would plead guilty, pay a fine of $500, and quietly vacate his post until the trial was over, at which point he would resume his position as the county’s chief law officer. In return, Glass had to serve as a witness for the state.

  As Mrs. Brewer was forming her coalition of women at City Hall, Brewer was at the courthouse, where nearly a hundred men had gathered before Judge Alcorn for the selection of a grand jury. Alcorn calmed the crowd. Then he ordered the assembly to “find out the parties that did this, use the power of the state and bring to justice anyone that has had a part in this crime.” Alcorn selected the twelve men who would compose the jury and render a verdict in the murder of Lindsey Coleman. Now all Brewer needed were the defendants to charge with the crime.

  The next day, Brewer called for a meeting of the Coahoma County Bar Association. Twenty-five lawyers from across the county met at the courthouse to discuss the lynching. When they arrived, Sheriff Glass was sitting near the front of the courtroom. He came at the request of Brewer, who had asked the sheriff to submit to questioning before the panel of lawyers.

  Brewer jumped right into the interrogation. He directed Glass, in a stern voice, to name the men responsible for the lynching. Glass grew visibly uncomfortable. He moved his eyes over the room. He responded that he “wasn’t sure if it was proper” to answer such a question. Brewer changed his tone. He grew forceful and impatient. They made a deal. He wanted names.

  “You are the sheriff and chief law officer in the county,” Brewer snapped. “The bar here assembled in mass wants to know from you, the sheriff, who these parties were.”

  In response, the sheriff listed four names: James Traynham, the Delta planter and adoptive father of Grover Nicholas; Thomas Nicholas, the brother of Grover Nicholas; Gold Cane, a manager at Traynham Plantation; and H. S. Blockley, a photographer from Clarksdale who was married to Grover Nicholas’s niece.

  On Christmas Eve, the grand jury returned indictments of murder against all four men. It was decided that Gold Cane would be the first to face trial. He had the least social standing of the four, but was likely to have the strongest defense, as he had already hired a team of six attorneys. On the day the trial was announced, Brewer volunteered his services for the prosecution. In doing so, the ex-governor became the first lawyer in Coahoma County to try a white man for the murder of a Negro.

  James Flowers sat at his law office in Jackson, Mississippi. His desk was flooded with letters, most of them congratulatory, with a spare few offering a barrage of insults. As president of the Mississippi Bar Association, he had recently taken the first political stance of his life and published a pamphlet condemning lynching. It was a bold move for a man who, until this point, had been a corporate lawyer for the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad.

  Flowers was now in the process of preparing a second edition of the pamphlet, just two weeks after he issued the first. There had been a lynching in Clarksdale just before Christmas, so he felt compelled to update the report to include the events of December 19, 1925. “Sinking to depths of ignominy with the lynching of the acquitted negro Lindsey Coleman at Clarksdale,” Flowers inserted in italics, “Mississippi closed the year with six of the nation’s total of 16 lynchings.”

  Flowers relied heavily on statistics. His hope was that the sheer number of lynchings would be “enough to stagger and to shame.” He was a practical man, who believed in motivating the public through fact over emotion, and his antilynching pamphlet showcased this trait. “During the last forty years, mobs murdered 4,144 men and women,” he wrote, adding that “1,036 of the victims were white and 3,162 were colored. . . . Mississippi has 530 lynchings to her discredit.”

  For a man who did not champion political causes, the lawyer’s report provided precise documentation of the nation’s legacy of lynching. His research was meticulous and demonstrated a commitment to accuracy rarely seen in political propaganda. He closed out his passage on statistics with a heartbreaking clause explaining his margin of error.

  These figures patiently and persistently gathered over four decades do not tell the full story of bloodshed and lawlessness. They do not take into account the hundreds killed in the bloody race riots at East St. Louis, Tulsa, Washington, and Chicago, or the isolated individuals done to death in the dead of night by craven cowards, with no feature story in the newspapers and little or no investigation in the grand jury room.

  Jokingly nicknamed General Flowers due to a demeanor that was quite the opposite of a gener
al, at age fifty-five, James Nathaniel Flowers had finally taken a stand. Some of his greatest praise came from the former governor Earl Brewer. Brewer, like Flowers, had been born in Carroll County. Both men had received degrees from the University of Mississippi, and both were the favorite sons of Confederate veterans. Yet when it came to law, the two men could not have been more different. Brewer began his career as a labor lawyer, taking cases for injured railroad workers and their families. Flowers was currently chief counsel for one of the largest rail lines in the state.

  So it came as both a compliment and a surprise to Flowers when Brewer asked him to take over as lead attorney on a Fourteenth Amendment case that was on its way to the US Supreme Court. It was an appeal out of Rosedale by a Chinese family who wanted to send their daughter to the white public high school. Flowers had very little experience with these kinds of cases, but Brewer asked a favor of him, and out of respect for the ex-governor, Flowers obliged.

  Brewer, for his part, would offer Flowers some support, but also made it clear that he was going to lead the prosecution against four men responsible for the Clarksdale lynching. This would mean that Flowers would be shouldered with most of the responsibility in the school case. Through one simple arrangement, the case of Gong Lum v. Rice, and the fate of Martha Lum, was handed off to a novice.

  Court convened at 9:30 a.m. on January 7 for the murder trial of Gold Cane. In total, forty-one witnesses had been subpoenaed to testify in the case, so everyone in town knew someone involved in the trial. By midday, the courtroom was overflowing with spectators. They stood in clusters behind rows of chairs spread out across the courtroom.

  A reporter for the Clarksdale Register noted that a significant number of Negroes had come to witness the deliberations. This seemed unusual to him, as he rarely saw colored spectators in court, and he made a point of adding an additional paragraph at the end of his article to highlight the abnormality.

  Rumor was that Sheriff Glass was going to testify against Cane. As the afternoon wore on, the crowd grew restless with anticipation. Glass took the stand shortly after 4 p.m. His face was pale and he tapped his fingers nervously on the wooden banister by his waist. The jury sat directly to his right, all twelve of them, elevated above the court in two rows of six. They were an imposing sight, wealthy planters and bankers, dressed in expensive suits, leaning their heads on their hands, waiting.

  Glass collected his nerves and, in a somber tone, began to describe what he saw on the night of December 19. Two men grabbed Coleman as he was leaving the courthouse. Glass recognized one of them as Gold Cane. The two men took Coleman out onto Yazoo Avenue, on the east side of the courthouse.

  “They brought him to the car,” Glass explained. “There were twelve or fifteen men around them. . . . I grabbed Coleman but was pushed back onto the street.”

  When Glass stood up, the men and the car were gone. The next thing he heard was that a body had been found on Desoto Avenue, bleeding onto the street from twenty-six bullet wounds.

  Although visibly uncomfortable, Glass gave a strong performance, and Brewer left the court with a sense of relief. When a journalist from Memphis tried to stop the lawyer on his way out the door, shouting questions over the noise of the crowd, Brewer merely responded with a smile. The reporter noted that Brewer’s wide grin was all his readers needed to know about the direction of the case.

  Five days later, on January 12, the jury reported to the court for closing arguments. They had heard dozens of testimonies and sat through hours of cross-examination. Following a rather short speech by the defense, Brewer gave the final word for the state. He made it clear to the men of the jury that he already served his time as the county’s district attorney, that he had no expectation of ever trying another murder case. But this heinous crime drew him back into the courtroom, not as a hired lawyer, but as a citizen of Clarksdale.

  “I am before you today as a representative of the people of Coahoma County,” he said. “I am here because an effort has been made to run over the law and trample it beneath the feet of those who disregard lawful society and set up mob law in this peace.”

  Brewer’s wife watched from the audience. Facing the judge and jury, he could not meet her eyes. It was only when he turned around to address the crowd that he saw her. She was surrounded by other women, her own coalition, a body politic of wives, mothers, and daughters, seeking retribution for the murder of a colored man they did not know.

  “Some folks enjoy killing,” Brewer continued. “I know some men who would drive halfway across the state to assist in the hanging of a negro, even when they didn’t know a thing about the crime he is supposed to have committed. That’s the vicious element. Let folks once understand that [if] lawlessness will be permitted, a state of anarchy will exist.”

  Following the death of his father, Brewer had organized a club called the Wildcat Society in a little country schoolhouse near his farm in Carroll County. The club met on Saturday nights to hold mock debates between local farmboys. One night, two older men came to the meeting. They talked about another society called the Ku Klux Klan. They made a proposal: the boys would do the work of the Klan and gain the privilege of binding themselves to a respectable society. The men said there were some worthless Negroes in the neighborhood who needed to be whipped, and that it was the duty of the Wildcats to attend to it.

  The boys then unanimously passed a resolution to devote themselves to the cause of the Klan, to go out on Saturday nights and “take these negroes out and whip them and run them out of the country.” Brewer, the youngest boy in the room, was the only member to voice concern that whipping Negroes was against the law.

  “He got a rabbit in him,” one boy chided. “He’s gettin weak in the melt,” said another.

  As the boys laughed, Brewer silently returned to his seat, afraid to be called a coward. He agreed to meet back at the clubhouse the following week and bring with him a white mask that he sewed at his mother’s kitchen table. The next week, as Brewer left to attend the Saturday meeting, his mother stopped him at the door. She told Brewer that a society that hides its face is not a society worthy of her son. “You don’t owe them any duty to assist them or encourage them in the commission of crime,” she warned.

  Brewer stayed home with his mother that night and never returned to a meeting of the Wildcats. During the following weeks and months, he heard of Negroes being whipped on Saturday nights. Then, one Sunday morning, the body of a Negro turned up with a fatal bullet wound. A group of white men were arrested and jailed on the charge of murder.

  When the case went to trial, Brewer snuck into the back of the courtroom to watch the proceedings. He recognized the defendants as members of his old society. He watched as one of the most distinguished lawyers in Mississippi defended each boy and listened as the jury entered the verdict of “not guilty.” It was the first time Brewer was confronted with evil and saw it go unpunished. Now, standing before a grand jury, Brewer had the chance to punish men for the crimes he did not have the courage to condemn as a child.

  As Brewer came to the end of his closing argument, he paced from one side of the floor to the other. Gold Cane showed no expression. Under the table, his hands moved restlessly.

  “Coahoma County is being weighed in the balance,” Brewer concluded. “Men dissatisfied with law and order have taken civilization into their own hands. They have said, ‘Let civilization be damned!’ This county has met every exigency, it must not fail in this case. Give the lawless an inch and they will take a mile. There is no reason to doubt this man’s guilt.”

  Judge Alcorn called for an adjournment while the jury made their deliberations. The fate to be decided was not just that of Cane, but of all four indicted men. “It is generally believed that if an acquittal comes in the Cane case,” wrote one reporter, “it will be useless to prosecute the other three men.” Filing out of the box, the jurymen followed one another into a room behind the judge’s bank. They did not reach a verdict for twenty-six hours.
>
  When it was announced that the jury had rendered a decision, Alcorn called the court back into session. As the back door swung open, the only sound was the footfalls of jurymen making their way back to the box. One jury member handed the verdict to a clerk, who read its words aloud to the court: “We, the jury, find the defendant ‘not guilty.’” Cane jumped to his feet, grasping the hands of the jurors as he murmured his thanks. Upon Cane’s acquittal, indictments against the other three men were dismissed.

  Immediately following Gold Cane’s release, Brewer filed another lawsuit, this time on behalf of a Negro prisoner named Marshall Jones, who was also charged with murder and was held at the Coahoma County jail with John Fisher when he was tortured. In the case, Jones v. State, Brewer again invoked Hemingway’s Code to protest misconduct within law enforcement. This time, he was able to win Jones another trial and stay his execution. In pairing Hemingway’s Code with the Fourteenth Amendment, Brewer found a renewed sense of purpose in his work. He joined the national fight against coerced confessions.

  For more than a decade, Brewer continued to take cases similar to Jones v. State. In 1936, serving as lead defense counsel in a case financed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Brewer finally earned the victory that he’d dedicated his life to win. In Brown v. Mississippi, the US Supreme Court, for the first time in its history, reversed a state criminal conviction on the grounds that the conviction was based upon a coerced confession. The landmark decision affirmed that the Constitution must be applied in all police interrogations, regardless of color.