The Hamlet Fire

by Bryant Simon

  Reverend Harold Miller preached at one of the black churches on the southern side of Hamlet. He didn’t grow up there, so he had a kind of critical distance about the place. In the months after the fire, he noted a sharp rise in the level of distrust—and that is the word he used—among his congregants toward white city leaders, state representatives, and members of the local fire department. This feeling wasn’t entirely new, as the race riot and fire bombings that took place in Hamlet in 1975 revealed. Well before Imperial exploded, many African Americans had no doubt heard stories about the Hamlet Fire Department, about Fuller being a “good old boy” and hiring a few of his own kind, and about his department sometimes refusing to come into their neighborhoods to put out house fires. Some in the black community wondered if their families and friends had been sacrificed the morning of the fire because of hard-boiled racism. If this could be true, and if what Annette Zimmerman believed about relief officials was true, many African Americans had to wonder how they could trust elected leaders and other public representatives going forward. Without that trust, it was hard to imagine recovering from the fire and investing in the town’s future.

  Hamlet’s racial geography only added to the already festering distrust that, in turn, exacerbated PTSD symptoms. Much of black life in Hamlet, especially working-class black life, was centered in South Hamlet, and there was almost no way to get there without going down Bridges Street. That meant going by the Imperial site and the charred and twisted remains of the factory, still standing there with the yellow police tape fluttering in the wind, one year after the fire, around the time that Ruth DeRosa wrapped up her research in town.

  State worker and songwriter Martha Barr traveled back to Hamlet on a bright, warm September morning to mark the fire’s one-year anniversary. She joined two hundred others gathered around the still waters of City Lake, a park with geese, ducks, picnic tables, and benches just below the town’s Main Street. Fanning themselves with paper programs to keep away the heat and mosquitos, the largely white crowd, dressed in short-sleeved shirts and gingham sundresses, stayed quiet as the Reverend James Bailey of the Hamlet Ministerial Alliance delivered a short and solemn opening prayer. When he finished, he called to the podium “our beloved Mayor Abbie Covington.” Applause from the audience. Covington, her voice shaky with emotion, thanked the city’s elected officials and employees for their efforts to keep the town together in the days and weeks after the fire. Reverend Harold Miller followed the mayor and urged Hamlet citizens to “turn to God . . . to help bear each other’s burdens.” When he finished, Martha Barr walked up the rostrum. Slowly, in alphabetical order, she read the names of each of the twenty-five women and men who had perished in the fire. After she said each name, a silver bell chimed. When Barr came to the end of the list, Reverend Bailey brought up Catherine and Amy Dawkins, the widow and pre-teen daughter of the Lance deliveryman who had died in the blaze. They unveiled a granite memorial inscribed with the names of each of the victims. Another prayer, and the ceremony ended.

  “I haven’t been able to alleviate the suffering,” Abbie Covington told a Raleigh television reporter after the lakeside service, “but we have shared it.”37

  The spirit of togetherness invoked by Covington, Barr, Bailey, and Miller wasn’t the only emotion swirling through Hamlet that anniversary day. At Saint Peter United Methodist Church, located a few blocks from the lake and less than a quarter of a mile down Bridges Street from the Imperial site, another memorial service took place. “This one,” explained a newsman, “was a little more lively, a little more angry, and a lot more black.”38

  Reverend Jesse Jackson was the featured speaker at Saint Peter. He was accompanied by Sheriff Raymond Goodman and members of Citizens Against Repulsive Environments (CARE), a local environmental group trying to stop the dumping of PCBs and other toxins in largely poor, African American areas in Richmond County. When they entered the church, the packed and sweaty crowd jumped to its feet and roared, “Jesse, Jesse” over and over again. With “Amen” punctuating nearly every line of his address, Jackson, a formidable candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, did what he usually did, firing up a crowd with a mix of Biblical quotes, black pride slogans, and call-and-response alliteration. He closed, like Covington had earlier in the day, with a rousing, though class-tinged, call for unity. “Here workers sit in this church,” Jackson intoned, “black and white together, bound by this tragedy. We’ll either live together as brothers and sisters or perish apart as fools.”39

  Most everyone in the pews at Saint Peter knew that Mayor Covington and other city officials had blocked Jackson from speaking at the “official” City Lake service. They also knew that this wasn’t the head of the Rainbow Coalition’s first visit to Hamlet. A week or so after the fire, he went to see injured Imperial workers at the Carolina Medical Center in Charlotte. From there, he traveled two hours east to meet with families, clergy, and city officials from both Hamlet and Dobbins Heights.40

  Mayor Abbie Covington knew that Jackson could be a polarizing force, especially in the white community. “I don’t want people to get upset,” she said about his initial visit to Hamlet in the fall of 1991. Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed to join him that time for an assembly at a local school, a march down Main Street, and a visit to a pantry distributing food to Imperial families. Covington came away from the encounter with a bad impression of Jackson. She felt like he came to Hamlet to exploit the town’s tragedy for his own public relations gain, a common reading of the itinerant activist and “parachute politician” both locally and nationally in the 1990s.41 “Jesse Jackson,” Covington remarked years later, “came down, handed out baskets, got his picture taken, and left.” From there, the relationship between Covington and Jackson soured. Undoubtedly, the hardworking and civic-minded mayor, who felt the losses at Imperial in her own deep and personal way, didn’t like it when Jackson, while weighing another run at the presidency, told crowds around the country, “We have to go to Hamlet.” He was using the town she represented and the tragedy that had taken place there as examples of callous neglect in his rallying cry against deregulation and union busting. Jackson even compared town leaders to “slave masters.”42

  More than anything, though, Covington blamed Jackson for injecting race into the legacy of the fire, a place, she said, it didn’t belong. After all, Covington would say, more than half of the fire victims, thirteen out of the twenty-five, were white. The mayor wasn’t alone in blaming the civil rights leader for fueling racial tensions in Hamlet. Martha Barr agreed, saying that Jackson “caused a great alienation that never had to exist.” “When Jesse Jackson came to town,” Ruth DeRosa remembers, with a hint of apology, mentioning her own liberal politics, “it got worse.” Instead of bringing people together, his visits, she thought, stirred up suspicions and tensions. Jackson’s presence in town terrified some whites, another health care provider recalled. A few feared that he would rouse their black neighbors and stir a second race riot in town.43

  Months later, when local African American leaders asked Mayor Covington to include Jackson in Hamlet’s official one-year commemoration of the fire, she wouldn’t hear of it. “Several . . . individuals were anxious to have him speak,” Covington remembered. “We didn’t feel it was appropriate.” “We wanted,” she said, “to keep it on the plane of community healing.” Hamlet’s all-white city council backed her up and voted not to invite Jackson to appear at the memorial service. City manager Lee Matthews said, “Mr. Jackson stood for political forces, organized labor forces, and we didn’t want it to be a political rally.” Covington agreed, telling a reporter that Jackson would inject “politics” into the event, but mostly, she said, “It was our tragedy.”44

  That wasn’t how the overwhelmingly black crowd crammed into Saint Peter in South Hamlet saw it. Some whispered that Reverend Harold Miller, the black preacher who participated in the official ceremony at City Lake, had “sold out his people.”45 Others spoke up loud and clear. �
��Why,” fire survivor Conester Williams fumed, “should anybody try to take away our freedom of speech?” “When the smoke cleared,” Sam Breeden observed, “it was ‘that’ group versus ‘this’ group.” Ada Blanchard thought that the two memorial services revealed quite clearly the “separation here in this city between the citizens and the mayor.” Covington never sought, Blanchard believed, “our input.” Her friend and co-worker, Annette Zimmerman, agreed. “They should have been thinking about us, not Jesse Jackson,” she maintained, “He was leaving, we were still here.”46

  The racial divisions on display that day, Zimmerman said, weren’t new. Rather, they reflected the racial divide that had always existed in Richmond County. The lines of separation were just “more visible,” she noted, one year after the fire, and they would remain in full view, Zimmerman insisted, for years to come.47

  At both of the memorial services on the one-year anniversary of the fire, co-workers who hadn’t seen each for a while asked about their kids and spouses, sore backs, seared lungs, and everyday anxieties and struggles. But, as one news reporter overheard, mostly they talked about the “the progress of lawsuits that have been filed on their behalf.”48

  That’s what Ruth DeRosa and her team of trauma researchers heard as well—unending talk of attorneys, lawsuits, and settlements. Behind this talk was something deeper.

  “There was so much anger,” recalled child and adolescent psychiatrist Lisa Amaya-Jackson, who worked with DeRosa. She wasn’t surprised by this emotion. The books on her shelves and the articles in the file cabinet at her UNC office taught her that when humans cause trauma through neglect or malice or even by accident, those left dealing with the consequences often feel anger, dismay, and rage. In response, they tend to formulate “revenge fantasies.” “The victim can feel good,” explains another trauma expert, “by planning vengeance and may experience pleasure at imagining the suffering of the target and pride at being on the side of some spiritual primal justice.” Imperial survivors certainly experienced a similar rush of feelings. Maybe that was why a few people vandalized the plant and others spray-painted “KILLERS DIE, 25 LIVES” across the walls of the abandoned offices. Or maybe that explains the behavior of the son of one of the fire victims. Police found him one night standing in front of a Rockingham store holding a can of gasoline and a lighter. Down the street, two other businesses were in flames.49

  As Amaya-Jackson remembers it, many of the Imperial victims were “focused . . . on revenge against the Roes.” While some shared their “revenge fantasies” about hurting the owners, sending them to prison, and making them feel the kind of pain that they themselves had felt, most looked not for actual physical vengeance, but rather for some sort of moral justice. When they did, they looked largely to the courts to provide it, opting for litigation over legislation as the prime form of redress.50 They wanted the Roes to pay—that’s the word they used—for what they had done. They wanted them behind bars. And given how much, in the eyes of workers and their families, Emmett and Brad Roe seemed to care, to the point of obsession, about making money and “getting out the product,” they wanted them to feel it financially.51

  Clinical psychologist Juesta Caddell would come back from her interviews with Imperial workers and tell her colleague, Amaya-Jackson, what she heard in the field. With strained and edgy voices, victims and family members would say, “When I get my money, that’s when justice will be served.” “We’ll get justice,” another said, “in the courts.” “They will pay,” another added, “and then they will have nothing.” Once they saw the Roes carted off to prison in handcuffs, once they got a check signed by the Roes (at least symbolically), then, and only then, some victims believed would justice be done. With it, many hoped, would come an end to the nightmares, flashbacks, jitters, and fears.52

  Faith—faith in God and community as well as faith in justice, legal justice—sustained many in the years after the fire. But this faith in the courts had a dangerous side effect. If, as Amaya-Jackson worried at the time, the trials got delayed or clients didn’t completely understand or believe their lawyers, or if the sentences handed down by judges didn’t seem to fit the crime, the trauma for fire survivors and family members could get worse.53 More distrust of officials. More sleepless nights. More racing hearts and cold sweats. More reckless spending. More need for pills and booze to dull the pain. More revenge fantasies. And a greater and more pressing need to do something to stop the voices in their heads and the pain in their hearts.

  As early as September 11, 1991, representatives from the district attorney’s office that covered Richmond County told reporters that they were considering filing serious charges against Emmett and Brad Roe and several others. At one point, the state labor commissioner, John Brooks, urged prosecutors to seek murder charges against the owners. The labor and activist group Black Workers for Justice, which began to organize in Hamlet after the fire, issued its own call to arrest Emmett Roe and put him on trial for murder. Then for months there was no word from the DA’s office. Finally, in March 1992, it was announced that a grand jury had handed down indictments on twenty-five counts of involuntary manslaughter to Emmett Roe, Brad Roe, and James Hair. District Attorney Carroll Lowder explained to the press, somewhat vaguely, the thinking in his office. “The evidence is all about workplace safety,” he said. “That’s what the evidence supports in my opinion.” Each charge carried a maximum sentence of ten years.54

  Some Imperial workers and their families grumbled about the “involuntary” label. Others did the math and calculated that the Roes and Hair could each serve 250 years in prison—life and then some. To a number of them, this seemed “just.”55

  Emmett Roe hired Joseph B. Cheshire V to represent him. Many considered the forty-four-year-old Raleigh man to be the best criminal defense attorney in the entire state of North Carolina. Willing to fight like a “cornered dog” for his clients, he didn’t know at first what sort of case he had with Roe.56 For months on end, the press had pounded the factory owner. Story after story talked about the broken lives of Imperial workers and the locked doors that plunged the rural community into grief. Still, Cheshire knew that the key to a murder case in a small town in North Carolina was not so much what the newspapers and television reports said but what the prosecutor thought. If the district attorney valued the lives of the victims, Cheshire had learned over the years, then he stood at a distinct disadvantage. But, if he didn’t, there was room to make a deal, and that sort of negotiation was another of Cheshire’s talents as a lawyer. A profile in the Raleigh News and Observer, in fact, called the curly-haired, not quite buttoned-down Groton prep school graduate “The Deal Maker.”

  To get a sense of what would be on the table in Roe’s case, Cheshire drove south from the capital to Matthews in 1992 to the offices of Carroll Lowder, the DA for the district covering Hamlet and Rockingham and several surrounding counties. Short, stout, and balding, Lowder, first elected in 1971, had built a reputation over the years as someone who could sway juries and put people behind bars. As a local reporter noted, he rarely “lost.” He also had a reputation as a “good old boy.” This meant that he talked with a southern accent and could glide through the courthouse crowd of lawyers, clerks, and law enforcement officers telling jokes and slapping backs. But in this case, it also carried with it, it seems, some troubling echoes of the region’s painful racial history.57

  A few years after the Imperial fire, the ACLU filed a motion on behalf of a black man charged with murder in Lowder’s district. Research by the liberal organization uncovered some disquieting patterns. In this white-majority area, fifteen men had in recent years been given the death penalty. All but one of them was African American, and all too often they were convicted by all-white juries. On the other hand, they discovered that Lowder’s office regularly extended non-capital plea bargains to defendants in cases involving black victims while insisting on capital penalties in white victims’ cases. Digging for more evidence, the ACLU looked into the
case of David Junior Brown, a black man convicted in Lowder’s jurisdiction of murdering a white woman and her daughter. He was sentenced to death. In the trial notes, they found a piece of paper with the word “nigger” scrawled across it.58

  When Cheshire got to Lowder’s office, they talked for a few minutes about the weather and people they knew in common. As the conversation turned to Emmett Roe’s case, the defense lawyer pretty quickly figured out where things stood. They didn’t discuss much about the charges of neglect against his client or the 2,500 pages of evidence on the fire complied by the State Bureau of Investigation. Cheshire remembers Lowder, instead, talking about stolen chickens. “That’s what these people do,” he recalled him saying. Finishing his thoughts on the character of the men and women who worked at Imperial and died there, Lowder added, again according to Cheshire, “They were just a bunch of low-down black folks anyway.”59

  Cheshire got back in his car and headed home to Raleigh, knowing that the DA clearly didn’t value the victims in the case and that there was a good chance he could strike a deal for Roe that would keep him away from a jury trial and lifelong prison sentence. “Sometimes beneficial plea offers fell in your lap,” Cheshire said years later, “and you could not say, ‘I am not going to accept that gift for my client because of your bigotry,’ you accepted it and moved on.” That, Cheshire added, “is one of the conundrums of the criminal defense lawyer.”60 In September 1992, a little more than a year after the fire, the New York Times announced “a surprise plea agreement” in the Imperial case.61