By Hands Now Known, page 19
The deceased soldier’s mother, Ethel Davis, a widow, was not a timid person. Her son’s slaying transformed her into a tireless civil rights advocate. Prior to this tragedy, Ethel Davis worked as a maid for a white family in Summit; after her husband’s death, she was the sole source of support for the couple’s four children. Her employer, James Leonard Roundtree, was a state senator, having served six terms in the Georgia House of Representatives. In 2013, Roundtree’s grandson, Marvin Roundtree Cox, shared his memories of Mrs. Davis, who had taken care of him during his childhood summers in Summit. She was, he said, a strong-willed and brilliant woman who was singularly fixated on vindicating her son’s death.
Although Senator Roundtree’s family had lived in Emanuel County for generations (his grandfather, James A. Roundtree—a lieutenant in the Confederate army—gave the town of Summit its name and owned just short of 4,000 acres in the county), he was apparently powerless to assist Mrs. Davis with local authorities. According to Marvin Cox, the town’s white citizens allowed Bohannon to retain public office after the incident. Within three months of her son’s death, Ethel Davis moved out of Emanuel County. She would devote the remainder of her life to seeking justice in her son’s case.
The War Department typically did not vigorously investigate assaults on Black soldiers in the South by local police officials, leading civil rights advocates like William Hastie and Thurgood Marshall to complain bitterly. Within days of Davis’s death in July 1943, however, the department launched an investigation. While local authorities had unhesitatingly accepted Chief Bohannon’s claim that he shot Davis in self-defense, the army’s investigators were convinced that the killing was unjustified, and they urged the Justice Department to prosecute. Initially, an FBI agent based in Georgia, William Kimbrough, concluded, in effect, that the county authorities had reached the right conclusion; he reported that his “investigation reveals victim to be of a quarrelsome nature.” This would have meant the end of the road for any ordinary case in which a police officer claimed self-defense, but Tom Clark, then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, refused to close the file. He asked the Georgia-based agents to investigate further, because, he observed, “this is a case of the killing of a negro soldier, [and] I feel we should take special precautions to make sure we have received all relevant testimony.”
Willie Lee Davis was on furlough from the Army when he was killed by the police chief in Summit, Georgia. “I’m not your man, I’m Uncle Sam’s man [now],” Davis protested when the chief slapped him. Moments later, he was dead. His mother, Ethel Davis, devoted her life to vindicating her son’s murder.
On October 9, 1944—fifteen months after Davis was killed—the Department of Justice filed a criminal charge under Section 52 against Bohannon in the Southern District of Georgia. But Washington’s efforts to pursue the case continued to be thwarted in the state. The US Attorney for the district, J. Saxton Daniel, who served in that position for twenty years, wrote Clark that the case should be dropped because FBI agent Kimbrough’s evidence corroborated the defendant’s claim of self-defense. Now the assistant attorney general, Clark persevered without local support, and a trial date was set.
But the case never went forward. Once the US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the Screws case from Baker County, the Justice Department asked for a delay in the Davis matter, for that case, too, raised the question of what proof satisfied Section 52’s “willful intent” requirement. When the opinion came down in Screws, reversing the conviction in a case where the facts were arguably more favorable to the prosecution than in the Davis matter, the department dropped the criminal complaint against Police Chief Bohannon. Clark, by then just a month away from assuming the top position in the Justice Department under the new Truman administration, reasoned that although “[t]here was considerable evidence to lend color to the idea that the shooting was an act of discrimination against the Negro [Willie Davis] and not one of self-defense on the part of the policeman … we do not believe we could prove … specific intent.” In sum, racist police brutality was not actionable unless it could be proven that the brutality was performed with the intent to deprive the victim of a federally protected right—and the right to be free from racist violence was not a federally protected right.
After her son’s death, Ethel Davis moved to New York to be closer to Thurgood Marshall and others at the NAACP who were assisting her on the case. She wrote directly to Truman Gibson, an aide to the secretary of war; Eleanor Roosevelt; and Attorney General Clark about her son. In one of her letters, she reported that Police Chief Bohannon had beaten her and several other women in Summit. She expressed fear for the life of another son, who had followed in his brother’s footsteps and joined the army. She refused to abandon her campaign even after the federal case was dismissed. In July 1945, she received a letter at her home on Long Island from Archibald B. Lovett, the federal judge in Georgia to whom the case against Chief Bohannon had been assigned. Judge Lovett explained to “Dear Ethel” that the Department of Justice was not confident it could meet the test set forth in Screws, but that the county could still prosecute Bohannon for murder. Seeking, perhaps, to quell her repeated claims that race explained the federal authorities’ decision-making in her son’s case, the judge wrote, “[y]ou may be very sure that in this court the question of race or color had no influence upon the actions of the officers.”
In October, well after the Justice Department closed its file, Ethel Davis wrote to Attorney General Clark once again. Willie Davis, she wrote, had been shot to death “for no reason at all.” Of Bohannon, she noted that “he has beat us poor old Negroes…. it was cold blood murder … he was never about nothing … he has got some Negroes selling liquor for him … he is a crook and all know it.” And she reminded Clark that “you people know how the South is to Negroes. So I am asking the Supreme Court to please take it up again.”
THE CASES FOLLOWING Screws had to bend to its inscrutable rules—and also meet the high bar the department set as to the worthiness of the victim, the probity of the facts, and the extremity of the crime. A Florida case met that test. In a 1947 opinion, a federal appeals court judge waxed eloquently about the setting where a killing took place and the Stephen Foster minstrel song that made it famous: “The beautiful Suwannee River—the mention of which calls to memory a plaintive melody of strumming banjos, humming bees, childhood’s playful hours, a hut among the bushes, and a longing to go back to the place where the old folks stay—was the scene of the cruel and revolting crime that provoked the gesture of dealing out justice that is this case.” The defendant’s cruelty was visited upon Samuel McFadden, who was severely beaten and then forced to jump from a bridge into the Suwannee River by a town marshal named Tom Crews. McFadden’s body was pulled from the river by fishermen sometime later. The Justice Department won its case against Crews and—miraculously, it seemed—held on to the conviction after an appeal.
While a disproportionate number of the Justice Department’s police brutality cases addressed crimes against people of color, incidents involving white victims also reached the courts. In 1951, the Supreme Court took the opportunity to revisit its opinion in the Screws case in another Florida matter, Williams v. United States, this one involving four white workers beaten by a private detective and his associates, hired by their employer, in the course of an interrogation about thefts from the lumber company where they worked. The detective, flashing a badge, took the men to a shack at their workplace and with his associates beat them over the course of three days, using a rubber hose, a pistol, and a sash cord. The ordeal was graphically described in an opinion by Justice Douglas—the author of the court’s opinion in Screws. “One man was forced to look at a bright light for fifteen minutes; when he was blinded, he was repeatedly hit with a rubber hose and a sash cord and finally knocked to the floor. Another was knocked from a chair and hit in the stomach again and again. He was put back in the chair and the procedure was repeated. One was backed against the wall and jammed in the chest with a club. Each was beaten, threatened, and unmercifully punished for several hours until he confessed.” Federal prosecutors in Florida won convictions against some of the assailants on some of the charges. In an unusual exception to the court’s interpretations of Section 52, Justice Douglas affirmed the conviction.
Notwithstanding the surprising result in the Williams case, the high bar that Screws set alerted federal prosecutors and civil rights activists alike that the Supreme Court could not be relied upon to safeguard constitutional rights in the face of racialized police murder. Nor could federal statutory remedies or state reforms be expected. Organized protest and spontaneous uprisings continued across the South, even when—or especially when—legal claims were maddeningly unavailing. In the 1940s, these activities began to foster alternative theories of change, solidify national Black political consciousness, and spawn a deep cynicism about legal remedies and reform. Though some reforms were put in place—the advent of constitutional criminal procedures, for example—lawless law enforcement persisted. In the 1960s, that cynicism was at the heart of a political journey that would lead people to take to the streets in radical uprisings, North and South, against police violence.
PART V
BLACK PROTEST MATTERS
24
“Bad Birmingham”
While Thurgood Marshall and others appealed to the Justice Department to pressure local prosecutors to enforce the federal statutes addressing racial violence, communities across the country expressed their resistance in other ways. In the South, the practices of these resistance movements were grounded in the here and now of daily life, drawing upon concepts of mutuality and racial solidarity, and bringing together journalists, civic leaders, and creative voices. Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1940s—at the height of Jim Crow—was home to one such resistance movement.
The Birmingham civil rights movement that most people know is the famous one: Bull Connor’s dogs; jail cells stuffed to the rafters with demonstrating children; the lives and deaths of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair in their Sunday school shoes; the magnetic leadership of Fred Shuttlesworth; Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Television brought this story into American living rooms in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and with it, images of a tinderbox town peopled by Klansmen and their police allies on the one hand, and a determined freedom movement on the other. There is a backstory here, on both sides of this coin. Connor’s dogs were on a well-worn path when they attacked children in 1963, and the people rallying at the 16th Street Baptist Church that year were the near relations of those who had participated in protest demonstrations ever since the Great Depression brought Magic City to its knees.
Their stories matter, too, as does their protest, but time and neglect have taken their toll. Set against the mythical, defaming, and exhausting “Negro with knife” stories that filled the white newspapers of the 1940s, and marshaled against the slapdash lies casually tossed about by coroners, medical doctors, prosecutors, and judges—all of whom at one time in their lives submitted to a professional oath—were Black citizens in motion, people who risked their livelihoods and often their lives to create a movement that rivaled, in scope, ambition, and grit the well-known campaigns of the 1960s. It was a movement that circulated deep in the cultural crevices of Black life: it was what they read about in their “colored” newspapers, what they prayed over in church, what their blues were about, and what, in carefully chosen words, they passed on to their children. The organizing tools of these earlier Birmingham activists, yesteryear’s Black Lives Matter movement, would be familiar today: mass meetings, strikes, petitions, editorials, appeals to Washington, funerals that assuaged grief and swelled grievance, boycotts, lawsuits, and, too, flash street demonstrations where the fury and frustration of the city’s outcasts, people at the bottom, often exploded and overtook the efforts of preachers and professionals to channel and contain Black anger.
Like the threat of violence itself, resistance was ever-present. It was as individual as it was communal, as spontaneous as it was methodical: a veteran, having had enough, moves the color bar on a bus; thousands of miners, in a volatile rage, stage a wildcat strike; a father sues the police to vindicate the shooting death of his fifteen-year-old child. It was this resistance that reinforced both collectivity and identity, re-inscribing events otherwise seen as the accidental encounter between a random victim and perpetrator, and exposing the social order’s ubiquitous dependency on anti-Black violence. In Birmingham in the 1940s, a Black person—any Black person—could have been killed by a white person—any white person. And thus every Black person had to make peace with the burden and duty of resistance, reckon with premature death, determine their personal point of no return, and countenance the politics of Black revolt, whether or not they wanted to. Hence the resistance, in its content and continuity, stood as a commanding counterstructure, although each action might have appeared to be a singular blow against a single antagonist. As a cultural phenomenon, the resistance borrowed from and informed Black devotional practice, while its radical cognitive threads linked Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Mildred McAdory, the Birmingham native who marched on miners’ picket lines and got arrested for sitting in the front of the bus more than a decade before Rosa Parks did so.
A GOOD DEAL OF the violence in mid-twentieth century Birmingham reflected the battles between Black labor and the companies they worked for, a longstanding combat zone dating back to before the Depression that seems to have intensified at the end of World War II. By the early 1940s, beatings and abductions—arising both from labor disputes that targeted white and Black unionists alike and from the efforts of white workers to secure their racial advantage—were everyday affairs in the mills and mines around Birmingham, making it one of the most violent cities in the country. Putting aside the violence tied to labor organizing, Birmingham was a heartless town for working people, with volatile class and racial divides that could, at the snap of a finger, lead to a man’s death. In the 1930s, “Bad Birmingham” recorded the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country, with over 50 murders per 100,000 people. And in the fifties and early sixties, the town was dubbed Bombingham, so commonplace were the blasts that blew up homes and places of worship.* Bull Connor, the town’s infamous and long-serving commissioner of public safety, added fuel to these fires, adroitly manipulating the chauvinism and economic insecurities of whites to eviscerate the progressive politics and cross-racial labor solidarity that had begun to take root during the Depression years.
The Ku Klux Klan, which officially resurfaced in 1946, worked hand in hand with Connor to transform a region that could have been a center of southern progressivism into a hard-core antilabor, anti-Black town. Birmingham had always been a Klan town; in 1924, there were 18,000 Klansmen in a city of 200,000. But the Klan fell out of favor in the 1920s and ’30s, only to be revived by the racial tensions of the postwar era. By 1947, the Birmingham klaverns boasted 7,000 members. Two related factors contributed to the Klan’s revival in the mid-1940s: Black disenfranchisement thwarted, in one fell swoop, half of labor’s potential vote; and the managing white elites—the “Big Mules,” as Birmingham’s industrial and plantation tycoons were known, and their allies—convinced the white working class to choose white supremacy over economic empowerment. Not until the climactic Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965 did the Klan release its grip on Birmingham.
WHILE THE KLAN CLAIMED its victims, so, too, did the Birmingham police. In the decade between 1938 and 1948, only one year would pass without a police killing. Over these ten years, fifty-four Black men were slain by white police officers. Police killed one lone white man in that same period—in a city that was about 60 percent white and 40 percent Black. Women, Black and white, were spared until 1949, when a Black mother and her son were shot to death in their home. There are many accounts of the mid-twentieth-century protest movements that took on racist policing in cities like Detroit and New York, but these campaigns have not generally been associated with Birmingham and other southern cities. Black people rallied to rein in the police in urban centers across the South in the Jim Crow era, struggles that often served as the basis for campaigns around other political and economic issues. Assaults by the “law” were so endemic, normalized, senseless, and absurd that they brought Black people together despite their political or economic differences. A well-publicized police shooting caused people to take to the streets, tapping into the rage and trauma engendered by the daily slurs, the abusive language, the threats, the sexual taunts, the racial profiling, the jailhouse beatings, all of it criminalizing a community seeking to be seen as legitimate and worthy. What followed the gunshot or billy club was, on the one hand, an assault on truth, as the white perpetrators rallied around a contrived, shamelessly flimsy fig leaf of a justification and crashed through legal rules, and on the other, an attack on the reputation of the dead person and a terrorizing campaign to silence his family and supporters.
