By Hands Now Known, page 30
102“to reside within the areas described”: For the Code of the City of Bessemer 1954, see S. Jonathan Bass, He Calls Me by Lightning: The Life of Calif Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty (New York: Liveright, 2017), 365.
102watermelon and reduced prison time: Chas. S. Johnson, “Southern Race Relations Conference,” Journal of Negro Education 12, no. 1 (Winter 1943): 133–139.
103“former or present Klan members”: FBI File 44-95, Mar. 3, 1946; DOJ Litigation Case File, 144-1-30.
103commonplace in Bessemer: Bass, He Calls Me by Lightning, 28, 56–57, 61.
105Weeks hollered: DOJ Litigation Case File, 144-1-30.
105“All of you damn niggers, leave here”: Ibid.
106a Bessemer army investigator: DOJ Litigation Case File, 144-1-30; “Birmingham Veterans Demand the Ballot,” Chicago Defender, Feb. 2, 1946.
106response from federal authorities: “1200 at NAACP Meeting Ask U.S. to Probe Killing of Marine,” Baltimore Afro-American, Mar. 24, 1946.
106not the federal government: DOJ Litigation Case File, 144-1-30.
107civic leader across the South: On the Caliph Washington case, see Bass, He Calls Me by Lightning.
12. DOUBLE V ON THE BUS
108“as well as Hitlerism without”: “The Barometer of Negro Thought …,” Crisis, Dec. 8, 1947; “Industry’s Failure to Use Negro Labor Held Glaring Obstacle to U.S. Defense Program,” Cleveland Call and Post, June 21, 1941.
109“resulted in some minor racial conflicts”: Federal investigator, quoted in Pete Daniels, “Going Among Strangers: Southern Reactions to World War II,” Journal of American History 77, no. 3 (Dec. 1990): 886–911, 905. Daniels also discusses bus problems in Mobile and Pascagoula (see “Some Problems of the Negro in Mobile,” Oct. 8, 1942, Records of the Division of Program Surveys, Project Files, 1940–1946, Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics; “Pascagoula, Mississippi,” Box 80, Pascagoula, Records of the Committee for Congested Production Areas).
110cost Spicely and Williams their lives: Quoted in Leslie Hossfeld, Race Folder, Governor J. Melville Broughton Papers, Box 82, North Carolina State Archives.
110“That happened all over the South”: Johnnie Stevens, 761st Tank Battalion, quoted in Lou Potter, with William Miles and Nina Rosenblum, Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992), 58.
111whereupon he whipped him: Records of US Army Service Forces (World War II), Fourth Service Command, RG 160, Box 70, File 291.2 (Negro Transportation File: Occurrence of Racial Incidents on Local Transportation Facilities), NARA.
111“side of the white man also”: Ibid.
111“down with a Tommy gun”: Ibid.
111his revolver on them: Ibid.
112terminated his military career: “Jackie Robinson Insubordination Charges, and Segregation on Military Post Bus,” NAACP Papers Part 9: Discrimination in the US Armed Forces, Series B: Armed Forces Legal Files, 1940–1950; Jules Tygiel, “The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson,” American Heritage 35, no. 5 (Aug.–Sept. 1984).
112to discipline the driver: Fourth Service Command RG 160, Box 70, File 291.2.
112“making a test case of some sort”: Dudley Magruder Jr., Special Agent SIC, Fourth Service Command to Officer in Charge, Aug. 4, 1944, ibid.
113“keep from becoming bitter”: “Black Soldiers’ Discrimination Complaints,” 1943, NAACP Papers, Part 09: Discrimination in the US Armed Forces, Series C: The Veterans Affairs Committee, 1940–1950; Thomas Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 202–203; “Put 8 Soldiers on Chain Gang in South Carolina,” New York Amsterdam News, Oct. 21, 1944; “NAACP Seeks GI Protection: Asks Stimson Support of Powell Travel Bill,” Pittsburgh Courier, Feb. 17, 1945.
13. THE DEPARTMENTS: WAR AND JUSTICE
115federal government and its contractors: Biddle to Stimson, Dec. 19, 1941, (citing Chiles v. Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, 218 US 71 (1910), and Mitchell v. United States, 313 US 80 (1941), Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Transportation Discrimination File, RG107, Box 252.
115travel was nominally desegregated: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 US 537 (1896); Morgan v. Virginia, 28 US 373 (1946). See also Bob-Lo-Excursion Company v. Michigan, 333 US 28 (1948).
115custody of Beaumont police: Beaumont Enterprise, July 28, Aug. 15, 1942; Houston Informer, Aug. 1, 1942.
116“result of his own misconduct”: DOJ RG 60, Box 579; Truman Gibson Jr. to Tom C. Clark, July 3, 1944, DOJ 144-3-9; Gibson with Huntley, Knocking Down Barriers.
116“without brutally killing him”: Irene Thomas to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Apr. 22, 1944, DOJ 144-3-9; Reverend S. R. Lee to Attorney General Francis Biddle, May 30, 1944, DOJ 144-3-9.
117Assistant Attorney General Tom Clark: Tom C. Clark to Albert J. Truly, May 20, 1944, DOJ 144-3-9.
117a civil rights violation: Quoted in Attorney General Francis Biddle to Eleanor Roosevelt, May 17, 1944, DOJ 144-33-14; DOJ Litigation Case Files 144-2-6; DOJ 144-33-14; DOJ 144-33-15.
14. THE “NEGRO TRANSPORTATION” FILE
118“to drop them again”: Jonathan Daniels to F.D.R., Nov. 24, 1942, OF 93 [Colored Matters], F.D.R. Library, quoted in Daniel Kryder, “American State.”
119“unnoticed in a white offender”: “Fort Bragg’s ‘Night of Terror’ Described,” Pittsburgh Courier, Aug. 16, 1941; Stacy Knopf to War Department, Racial Difficulties in Fourth Service Command, Washington, DC, May 30, 1942, File 291.2; Records of Fourth Service Command, RG 160, Box 69, NARA; Racial Situation: Tabulation of Racial Incidents, Dec. 31, 1945, RG 160, Box 69, File 291.2, NARA.
119incidents of a racial nature: War Department RG 107, Box 252, Transportation Discrimination File, 1941.
120“as he did, in the breast”: Fourth Service Command, RG 160, Box 70, File 291.2, NARA.
121for his impromptu protest: Harvey J. Reid, Sept. 1, 1944, War Department RG 107, Box 252, Transportation Discrimination File, NARA.
15. RECONSTRUCTION STATUTES, JIM CROW RULES
126“the vengeance of the law”: Amos Akerman, quoted in Robert J. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 66.
126their race or color: Exclusion of jurors on account of race or color, 18 U.S.C. § 243 (1948).
126peonage or involuntary servitude: Civil actions against the United States and agencies and officers thereof, 28 U.S.C. § 1581, 1583, 1584 (1930).
126federal criminal law enforcement: Judicial treatment of Sections 51 and 52 is addressed in Part 4.
127“put in the constitution at all?”: Quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 455.
128virtually every case it tried: Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871–1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 49, 100. See also Foner, Reconstruction, 457–59.
128threat was significantly diminished: Richard V. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 110.
128as well as Sections 51 and 52: Charles Hamilton Houston Papers Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Box 163-25.
128taking on such a “local” matter: On the 1933 Tuscaloosa lynching case, see Kimberly Sharpe, Tuscaloosa 1933: A Summer of Violence, 2015, Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project paper (on file with author). See also J. Eugene Marans, The Struggle for Federal Anti-Lynching Legislation, 1933–1945 (Harvard Honors Thesis, Department of History, Harvard College, Mar. 1962). The department’s position would shift in 1940, when CRS issued its first set of guidelines to the attorneys responsible for enforcing federal civil rights law. The policy has been interpreted as confirming that Section 52 protects a “federal right not to be lynched.” “Should the jailer … turn over the keys to the lynchers … the official’s failure to protect amounts to discriminatory action in unleashing unlawful forces as a direct consequence of his unique position as an official, and both he and the private parties appear subject to Federal prosecution” (1940 Policy Circular).
129Civil Rights Section in 1941: The Civil Liberties Unit was renamed the Civil Rights Section in 1941, and in 1957 it became the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. I refer to the entity as the Civil Rights Section, or section, or CRS here.
16. “HER HIPS LOOKED LIKE BATTERED LIVER”: TUSKEGEE IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
131with the fan belt from a car: Investigative Report, Dec. 23, 1942, DOJ Litigation Case File 144-2-3. The case is described in Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 44–58; and Silvan Niedermeier, Violence, Visibility, and the Investigation of Police Torture in the American South, 1940–1955, Violence and Visibility in Modern History, eds. Jurgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
131and a fractured skull: Interview with Rhetonia Chisolm, Tuskegee, AL, June 9, 2017 (interviewer: Margaret Russell) (on file with author).
132Readie Glenn Huguley: United States v. Edwin Eugene Evans and Henry Franklin Faucett, Case Nos. 1297 and 1299, Eastern Division Middle District of Alabama, 1943, Grand Jury testimony.
132fatal assault on Gunn: Norrell, supra., 53–54; “Witnesses to Slaying Won’t Talk,” Chicago Defender, Aug. 1, 1942.
133“future than they had ever given”: FBI interview with Chief of Police C. H. Thrasher, Dec. 23, 1942, DOJ Litigation Case File 144-2-3.
134back up in a sweltering cell: Lillie Mae Hendon statement, Dec. 23, 1942, DOJ 144-2-3.
134“her hips looked like battered liver”: Ibid, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, 54.
134disparage her as sexually loose: Ibid.; “Jury Frees 2 Ala. Police in Beatings,” Chicago Defender, July 1, 1943.
134against the state’s witnesses: “Jury Acquits Macon Sheriff and His Deputy,” Atlanta Daily World, June 26, 1943.
134Macon County’s sheriff until 1950: Ibid.; Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, 54, 75–76.
134the killers of a Black man: Mitchell v. Wright, 69 F. 2d 924 (5th Cir. Ala. 1946).
135discriminated against Black voters: Sellers v. Wilson, 123 F. Supp. 917 (D. Ala. 1954).
17. “A LITTLE QUICK ON THE TRIGGER”: UNION SPRINGS IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
136so they banished him: Interview, Whiley Thomas, Montgomery, AL, Oct. 25, 2012 (interviewer: Bayliss Fiddiman) (on file with author).
137and kept on shooting: Statement of C. A. May, Feb. 12, 1946, FBI 44-HQ-1324-5.
138“son of a bitch on the street”: Ibid.
138never reside in Union Springs again: Statement of Rev. J. L. Pinckney, Oct. 30, 1945, NAACP Papers, Box II B117, Folder 14, Legal File, Police Brutality; Report of Kenneth C. Kennedy, Southern Negro Youth Congress (undated).
138pronounced dead on the scene: Statement of Ada Hightower, Donahoo Field Report, Oct. 13, 1945, FBI 44-HQ-1324, DOJ Litigation Case File 144-2-15.
138“too quick on the trigger”: Donahoo Field Report, Feb. 12, 1946, ibid.
139address Bradley’s “reign of terror”: Louis Burnham to Mayor C. A. May, Dec. 31, 1945, Southern Negro Youth Congress Files, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Library; DOJ Litigation Case File 144-18-39; DOJ Litigation Case File 144-2-15.
139Washington followed his lead: Theron L. Caudle to J. Edgar Hoover, June 20, 1946, DOJ Litigation Case File144-2-15.
18. “THE TESTIMONY … OF THE NEGROES SEEMS MORE PROBABLE”: TUSKEGEE IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
141and threw it at Elijah: Kirby quoted in Donahoo Field Report, June 17–20, 1946, DOJ Litigation Case File 144-2-17.
142would see her two sons again: Report of Henry A. Donahoo, June 21, 1946, DOJ Litigation Case File 144-2-17.
142requesting an aggressive investigation: Thurgood Marshall to Turner L. Smith, May 8, 1946, DOJ Litigation Case File 144-2-17.
143Kirby told the FBI: Interview, Eddie James Ray, Nov. 20, 2014 (interviewer: Quinn Rollins) (on file with author).
143“extremely shy and inarticulate”: Henry A. Donahoo, Donahoo Field Report, June 17–20, 1946, DOJ 144-2-17.
144without a grand jury: Theron Caudle to Edward B. Parker, Jul. 30, 1946, DOJ 144-2-17. An offense under Section 52 was punishable by a sentence of only one year’s imprisonment, which meant the case could be prosecuted on an Information rather than an indictment.
144“this matter should be closed”: Edward B. Parker to Theron Caudle, Oct. 17, 1946, DOJ 144-2-17.
144closed in November 1946: Parker’s resistance—Undated memo to file, ibid.; file closed, Theron Caudle to E. Burns Parker, Nov. 15, 1946, ibid.
145sheriff who killed William Lockwood: Theron Caudle to Robert L. Carter, June 24, 1947, ibid.
145“wanton killing by police officers”: Thurgood Marshall to Theron Caudle, July 3, 1947, ibid.
145the Screws case: The Screws case, Screws v. United States, 325 US 91, 1945, is discussed in Chapter 4.
145what tipped the scales: T. Vincent Quinn to Thurgood Marshall, July 25, 1947, DOJ 144-2-17.
146“X—will not go on anything”: Steven F. Lawson, To Secure These Rights: Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1947), 122.
146“violations will not be prosecuted”: DOJ 144-2-17, Nov. 30, 1948.
146talked about the tragedy: Quinn Kareem Rallins, The William Lockwood Case: A Legal History, Civil Rights & Restorative Justice, Fall 2017, on file with author.
19. “HEAD … SOFT AS A PIECE OF COTTON”: LAFAYETTE IN THE MIDDLE DISTRICT
149“judge in New York or Michigan”: “Two LaFayette Officers Freed: Courtroom Greets Verdict with Cheers,” Alabama Journal, Mar. 23, 1950.
149“permitted to remain on the force”: “LaFayette’s Unfavorable Publicity,” LaFayette Sun, Mar. 29, 1950.
150“vicious and dangerous men?”: “Police and Their Prisoners,” Birmingham News, Mar. 24, 1950.
150right after the acquittal: Memorandum, James M. McInerney to J. Edgar Hoover, Mar. 13, 1950, FBI File 44-3012.
151conduct a vigorous investigation: Memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to James M. McInerney, Apr. 6, 1950, ibid.
151“to punish a person”: US v. Clark, No. 1744-E, Middle District of Alabama, Trial Tr., 138–139, Oct. 31, 1950 (on file with author).
151sentence of ten months: Clark v. United States, 193 F.2d 294 (5th Cir. 1951).
152from pursuing a civil case: Interview, Leslie J. King, Jan. 14, 2013 (interviewer: Tasha Kates) (on file with author).
20. “NONE OF WASHINGTON’S BUSINESS”
153“Nation’s history and its future”: Younger v. Harris, 401 US 37 (1971).
154control over Black communities: For the relationship between small-town police departments and sheriffs, see Toby Moore, “Race and the County Sheriff in the American South,” International Social Science Review 72, no. 1/2 (1997): 50–61.
156“in American legal history”: Frank Murphy to Franklin Roosevelt, July 7, 1939, Justice Department Files, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.
156“organized to protect civil liberties”: Frances Biddle, In Brief Authority (Atlanta: Greenwood Publication Group, 1976), 154.
157“respect to a particular type of case”: Federal Criminal Jurisdiction over Violations of Civil Liberties, Memorandum with Circular No. 3356 (Supplement No. 1) from O. John Rogge, Assistant Attorney General, to All United States Attorneys, May 21, 1940.
157murky “constitutional issues”: Ibid.
157“state and local governments”: Proceedings of the Federal-State Conference on Law Enforcement Problems of National Defense, Great Hall, Department of Justice, Washington, DC, Aug. 5, 1940, RHJP Box 40.
157“to alter their conduct”: Robert Carr, Federal Protection of Civil Rights (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947), 163.
159“no better friend than our District Judge”: Lawrence S. Camp to Henry Schweinhaut, Mar. 26, 1940, DOJ Litigation Case File, 144-19-5.
159defendant’s claim of good character: R. W. Martin to John Rogge, Sept. 4, 1940, DOJ Litigation Case File, 144-19-5.
159Hoover wrote to the CRS: John T. Elliff, “Aspects of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement: The Justice Department and the FBI, 1939–1964,” in Perspectives in American History: Volume V, 1971 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 609; Silvan Niedermeier, “Selective Public Outrage: The Quintar South Case,” in The Color of the Third Degree (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 120–121.
159violated Section 52: United States v. Sutherland, 37 F. Supp. 344 (1940). For a full account of the Sutherland case, see Elliff, “Aspects of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement.”
1591876 case United States v. Cruikshank: United States v. Cruikshank, 92 US 542 (1876).
159“It is secured by State laws”: Matthew F. McGuire to John Rogge, Sept. 30, 1940, DOJ Litigation Case File 144-19-5.
160Section 52 was “a little farfetched”: Alexander Holtzoff to James Rowe, Feb. 13, 1942, ibid.
160“to good race relations”: M. Neil Andrews to Francis Biddle, June 13, 1944, ibid.
161“for the prosecuting attorney”: J. Edgar Hoover, quoted in Lawson, To Secure These Rights, 124.
161and then go away: Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 368.
162unproductive “fishing expeditions”: J. Edgar Hoover to Tom Clarke, Sept. 12, 1946, DOJ 144-012; Hoover to Clark, Sept. 17, 1946, ibid.; Hoover to Clark, Oct. 2, 1946, ibid.
162walking the streets of Brownsville: Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The New Press, 2009).
162“the witness to tell the truth”: George Fisher, Evidence 1, 3rd. ed (New York: Foundation Press, 2009), 686.
162“cases of outright brutality”: Berge to Rowe, Mar. 3, 1942, DOJ Litigation Case File, 144-19-5.
