By Hands Now Known, page 4
Or so she hoped.
Edwards was likely more terrified than surprised when one chilly October evening in Detroit in 1928 a friend whispered to her that the local police wished to see her. Such a meeting could have only one purpose. Edwards was decidedly disinclined to reveal to Detroit’s chief detective exactly why she had abandoned Pensacola, so she holed herself up in her room. Detroit Chief Detective Edward H. Fox, who in fact knew the details of the alleged crimes that had turned Edwards into a fugitive, kept hunting her down, his appetite abetted by a tip and enticed by Pensacola’s $100 reward. When he finally discovered her whereabouts, without a warrant but with assurance that one executed under the authority of the governor of Florida would be forthcoming, Detective Fox made the arrest. “Arrest her and hold at any cost,” read the urgent wire to Fox from Pensacola’s police chief. “I’ll be responsible. When you get her I will send fugitive warrant.”
And so he did.
Moses S. Penton, a Pensacola sheriff, arrived in Detroit to recapture Edwards with the governor’s warrant in hand. He could be forgiven for thinking he would not be long delayed in the Motor City. Michigan laws on extradition were fairly straightforward: another state’s request for extradition was to be honored if the identity of the person named by the demanding state was established to the satisfaction of the receiving state’s decision-maker, whether that be the governor or a judicial officer. The laws appeared to leave little maneuvering room for the person named in the demanding state’s warrant. However, Edwards’s case was but another page in a nearly three-centuries-old unwritten legal tome on the subject of Black fugitives fleeing from the South to the North. If the Michigan governor believed it to be within his right to question the procedurally sound and seemingly routine application of a sister state for the return of a fugitive, it was on account of uncodified legal traditions that began long before Viola Edwards was born—indeed, decades before the adoption of the US Constitution in 1789. Even if the law “on the books” seemed cut-and-dried, historical experience had created a crawl space through which Edwards, and many hundreds of other Black Americans, could and did slip.
VIOLA EDWARDS, née Washington, was born in 1874 in Wetumpka, Alabama, one of two children of Charles and Bettie Washington. To the people of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation who named her hometown, Wetumpka translated to “rumbling waters,” evoking the sounds of the Coosa River spilling over the layered rocks known as the Devil’s Staircase.* Viola learned to read and write in Wetumpka, and served as a cook in a private home. She met William (Willy) H. Edwards, who was one of only six Black employees in the US Postal Service delivering by railroad to Wetumpka. On January 12, 1908, at thirty-four years of age, she married Edwards and moved to his home in Pensacola.
Willy Edwards, a Pensacola native, was a prosperous man from a prominent family. His first wife, Lodie, also apparently from a well-to-do Pensacola family, had passed away in 1906 after a freak accident: she was kicked in the stomach by a horse. When Lodie died, the couple’s three young children, Charles, Otis, and Alzata, were left in Willy’s care. Viola moved into the spacious home Willy had purchased in 1893 in Pensacola’s historically Black Belmont-DeVilliers district. He bought the house at a time of change for Blacks in Pensacola: in the 1880s, Blacks were relatively free from the economic and residential segregation that would begin to sequester and concentrate their communities in the first decade of twentieth century as the strictures of Jim Crow tightened. It was these new constraints that created on DeVilliers Street a typical Black “Wall Street,” much like larger cities such as Miami, Tulsa, and Durham, in a town where heretofore Blacks had operated businesses across the entire city.
Although Viola worked as a cook prior to her marriage, she had trained at Tuskegee Institute’s famous nursing school about forty miles from Wetumpka and would have been in one of the early graduating classes. In 1920 she worked and obtained further training in nursing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, likely gaining valuable experience. In 1924 she founded the first maternity hospital for African American women in Pensacola. The hospital was at 513 DeVilliers Street, next door to her home. Pensacola’s press announced the opening of the “Viola Edwards Hospital,” with her undertaking becoming an item of note in both the Black and white communities.
Viola Edwards, a nurse, opened an infirmary serving the Black community near her home in Pensacola, Florida, in 1922.
Applying the cooking skills she had honed in Alabama, Viola was also the proprietor of a restaurant, located near her home and new hospital. Her establishments contributed to the bustling Black commercial district on DeVilliers Street that served a rapidly growing community of native Pensacolians and Blacks migrating from rural Alabama and Florida. In the first decade of the century, when 50 percent of Pensacola’s total population of about 28,000 was Black, Tuskegee University’s president, Booker T. Washington, extolled the successes of its “progressive colored communities … [where] members of the Negro race are learning to do their own business and direct their own affairs.” Indeed, Willy Edwards’s achievement as one of the “six first-class clerks” was lauded in Washington’s essay, “Pensacola, A Typical Negro Business Community.”
IN AUGUST 1927, Eugene E. Tart, a white man, brought his white secretary, twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Friederichsen, to the Viola Edwards Hospital. She was pregnant; Tart was the father. Tart was a prominent—and married—businessman; Friederichsen herself was the daughter of a well-known businessman who had recently passed away, and whose memory was still fresh in the minds and hearts of a certain group of Pensacolians. At the hospital, an abortion was performed in accordance with the wishes of both Tart and Friederichsen. Tragically, the patient succumbed to septic infection, and she died on August 5 while in the care of Edwards’s hospital.
Five days later, Viola Edwards, Eugene Tart, and two Black doctors who had attended to Friederichsen, S. McGee and E. C. Moon, were charged with manslaughter in connection with her death. When the group was arrested, Tart was able to post the high bail of $5,000 while Edwards went to jail. McGee and Moon were held for two days until they could post bond. Six weeks later, the defendants, described in the local paper as “the three Negroes and Tart,” faced a jury in the Escambia County courts. Astonishingly, on September 23, the jury acquitted all of the defendants.
However, the jury’s verdict was just the start of Viola’s travails. She became the target of a vitriolic campaign, aimed as much at abortion and midwifery as it was at Black female entrepreneurship. At the close of the trial, the prosecutor had spelled out the theme that defined the post-verdict hysteria in Pensacola: “The state has unfolded before you chapter by chapter, this sordid, subterranean story that was going on up there while you and I were going about our daily tasks,” he proclaimed. “This story came to light when almighty God took a hand in the drama being enacted in the dusky hospital on DeVilliers Street.” Damned in one fell swoop was Pensacola’s Black “Wall Street,” deemed “subterranean” (turning on its head the history of Black exclusion from white business areas), and the practice of midwifery and abortion procedures, also “subterranean” (ignoring the historical discrimination against midwives by doctors who feared competition from people like Viola Edwards).
Many in Pensacola’s white community were enraged by the all-white jury’s seeming betrayal of their racial interests, and their sensibilities were even more bruised by the ecstatic response of Black Pensacolians who attended the trial. In the weeks that followed, the Sunday pulpits in the white community were fiery with condemnations of the jury’s proclaimed attack on “the majesty of the law,” one that “[protected] thieves of anarchy, ignorance, prejudice and bolshevism.” The newspapers joined the choir, with the Pensacola Journal pitying the plight of a “white girl fighting her greatest fight, [who] met it and lost it in the care of a group of Negroes.” These particular Negroes were the pillars of the community celebrated by Booker T. Washington and others like him, but to white Pensacolians of all classes, they were ne’er-do-wells and criminals.
So fanatical was the venom aimed at Viola Edwards after the acquittal, and, to a lesser degree, Eugene Tart, that the prosecutor quickly brought a second case. On October 21, he obtained a criminal complaint charging Edwards and Tart with manslaughter again, but this time the charge was based on the fetus. Around the time of the second complaint, the Viola Edwards Hospital at 513 DeVilliers Street went up in flames, as did the Edwards home next door, which had been in the proud possession of Willy Edwards for three decades.
Viola Edwards well understood that she could not risk another trial. She packed a few belongings, bade goodbye to her stepchildren and husband, and abandoned any hope of rebuilding her businesses in Pensacola. She fled first across the border to Wetumpka, Alabama, where she made certain her mother was in the care of relatives, and then proceeded northward. A sister-in-law in Detroit, she reasoned, could help her settle there until the scandal quieted down in Pensacola.
Eugene Tart, on the other hand, the man who had sought out abortion services for his mistress, had little cause to fear for his personal safety. The Sunday sermons lamenting Friederichsen’s fate demonized her female “abortionist,” not her married boyfriend. At the time of the first trial, “Dies Among Negroes” was the headline one newspaper ran, suggesting who was blameworthy and who was not. With good reason, Edwards ran because she believed she might be lynched. Tart, on the other hand, remained in Pensacola and relied on the courts to treat him fairly, which, when all was said and done, they did.
IN CONTRAST TO EDWARDS, Tart’s calculations about whether to flee or fight were probably not affected by a murder that filled the Pensacola headlines back in 1908—the same year Booker T. Washington’s uplifting study of Black progress in Pensacola was published, and the year of Willy and Viola’s marriage. In July of that year, about a mile from their home on DeVilliers Street, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, Leander Shaw, met his death at the hands of a Pensacola mob. Charged with a fatal sexual assault on Lillie Brewton Davis, a white woman, Shaw, a widower, was abducted on July 29 from a besieged sheriff who had warned a mob gathered at the county jail that was clearly intent on a revenge killing to stand down. “Gentlemen,” Sheriff James Van Pelt said, half pleading and half commanding, “here I am. You can kill me if you want to, but if you get my prisoner, it will be over my dead body. I have sworn to do my duty, and I am going to do it if I die for it.”
No one, it seems, heeded the warning. A mob of men and women numbering in the thousands battered down the gate of the county jail and fired shots on the defending deputies, seriously wounding three of them. While his men were defending the front of the jail, Sheriff Van Pelt rushed to hold down the back door. With the sheriff quickly overpowered, Shaw was noosed and trussed, then dragged through the town’s grand old Spanish boulevards until the crowd arrived at the historic Plaza Ferdinand VII.
Shaw was hung from an electric lamppost at the precise location where, in 1821, General Andrew Jackson pronounced new rulership of Spain’s former colony, thereafter to be known as the Florida Territory, and proclaimed Pensacola its capital. The plaza, named in 1815 after the king of Spain, had not quite commemorated its centennial when Shaw’s murderers desecrated its pristine European gardens by firing into his suspended body two thousand rounds of ammunition. Makeshift signs, presumably underscoring for those who may have missed the import of the bullet-infused corpse, were spread around the plaza, including one hanging from the body that read “God Bless Our Home.”
Half of the “home’s” population were, at that point, the children and grandchildren of slavery. Over the days that followed, white Pensacolians hoping to recover a memento from the lynching—a piece of the rope, a spent bullet, a postcard—roamed the plaza and surrounding streets, forcing Blacks living in the area to hide in their houses. It was rumored that unfortunate Black men caught off guard were for weeks thereafter beaten and murdered. Scores, if not hundreds, left town, to the perverse consternation of white businesses concerned about labor shortages.
The atmosphere—part carnival, part damnatio ad bestias—was memorialized by photographers whose images of Shaw’s hanging body were mailed around the country within days of his death. One resident, eighteen-year-old Edward Ware, sent a postcard depicting the lynching to a friend in Jacksonville on August 1, just three days after the event. “This is the nigger brute they hung in the Plaza July 29, and riddled him with bullets. Dock, how is this for Pensacolians?” he wrote with gusto and civic pride.
Viola Edwards would have been a thirty-four-year-old new bride and stepmother of three when her neat, house-proud neighborhood was deluged by the mob that lynched Leander Shaw. Nor, most probably, would Leander Shaw’s have been the only lynching haunting her as she contemplated her chances of obtaining fair treatment by Pensacola authorities in a second trial. In Wetumpka, Alabama, where Viola grew up, “nigger-killing” as sport had gotten so out of hand that in 1908 the local sheriff banished or sent to the chain gang a dozen white men who were known to have slain Black men indiscriminately in “defense of white womanhood.”
When Pensacolians discovered that Edwards had taken off before she could be retried, all hell broke loose. Though the FBI had not yet adopted its “Ten Most Wanted” program, Edwards became a sought-after national fugitive, due in no small part to the unrelenting campaign of the Pensacola police to capture her. A local grand jury pronounced that “the enormity of her crime is such that the cause of law and justice in this community will suffer if she is not brought to trial for her offenses, therefore we recommend that the governor … offer a reward of $500 [for information leading to her capture].” Notice of another reward of $100 and a detailed description of her were broadcast across the country. In her absence, investigations into her hospital were undertaken, and the anger in Pensacola spiraled when it was revealed that more than a dozen white women had sought abortions from Edwards and her staff. No price was too high, the Pensacola sheriff must have felt, to get Edwards back to Florida.
What Sheriff Penton could not possibly have expected was the solid support for Edwards that would come from every corner of Detroit’s Black community. When they learned of the arrest by Detective Fox, her friends in Detroit immediately alerted attorney W. Hayes McKinney. Born in 1877 in Coosa County, Alabama, to enslaved parents—his grandparents, both McKinneys, were the slaves of descendants of the Scottish slaveholder Harris McKinney—attorney McKinney knew well the beast of the Deep South. In 1920 the lawyer had waged a two-year battle to prevent the return of Tom Ray to Wilkinson County, Georgia.
Ray had killed his white employer in the summer of 1920 during an argument over unpaid wages. Eluding a posse for several days, Ray ended up in Detroit, only to be arrested a few months later in that city by a group that included the dead man’s brother, a Georgia sheriff, and Detroit police officers. McKinney met with Michigan governor Albert Sleeper and recounted for him the lynching record of Georgia. Upon receiving assurances from Georgia’s governor that Ray would be tried in a different county, Sleeper granted the warrant. About a week later, a group of armed Black men vowing to protect Ray from being kidnapped faced off with Georgia police and their white Detroit supporters.
Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, came to town and reminded Governor Sleeper that there had been 142 lynchings in Georgia since 1889, but the governer remained unconvinced. McKinney’s petition to the state courts also fell on deaf ears. The Michigan Supreme Court observed that it did not favor turning the state of Michigan into a haven for the “[m]urderers and criminal classes of the southern States.” As luck would have it, McKinney was able to present the matter to a new governor, Alexander Groesbeck, who would prove to be more sympathetic. The lawyer argued that there was strong evidence of self-defense that had been disregarded by prosecuting authorities in Georgia. But he also provided the governor with data on the history of lynching in Georgia. Governor Groesbeck was persuaded. He observed that “during the course of these proceedings it has been made to appear that there have been some one hundred and forty lynchings in that State.”
McKinney probably knew that Ray’s case was exceptional. Many northern governors perceived their role to be purely ministerial. However, appreciating as he did the growing influence in Michigan politics of Black voters and the power of organized labor, the lawyer may have also thought he could accomplish for Viola Edwards what he had done for Ray. With the help of the NAACP national office, McKinney amassed data on lynchings in Florida. It was chilling—195 persons were lynched from 1889 to 1918, of whom five, including Leander Shaw, were from Escambia County. McKinney encouraged Black civic and church organizations across Detroit to make their support for Edwards known to the next governor, Fred Green, who had just taken office. One minister, writing on behalf of “two thousand electors of northeast Detroit represented by the Pilgrim Baptist Church,” reminded the governor that “no justice will be given this lady in that part of the country.” Also urging Green to deny the warrant were the State Association of Colored Women and the Progressive Women’s Civic Association.
Governor Green, obviously impressed by the massive support from Black and white Michiganders alike, refused to extradite Edwards. His decision was front-page news in the Black press—“Michigan Governor Saves Woman from Florida Mob,” proclaimed the Chicago Defender. In Escambia County it came as a complete shock. Unlike Groesbeck’s message to Georgia in the Tom Ray case, Green stopped short of rebuking Florida. Rather, he observed that Viola Edwards had been tried and acquitted of virtually the same charge as that in the extradition warrant, and that returning her to Florida would entail unnecessary “hardship and expense.”
