Tommy Lee Hines and the Cullman Saga

By Bob Dart

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, pp. 12-15

Squatting in the marbled hallways, the wrinkled hangers-on, found in any country courthouse, chewed and digested the carryings-on that had descended upon their town.

“We’ve never had enough niggers in this county to amount to nothing anyway,” allowed one oldtimer. “And what we had, stayed in their place. Now this thing will get them stirred up and it won’t ever be the same here.”

In the paneled courtroom upstairs, a Black man with an IQ of 39 – the guile and wisdom of a six-year-old child – stood accused of raping a White woman. Up Highway 31 a piece, the Ku Klux Klan and Black civil rights marchers – both awakened by the case – had been eyeball to eyeball at the town’s city limits a few days earlier.

Now in the courthouse, the weathered old men in faded bib overalls and narrow lapeled suits sensed that no matter what the trial’s outcome, things would never be the same in Cullman. Southern justice was on trial here; an old and a new South were clashing once again.

But the winds of change never stirred a small, silent man upstairs. Tommy Lee Hines slumped in his chair as strangers dissected his life, debated his fate, and all the while looked beyond the textbook law case they were writing. The 26-year-old retarded Black man understood little of what was happening to him, his family and friends said. For what is history to a man who can’t remember the days of the week?

“He was seven before he ever talked,” his daddy recalled. “But he was always a good boy. Always minded. Anything you’d tell him to do, he’d try to do it. He never sassed me or his mama. I never heard him say a cuss word.”

Tommy has always been special, his family and neighbors recalled. “I always knew he was different from the rest of my children. I had nine boys and three girls, you know,” explained Richard Hines. “But he ain’t crazy. I’ll tell you that. He’s retarded; just different.”

Tommy Hines never attended public school as a boy, his neighbors said. There were no facilities for a “special” Black boy growing up in Decatur, Ala.

“Everybody knew Tommy,” said James Guster, a neighbor of the Hines family in the northwest side of town – the Black section. “When we’d see him, he’d always be with relatives. We never saw him by himself.”

So Tommy Hines grew up insulated from the outside world by a protective family. “You know, that boy has never been to a picture show in his life.. he don’t know a

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nickel from a quarter,” his father said. “I never let him out to play much. Bigger boys would try to hurt him. He got knocked down once trying to play football. I couldn’t let him get hurt.”

Tommy Hines was past 20 when he started to school. The Cherry Street School – a center f or retarded persons – opened in Decatur and he was enrolled. After a battery of tests, the center declared that Tommy Hines is trainable, with a moderate retardation level. He could learn to do some tasks but could never function in society by himself.

“The thing I remember about Tommy is his big smile when he told me ‘I go to the Newcomb Street Church of Christ and I was baptized by Brother Alphonso Robinson,’ said Joel Loftin, a state official who tested Hines. He said he was moved that the two of them – worlds apart in intellect – had been touched by the same faith.

Officials at the Cherry Street School testified that Hines attended regularly and caused no trouble. Rosemary Wright, the White secretary at the school, said she sometimes went alone with Tommy to pick up school lunches.

“He was always well-mannered and very quiet … well behaved. He was a gentleman.”

But in the courtroom, a White man and a White woman painted a different picture of Tommy Lee Hines.

Decatur Police Detective Doyle Ward testified that Hines had been picked up for questioning after being spotted in a neighborhood where he was a stranger. The official said he thought the young Black man matched the description a rape victim had given of her attacker.

Under gentle questioning, Ward said, Hines had confessed to three rapes and had led police to the scenes of the crimes.

“I went by the train station, and I saw a girl I knew who worked there … When she went to her car, I grabbed her, and she tried to get away . . .” Hines allegedly told the police. He reportedly supplied details of the sexual assault on a 21-year-old clerk at the railway station.

The victim in the case said her attacker had worn a plastic garbage bag over his head, like a bonnet, but had left his face uncovered. In court, she pointed out Tommy Lee Hines as that attacker.

A bevy of defense witnesses attacked these stories. His teachers and testers said Tommy Hines was incapable of relating the confession that Ward testified the retarded Black man had told in his own words. The language of the confession is much too sophisticated for Hines, the school officials said.

Others who knew him said Hines was frightened of “authority figures” and would likely admit to anything he thought they wanted to hear, just to please them.

Asked the question, “How many women did you rape, two or three?” Hines would pick one answer, just guessing to try to be right, a defense witness said.. He told the police “three.”

A trusty at the Decatur jail testified that Tommy Hines was crying and praying loudly the day he allegedly confessed, the day police said he talked calmly and lucidly to them.

Richard Hines testified the police “wouldn’t let me see my boy (after his arrest). They shut the door in my face …told me he (a policeman) didn’t have time to talk to me.”

But the prosecution stood unshaken; the woman said Tommy Hines raped her and a policeman had a confession he said Tommy Hines dictated and signed.

The verdict would come from an all-White jury, nine men and three women picked from the populace of Cullman County, Ala.

Most of Cullman County’s 52,000 residents would just as soon have had the Tommy Lee Hines trial stay in Morgan County, where the rape occurred on Feb. 16,1978. But a change of venue – a legal quirk -brought the case and an unsought notoriety to the rolling farmlands and sleepy county seat of Cullman.

“Folks in Cullman ain’t mad at Hines,” said a state trooper assigned to guard the courthouse. “They’re mad at that judge in Morgan County who sent his trial over here.”

Less than one percent of Cullman County’s population is Black, and most of them live in an area outside of town known as The Colony. It’s a church-going county – not a legal drink to be brought within 50 miles – with a faded row of single-story storefronts lining Highway 31, the town’s main drag.

Cullman is a good place to live, its residents claim, and there had been little racial tension before the Hines trial arrived. “We have our coloreds in The Colony down there,” said one resident. “They’re treated as good as any Whites. They just stick to their business and we stick to ours. Their kids go to school with ours.”

“I’ve sold cars to the niggers around here for years, said another man. “They pay on time just like the White folks.” The White residents blamed a Black protest movement that took place in Decatur after Hines arrest for the move of the trial.

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“They (Blacks) never had any organization in Decatur before this,” a state trooper said. “But they seized on the case and used strong-arm tactics to organize. Then the Klan recruited for the first time in years. Tommy Hines is a scapegoat, caught between two radical factions. It’s really kind of pathetic.”

The “outside agitator” that northern Alabama Whites blamed for arousing the local Blacks is the Rev. Richard B. Cottonreader, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference project coordinator in the Hines case.

“I got involved when some local people put in a call to the national office,” Cottonreader recalled. “They wanted help so I was sent over here (from Gadsden, Ala.). I tried to arouse the community as best I know how.

“I don’t consider myself an outside agitator. I consider myself one of the best things that could have happened to Decatur at the time.” Cottonreader organized a long, hot summer of protests and confrontations with the KKK that thrust the Hines case into the national spotlight.

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish sometimes,” said Cottonreader, a slim man of 47 given to wearing denim outfits and a silver cross. “SCLC was needed here. We opened the eyes of the nation to the Tommy Lee Hines case. If we hadn’t been here, he would have been just one more Black on trial for rape.”

Indeed, the protests also awakened the long-slumbering Klan of northern Alabama. Once again burning crosses lit pastures and white-robed and hooded men spit out words of racial hatred.

Klan membership “skyrocketed” in Alabama, said KKK Kleagle Bill McGlocklin. “I look upon this as a rebirth of the Klan,” the Decatur service station owner said. He became an open Klan leader, he said, after reading that a Black organizer had said, “We’re going to get a piece of the pie in Decatur or there isn’t going to be any pie.”

The “Invisible Empire” of the KKK has changed, McGlocklin said. “It’s not like the old Klan. We don’t do any nightriding or burn churches. We’re into politics now. You can’t get anywhere with violence any more.”

“In four years,” he continued, “we want to grow so much that no one in Alabama politics – no county commissioner, state representative or governor – can be elected without the Klan’s endorsement.”

Blacks have organizations to represent them, McGlocklin countered, so Whites need one, too – the KKK. But he said most Klansmen carry guns and are still ready to act as vigilantes if they deem it necessary.” It’s like the T-shirt says. “If you want my gun, come take it.”

The Hines case produced a series of confrontations between the Klan and Black protesters: meetings that produced no violence but a lot of publicity. The confrontations climaxed on the opening day of Hines trial when robed Klansmen and other Whites met a group of Black marchers walking from Decatur at the Cullman city limits. Several of the Black marchers ended in jail.

Behind the protesters came a rash of rumors; tales the Klansmen and their sympathizers seized upon and embellished. “I know for a fact the Black Panthers are ready to come in,” a self-styled “Concerned Citizen” said outside the Cullman courthouse. “They’re staying at motels all over north Alabama, came from Atlanta, New York and Detroit. They get $32 a day expenses.”

The White men gathered each day under a pecan tree outside the courthouse and discussed how to handle the invasion of Black radicals they believed was coming. If

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Hines were convicted, they said, the Black groups had vowed to burn Cullman to the ground.

“The first one that strikes a match, his head comes off,” said one Cullmanite. “This is not Detroit. This is Cullman, Alabama.”

Across the courthouse parking lot from the tight knot of White men, young Black men and women from Decatur ate their lunch each day during a break in the trial of Hines, their neighbor. They, too, had heard rumors – of Klansmen ready to perform their own brand of justice on the young Black man. Two young Black men drove Hines to and from trial each day and stayed near him, calling themselves his bodyguards.

“We ain’t the same folk the Klan scared 20 years ago,” a woman in an Afro observed. “They’re dealing with a new Black man and woman.”

In northern Alabama, the Tommy Lee Hines case had awakened a racial confrontation that many felt had been put to sleep forever in the violent 60s. A veteran of 16 years with “the Movement,” Cottonreader said “Alabama appears to have changed a bit on the surface, but only on the surface. Racism,” he explained, “has gone underground.”

He said that once he moved in to work on the Hines case, he found other changes that were needed. “Alabama’s changing, but Decatur is more behind than the average town,” he said. “Tommy Hines was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I believe that Tommy Hines is a special person chosen by God to bear a cross for the Black people of Decatur.”

Sitting silently in the courtroom in a tan leisure suit, Tommy Lee Hines slumped uncomfortably, his dark eyes darted around toward the unfamiliar faces. Friends said he was unaware of what was going on; unknowing of the racial and legal turmoil his situation had caused.

“Hell, sometimes he doesn’t even know who I am,” said Harry Mims, one of Hines’ attorneys. He said his client hadn’t been able to help his defense at all.

The courtroom drama winds slowly down. The trial takes two weeks and the expected violent Black-White confrontation never comes.

The case boils down to whom the jury believes. A White woman says Tommy Lee Hines raped her. A White policeman says the young Black man confessed to the crime. Hines’ teachers, family, friends and state psychologists say he is retarded, incapable of committing such a crime. Tommy Hines himself says nothing.

Prosecutor Mike Moebes says Hines’ mental abilities are not the issue. “Retardation is not a defense,” he said.

The all-White jury deliberates for three hours before returning a verdict: Guilty.

Judge Jack Riley sentences Tommy Lee Hines to 30 years in prison and congratulates Moebes for doing a “tremendous job.”

Hines’ attorneys vow to appeal. Newsmen are ready to file their final story on the Hines case, eager to get on with the next assignment. Then judge Riley asks Hines if be has anything to say.

No, sir,” mumbles the small man. No one knows for sure what Tommy Lee Hines thought then, as state troopers led him to a car and jail. The “special” boy his family had sought to protect, the man with the mind of a six-year-old child, the man “with a cross to bear,” the convicted rapist – simply gazed mindlessly ahead.

Bob Dart is a staff writer for the Atlanta Constitution.

Human Rights: From the South to South Africa”

By Wallace Terry

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 9-13

I was profoundly affected by what I saw on the battlefields in Viet Nam from 1967 to 1969, particularly the outrageously racist behavior of White troops towards Blacks. I knew that most Blacks would receive far too little at home for the blood they spilled abroad. So with the kind and generous assistance of Leslie Dunbar and our friends at the Field Foundation and the Center for National Security Studies, I have spent the last few years recording and writing the Black GI’s story. It seems a small way to salute them.

From units all over the country and at any given moment, Black soldiers would meet to log their experiences with discrimination. From them I learned of our American sailors burning crosses at Cam Ranh Bay; wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes at the Navy base in Cua Viet; writing graffiti on the walls of latrines: “I wouldn’t compare a gook to a nigger.” Blacks were refused rides. They were held back in promotion. And if they became too militant, White officers shipped them to the DMZ where they were more likely to be killed in action. In effect, there were two wars in Viet Nam. And as the war against the Vietnamese wound down, the race war between Black and White Americans spread.

Investigating these racial incidents, of course, made me very unpopular with the commands. Indeed, I think the Marines once tried to eliminate me. When a Marine chopper dropped me into a field, there was no one on the ground to meet me. And the chopper did not return to pick me up in this very hot zone. My escort, a White major, was, ironically, of no real use. He was from North Carolina, and always wanted me to pose in pictures with him, because he planned to run for sheriff back home. The pictures, he said, would help him get the “colored vote.” Perhaps he had his eye on the White House, too. Anyway, I later learned that he was considered a roustabout, a troublemaker, so the Marines probably considered him expendable as well.

Racism, of course, is not the private preserve of White people. In my travels I’ve had my eyes opened to the fact that some Asians don’t like other Asians; that there are Black people killing other Black people in places called Uganda, Eritrea and Zimbabwe. Tribes in the same African country hate each other. And in Lebanon, a very beautiful country is being destroyed, because there are Arabs who cannot live in peace with other Arabs. Yet, there seems to he no more arrogant form of racism than the racism based upon color and culture.

Once, I told a very liberal and politically prominent publisher of New Republic Magazine that I believed that the war in Viet Nam lasted so long and was so wrong because of our racism. The Vietnamese were transformed into objects. Lyndon Johnson called them “little brown people.” The armies he and Nixon sent to kill them called them dinks, slopes and zipperheads. Well, the publisher was dubious. How could I suggest that this war was racist, or anymore or less racist than any other? “After all,” he

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explained, “in World War II, we called the French ‘frogs.’ So, I see nothing wrong with calling them dinks over there.” But the French belong to his race and to his culture.

Have you ever noticed that whenever there is a change of government in a European nation, no one here doubts their ability to govern themselves? But, this is the first question we raise about a new African government and the new one in Iran.

Have you noticed, too, that we never consider ourselves racists or racist murderers although we have been killing Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese almost without interruption since the turn of the century? Yet, we call Idi Amin a “racist murderer.” And what race other than his own has he murdered? Idi Amin should simply be ignored and isolated. That means we should get the Americans out of Uganda and break diplomatic relations. Left to his own devices, he undoubtedly will kill more Ugandans. But, by robbing him of the world stage we have thrust him upon, there is a good chance that his macho impact on other Africans will diminish. In time, he may be done in at home by this very impotence. Our castigation simply makes him a champion of defiance of the White Western world to supporters inside and outside of Uganda. And he is likely to remain so as long as our magazines call him “the wild man of Africa” and our editorials demand his assassination.

And why, simply for the sake of a few dollars, do we insist upon lining up on the White racist side in South Africa? The Russians don’t. Frankly, I was impressed by Castro’s explanation for being in Angola. “We have an African heritage,” he explained. And that is a more convincing reason than America has for its presence in South Africa, which is helping to keep apartheid alive. If Henry Kissinger had had any respect for Black Africa or, for that matter, his fellow Black Americans, he could have made the same claim as Castro. After all, there are more people of African heritage in the United States than in all of the Caribbean.

You may also recall that Steven Biko accused this country of being the handmaiden of the tyrannical practices which led to his death since American investments in South Africa make the government stronger and the position of the struggling Blacks weaker. We should simply break all relations with South Africa until it frees its slaves, or, by whatever means necessary, the slaves free themselves.

Now the Arabs and the Persians earned Kissinger’s respect. They had the oil he wanted. That’s why the Arabs stopped being the butt of every dirty joke in Washington and Ardeshir Zahedi became the toast of Georgetown. But Ayatollah Khomeini emerged on our editorial pages as the world’s next boogey man, an Idi Amin in turban and flowing white beard who wants us to return to the glories of the Dark Ages. I confess. My sympathies for the moment lie with him. I cannot root for the Shah simply because he turned on the oil at our will and kept our arms merchants busy. The Shah was an arrogant autocrat who plundered his nations wealth. How many exdespots can fly off into exile piloting their own Boeing 707 and packing more money than a hundred Rockefellers? And what did he leave behind? Thousands jailed by Savak, his vicious secret police, and a nation whose social and economic fabric was shredded by uncontrolled growth and the co-consumption of the elite. But the American press gives no credit to Khomeini for pressing for the reforms we should have demanded from the Shah.

Meanwhile, I find myself in the awkward position of cheering the Hanoi takeover of Cambodia. For that seems to be the only way to stop the total destruction of a land as gentle as any I ever visited or learned to love. We have, of course, Nixon and his friend, Kissinger, to thank

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for that. When they chose to invade Cambodia in 1970, they turned this once peaceful land into a battlefield, and precipitated the events which led to the singularly barbaric behavior of the Khmer Rouge. After the corrupt Lon Nol regime was toppled, the genocidal Khmer Rouge took its place. We had missed the opportunity of reestablishing Sihanouk, an eccentric but benevolent dictator, on the simple grounds that his independence and neutrality had been guaranteed at Geneva. In the hands of the Khmer Rouge none was spared – the old, the women, the children. Cities were abandoned. Villages were razed. Hundreds of thousands were worked, beaten, starved or shot to death. A culture was obliterated, and your hands and mine are stained forever by Richard Nixon’s bloodiest legacy which may continue to claim even more lives.

As I perused the pages of The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice? I felt the same shudder I felt in the days of Kent State and Jackson State. Are we killing our own children again? Had he lived, young Horman seemed destined to join the ranks of The Best and The Brightest. After a brilliant career at Exeter and Harvard and service in the Air National Guard and the federal anti-poverty program, he ventured to Chile as a freelance writer. Apparently he inadvertently witnessed U.S. military and intelligence activity off the coast on the morning of the bloody coup d’etat. A few days later he was probably executed in the national stadium where thousands of detainees were beaten and tortured. The State Department says it could not establish a legal basis for attributing an international wrong to the Chilean government. Horman’s father believes otherwise. His son may have died because he knew too much, too much about American involvement in the establishment of a clearly fascist government. He has said, “I have lost trust in the statements, motives, and decency of our government.”

However many crosses we burned in Viet Nam, however many Klan costumes were worn or other insult to the Black G I, nothing still quite matched our behavior toward the Vietnamese, friend or foe.

There was the $50,000 John Deere plow we shipped to Qui Nhon without the spark plugs to start it up. So it became a public urinal where it was abandoned at the railroad station.

There were the free radios we supplied the farmers so

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that they would listen to our propaganda, which they didn’t. We tried to get their sets turned on by giving weather reports. That didn’t work, of course, because being farmers they had learned from their fathers exactly what the weather would be like the next day and the next. So we finally managed to gain their attention by announcing the next B-52 bombing strikes.

There were the women we stripped and searched for contraband before they entered our bases to clean out the hootches and do the laundry. A naval officer asked, ever so simply, “How do we win the hearts and minds by searching the vaginas?” Of course the same question could be asked of British immigration officials who are testing the virginity of Indian women and of Chicago police who are examining the genitals of women held on traffic charges.

There were the children in Viet Nam, some afflicted with leprosy, who were paid a few pennies by the Marines for every live round of ammunition, grenades and mortar rounds they found in the countryside.

There were the brave warriors of the First Cav Charley Blues who drank beer from the skulls of the Viet. Cong victims. A brother asked me, “How would you like it if someone was drankin’ out of your head?”

There was the woman with the gun, brought down with napalm. Although she was still alive, the Cav troopers stripped off her burning clothes and, using a round of machine gun ammunition like a nail, tacked their patch into her vagina. Another brother told me, “I just couldn’t eat when I saw that.”

There were the entire blocks of cities blown up to kill one sniper because we were unwilling to fight one on one, sniper against sniper, American against gook.

There were the villages blown up by American air strikes because the villagers refused to be extorted by corrupt officials who told the Americans that the recalcitrant Vietnamese were enemy Viet Cong.

And there was, of course, My Lai.

We need, of course, an enlightened leadership in our military and foreign policy. A kind of leadership which places human value above economic expediency. Domestically, we are not where we should be, in the South, in the North, in the East or in the West. The unemployment rate among Black youth is a national disgrace. And there was something sad about Black people of this city applauding happily when their former governor called for a national holiday commemorating the late Dr. Martin Luther King while his staff prepared a budget which would reduce federal spending on social programs while increasing the defense outlay. I do not oppose a King holiday, but in this instance we watched Blacks swallowing a symbolic gesture while the issue of their economic survival remains imperiled.

A few weeks later Carter sat down to the most important state dinner of his term of office. There was only a token Black American couple present among the guests honoring the deputy premier of China. The message was clear to many Blacks: affairs of state which could affect billions are in the last analysis the White man’s business. Then the evening ended at the Kennedy Center where Teng Hsiao-ping watched a 20th century edition of the minstrel show. Black performers strutting and shuffling to the strains of the musical “Eubie,” and a clown act, commonly known as the Harlem Globetrotters. Apparently those who orchestrate the president’s schedule – in Atlanta and in Washington – have their heads buried in the pages of Gone With the Wind.

I hope, too, that we will hear an end to the Moynihans and Novaks who tell us how the Irish pulled themselves up and why shouldn’t we. We have been here for more than 200 years. Yet we are treated like the newest immigrants, watching one immigrant after another leap frog over our bent down backs.

I hope that we will hear an end to the Jesse Jacksons who, by suggesting that Blacks should help themselves first, play into the hands of racists who seek any excuse to continue their discriminating ways. Blacks have been helping themselves as far as they could for over 200 years from Nat Turner to Harriet Truman to W.E.B. DuBois to Patricia Roberts Harris.

I hope we can adopt a monitoring system involving outside attorneys to guarantee full and fair prosecution when police kill. We need a law limiting cops to the use of deadly force only when they or other people are threatened with death or serious injury. In Houston, a disabled Black Viet Nam veteran was shot eight times by police because he looked wild-eyed and was supposedly carrying a gun. The gun turned out to be a Bible. No one was indicted in that case. Cops, after all, should display the same degree of discretion as the average citizen. And statistics show that if you are Black in America, you are still more likely than anyone else to be killed by the police, whether you are guilty or innocent.

I hope that we can stay forever the execution order in our society if for no other reason than capital punishment is most often visited upon the Blacks and the poor. In one 40-year or so period, Georgia executed 414 persons but only 77 of them were White.

I hope that Black leaders are asking themselves where it was that they failed, allowing hundreds of Blacks to flee

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America for a jungle utopia with the Reverend Jim Jones. Well, many Black people believe that if they are not a little paranoid in a racist society, then they are not being very realistic. Someone may actually be out to get you, so a little paranoia is like an ounce of prevention. Jones understood that paranoia, the product of centuries of division and dispossession, of intimidation and segregation. In the deepest recesses of that fear lurks a vision of obliteration in a racial Armageddon as devastating as the destruction of European Jewry under Nazi tyranny. So Jones fed that paranoia with dark warnings of impending doom in secret government death camps, and he proclaimed his message among those Blacks most easily lured, those with the least to lose and those we listened to the least. And just where were the State Department, the FBI and other authorities when those victims were crying out for help?

I hope that we develop controls to prevent the future abuses of the FBI and other intelligence agencies which in the past sought to destroy Dr. King, the Black movement and other political dissent. The entire history of FBI abuse in the sixties must be told, especially any wrong doing which it condoned, covered up or conducted.

I hope that Blacks do not get caught up in the half-baked, but suddenly popular, notions that their economic opportunities are now more shaped by class than race and that the civil rights movement was anti-Black women. Remember Diane Nash and Septima Clark and Ella Baker and Rosa Parks? I hope they are listening instead to Thurgood Marshall reminding them that the gap between Black achievement and White advancement grows greater, that they must beware of the traps laid for them by racists in every phase of American society and that they must not rely solely on the courts for progress – they must use economic and political muscle, too.

I hope Jimmy Carter will show the same concern for the human rights of Ben Chavis as he has shown for the human rights of Patty Hearst.

And I hope, finally, that we will hear an end to those Whites opposing preferential treatment for Blacks to compensate for conditions imposed by their ancestors. These same Whites have never turned down the favors created in the society they inherited, favors that stack success their way.

America must become my land, too. My Black heritage belongs to America. My talent is hers, too. My hopes are hers, too. And she is mine.

Wallace Terry is a former Newsweek correspondent and is now the Fredrick Douglass Professor of Journalism at Howard University.

The Continuing Saga of the KKK

By Vanessa J. Gallman

Vol. 2, No. 1, 1979, pp. 18-21

Publisher’s Note: The Ku Klux Klan traced the famous “Selma to Montgomery” march last month. While predicting a group of 2,000, the Klan leaders had fewer than sixty followers on US. highway 80; none the less, KKK related violence has grown over the past year without strong opposition from local authorities. In fact there has been only one recent prosecution of misconduct relating to Klan violence in the South – and then only by a federal prosecutor. This article by a Black editor of the Charlotte Observer looks at the Klan’s activities and their meaning for present race relations.

Police rifles peered down from rooftops and a helicopter carrying emergency medical supplies hovered over the streets of Decatur, Alabama June 9 as 1,500 supporters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) marched to city hall.

For more than a year before this day, SCLC supporters had persistently protested the conviction of Tommy Lee Hines, a retarded Black man convicted by an all-White jury of raping a White woman. The civil rights organization had even set up a “tent city” on the city hall grounds.

Klansmen had reacted by gathering 7,000 for cross burnings and yelling racial slurs and brandishing weapons at SCLC protestors until the tension between the two groups climaxed with a confrontation that left two Blacks and two Klansmen wounded.

SCLC would never march in Decatur again, Klansmen vowed. SCLC declared they would “march against repression” despite the threats and called in reinforcements from nearby states to swell their usual 75-member group.

On the sweltering June day of the march, two rows of helmeted National Guardsmen, with guns raised for easy aim, separated the marchers from about 50 Klansmen standing on a curb across from city hall. Straining like horses against bits, Klansmen waved sticks and yelled obscenities to a taped, instrumental version of “Dixie.” “Free James Earl Ray” was the chant that left many hoarse.

Earlier in the day, 150 robed Klansmen and an equal number of unrobed supporters rallied on the city hail steps denouncing an American government they claim has forsaken democracy, ignored the needs of White people and encouraged race-mixing.

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Bill Ricco, the 22-year-old grand chaplain of the Alabama chapter of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, trembled in his anger and hatred as he addressed the crowd. Bouncing on his heels, with jowls flapping and green eyes piercing, Ricco denounced integration as having put “Black apes in our high schools and elementary schools with our superior White children and forced them to mix. And the day a Black ape lays his Black paw on a little White girl, the Ku Klux Klan will move in and trim that paw back.”

Hostile racial slurs set the tone for the Klan rally but there were more haunting statements that rang painfully familiar – calls for the end of social service programs and affirmative action.

“I, for one, am sick of Negroes and other minorities being given the jobs I deserve,” Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkinson of Denham Springs, La., told the cheering crowd. “I’m sick of the government saying the next 40 troopers you hire in Alabama are going to be Black.

“If they have some Black people who qualify for the job, that’s one thing. But to spend our tax money out beating the bushes to find something that doesn’t exist, that’s another.”

The issues Wilkinson hammered at the crowd were the same concerns being expressed by many politicians and their legislation – Bakke, Proposition 13 and the attempt to outlaw forced busing.

Without his white robe, Wilkinson would merely be labeled “conservative.”

It is in conservative tones – “Negroes” instead of “niggers” – that Klansmen are presenting Blacks, Jews and organized labor as sacrifices for a floundering economy.

Klan demonstrations are not peculiar to Decatur. Crossburnings and the showing of the proKlan film, “Birth of a Nation” are commonplace occurences throughout the South. In the past year, the White supremist groups have become more forceful and vocal:

—Last November, 75,000 Black fans packed New Orleans for a football game between Louisiana’s two largest Black colleges and a weekend festival celebrating Black food and Black culture. About 100 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by 27-year-old, college educated David Duke, marched to a White supremist statue marking the end of Reconstruction. Blacks had threatened to hold an “educational” rally at the statue to await the Klan but confrontation was avoided when police persuaded Klansmen to march earlier than announced.

*In June, a man scheduled to testify against two Klansmen charged with shooting into the homes and cars of Black leaders in Birmingham, Ala., was killed the day before he was to testify. Police say his death, from a blow to the abdomen, was the result of an argument unrelated to the Klan case. But some question the strange coincidence.

—Events surrounding the showing of “Birth of a Nation” in China Grove, N.C., still have both Black and White residents on edge.

—On July 8, anti-Klan protestors objected to the film’s showing by burning the condederate flag on the steps of the community center where it was to be shown later. Armed Klansmen were held back by police but vowed revenge. Protestors armed themselves and began 24-hour patrols of the Black community. They feel they have reason to worry. Their sheriff, “Big Bad John” Stirewalt campaigned as a Klansmen when he was elected in 1966.

—Klansmen claimed responsibility for the abduction and beating of a Black preacher from Columbus, Georgia who stood on the Cullman, Ala., courthouse denouncing Hine’s conviction. The preacher was forced into a truck, beaten with a belt and tree limbs and stripped leaving only his shorts.

—Terrorism and gunfire continue as Klan tactics in Tupelo, Mississippi where Blacks are boycotting and demanding better jobs, housing and education.

Incidents of Klan uprising continue – in Selma, Ala. robed Klansmen appeared at a city pool “to protect our children” from Blacks and the U.S. Navy is currently investigating Klan activities on ships docking at Charleston, S.C.

Although those members of “The Invisible Empire” who actually march in many cases number less than 100, it is not the number of white robes that concern civil rights workers the most. It’s what they see as a “Ku Klux Klan mentality” throughout the country.

That mentality, according to U.S. Rep. Walter Fauntroy, “has expressed itself violently in Decatur, but we see it expressed on Capitol Hill in votes that say that we are not concerned about the elderly, not concerned about the sick, not concerned about Blacks.”

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Sociologists have labeled this era the “me generation” and economists admit the country is now in a recession. It’s a difficult time to try to needle anybody’s conscience, even if for rights and privileges long overdue. It’s an ideal time for Whites, many feeling the pinch of hard times, to look for ways to relieve the burden. The Klan offers a way – end social service programs, busing, affirmative action and put the White majority in unrestricted control.

Like fever blisters hinting of disease seething below, Klan groups are spreading and infecting this country.

Realizing how well the young, like the well educated Ricco and Duke, are being indoctrinated with the Klan mentality, it’s difficult to see an immediate reversal of the Klan activities and Klan-related trends.

Aggravated by the inevitable scrabble among all special interest groups in this country to get a bit of the dwindling American pie, those blisters may one day burst.

And in light of the Klan’s history of hatred and violence, more people will die.

Vanessa J. Galiman is an editor for the Charlotte Observer.

Greensboro Slayings

By Janis Powell & Bob Powell

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 3

Five people were slain and nine wounded in Greensboro, North Carolina November 3 as they participated in an anti-Klan rally. Fourteen members of the United Racist Front, a coalition of Nazis and Klansmen, were arrested and charged with first degree murder or conspiracy to murder by local authorities in connection with the slayings.

The Communist Workers Party (CWP) had called the demonstration in Greensboro to protest the growing number of Klan attacks upon Black people and civil rights workers throughout the nation. One hour before the scheduled march and rally, the anti-Klan group of one hundred demonstrators changed the publicized meeting site from Windsor Center on Market Street to the Morningside Homes housing project. Both sites are in the Black community.

Shortly after the rally began, five car loads of White men drove into the project shouting racist jeers and heckling the demonstrators. The two groups first confronted each other with rocks, sticks, and insults. Gunfire broke out and of the five killed (four White men and one Black woman), all but one were considered CWP leaders.

The Greensboro police department claims that it had the Klan under surveillance outside of town and officers a block and a half away from the demonstrators. However, uniformed officers were not on the scene until three minutes after the shooting.

Transcripts of the police radio communications indicate one officer announced the Klan arrival into the area and apparently could not get assistance in time to stop the shooting.

Greensboro Police Sgt. A.W. Lewis said uniformed police had been at the rally site but withdrew shortly before the shooting took place. Police said the withdrawal was done at the request of the demonstrators and as an effort “to keep from inflaming the marchers.”

Despite the anti-Klan nature of the rally, Police Chief Swing confidently assured reporters that the situation was not racial. He said, “We’re not talking about the Woolworth sit-ins in 1960 or the student rioting at A&T State University in 1969, this is simply a case of White against White.”

Residents of Greensboro have many unanswered questions, which are being posed as the community searches to understand – why?

—How did the Klan know exactly where to come to if the rally site had been changed? Earlier in the week the Klan had secured through the city attorney’s office the original route of the demonstrators. Despite the change in the rally site, the Klan drove straight to the site.

—When did the police discover the rally site had been changed?

—Why were the Morningside residents not informed of the change? Some residents say they glanced outside to check on their children playing to find them in the middle of a “war zone.”

—Why were there no Greensboro Klansmen involved in the shooting?

—Why do many blame thevictims for the tragedy? Equating possible CWP tactical blunders on the same level as Klan/Nazi terror tactics, some are calling both groups “crazy” and equally responsible.

—Has the Klan become willing to kill in front of TV cameras instead of on Southern back roads?

—Are local officials involved in the background of Klan activities?

—Will this tragedy reinstate various police surveillance of political activities?

—Will this incident be used as a basis for red-baiting? Shortly after the killing, a company in Collinsville, Virginia reportedly pressured its union to fine an avowed Marxist member for passing out pamphlets at work protesting the killings.

Because of these and other questions, civil rights groups and individuals around the country have called for local and national responses including: (1) vigorous prosecution of those responsible for the Greensboro murders; (2) an independent investigation of police and local officials complicity in the Nov. 3 attacks; (3) statewide legislative investigations into the activities of the Klan; and (4) open, public Congressional hearings about the activities of the Ku Klux Klan nationwide.

Fighting the Klan in the Military

By Phil Wilayto

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 8-11

An aircraft carrier is really a small city. When it’s out to sea with a full crew and a complement of marines, it’s 5,000 people, almost all of them young men, enclosed in a small place for months at a time. In case of trouble, mechanical or social, there’s no place to go.

On February 9, 1979, a small one-foot wooden cross, covered with some kind of flammable fabric, was found burning in the enlisted dining area of the carrier USS America. In late January, a group of White sailors attacked a group of Blacks on the USS Concord, a 400-man supply ship estimated to have 20 Klan members aboard. The Navy has admitted that it is investigating Klan activity on at least one other East Coast ship, this one based in Charleston, S.C.

And the trouble wasn’t only on ships. Within the past year there have been crosses burned outside Ft. Eustis in nearby Hampton, in rural Chesapeake, there have been incidents of spraypainting of the letters “KKK” on Black people’s property in Norfolk and in Virginia Beach.

It was in this atmosphere of increasing racist incidents in the Tidewater area of Virginia that Bill Wilkinson’, Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, announced that he would hold a “recruiting rally” aimed at the military in Virginia Beach on October 5.

Since the 50s, the KKK has been splitting into a number of different factions and organizations. Wilkinson’s group, one of the newer ones, has established for itself a reputation as being one of the most rabidly violent of the Klan groups. This was the gang that held an armed march from Selma to Montgomery last summer, that shot into a crowd of Black demonstrators in Decatur, Alabama earlier this year, and that a few months ago was accused of whipping a White woman said to have committed the crime of eating lunch with some of her Birmingham, Alabama Black co-workers.

When Wilkinson announced his plans for the October 5 rally, a number of organizations in the Tidewater area began to make plans for a counter-demonstration. Two weeks prior to the 5th, a coalition of labor, community, civil rights, gay, and political organizations was formed to sponsor the demonstration. The coalition, called “People United for Human Justice” (PUHJ), grew to include 20 organizations and individuals, including officials from the longshoremen’s ‘union, the Teamsters, Carpenters and Joiners, Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, the NAACP, Black Vanguard Resource Center; Unitarian-Universalist Gay Alliance, Palestine Solidarity Committee, Norfolk Coalition for Human Rights, and Workers World Party.

As both the Klan and the anti-racist coalition moved forward with their organizing, a number of other forces began to make themselves felt. One of these was the Navy.

Originally, Navy officials took the position that, while of course they deplored the racism of the Klan, they couldn’t legally forbid military personnel from attending the KKK rally. Several laws on the Navy books could apply. In particular a Defense Department directive suggests

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that military personnel can be banned from unlawful gatherings and where there is a likelihood of violence.

The coalition contended that this directive applied since the Klan rally did not have a permit, and in Virginia it is against the law to appear in public with a mask or hood. Also, the Klan has a history of violence and given the community’s feeling about the Klan recruiting there was a likelihood of violence. B’nai Brith filed a formal complaint with the Navy noting that membership in the Klan is not compatible with the Navy’s stated goal of equal opportunity and affirmative action.

Besides, the military has never felt hamstrung in outlawing participation in Black or Latin organizations, anti-war groups, or other political organizations. What the Navy’s position really did was to give the go-ahead to racist Whites to attend the rally and get “recruited”. This stand was to change later on in form but not in essence.

The local city governments took a similar approach of back-handed – and sometimes direct – support for the Klan. When the PUHJ spokesperson appeared at a session of the Virginia Beach city council and asked to make a statement, he was refused permission by unanimous vote of the council. Mayor Patrick Standing’s comment was that, “It’d be better to say nothing at all.” However, when the Klan finally announced the site for its rally, where should it be but an oceanfront vacant lot owned by the mayor’s family! The few Black council members in other Tidewater cities all went on record as opposing the Klan’s local organizing efforts, but their White counterparts all refused to follow suit, a development that the Imperial Wizard said he found “encouraging”.

The press, too, played a strong role in the development. Every throat-clearing and pronouncement by Wilkinson was treated with the seriousness and respect given a visiting dignitary, while coalition spokespersons were seldom quoted directly, if at all. And while the coalition members had never mentioned intentions of violence at their

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demonstration, it was that subject that seemed to most fascinate the city’s editors and TV news managers, so that by the time October 5 arrived an atmosphere of real tension had developed.

It was partially this tension that gave the Navy, which was under mounting local pressure to change its position on the Klan rally, an excuse to put the rally off-limits to military personnel. However, it also put the anti-Klan demonstrations off-limits. The Navy went even further and announced it would not have investigative agents at the KKK rally while giving the impression that investigative agents would be at the anti-Klan rally. Coalition members charged that the Navy’s new position was in fact trying to discourage anti-Klan activities while assuring racists that they would not be detected if they did go to the Klan rally. Even so, a number of sailors from the surrounding bases did turn out to protest against the Klan.

Wilkinson had set his rally for 7:30 in the evening next to the Virginia Beach Ramada Inn. At 5:30 pm, PUHJ set up a spirited picket line outside the Virginia Beach Civic Center, about a mile down the road. Under the watchful eyes of about 20 riot-equipped state police, the demonstrators carried their banners and signs and chanted, “Ku Klux Klan, Scum of the Land” and “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, the KKK has got to go”. The numbers gradually grew with new arrivals until well over a hundred people – Black, White, gay, civilian, military, students, and union members were all declaring their opposition to racism and racists.

About dusk, the group gathered for a rally, hearing representatives from the NAACP, Longshoremen, the Black Vanguard Resource Center, the Unitarian-Universalist Gay Alliance, and Workers World Party.

At 7:00 pm the demonstrators moved out to the Klan rally. CB reports from coalition members stationed at the rally site indicated the Klan was preparing to assemble and that some 200 state and local police had gathered around the rally site. Another group of about 40 anti-Klan demonstrators had also arrived and had set up a picket line across the street.

The police had previously announced that they would forbid anything but a small picket line. But the march proceeded anyway, behind the lead PUHJ banner reading “Organize to Defeat the

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Klan”, and the chants resounded off the walls of the resort motels, bars, and cafes.

By the time the marchers reached the Ramada Inn, their numbers had grown to over 200, far more than the dozen or so robed racists and the 40 or so sympathizers they had attracted. The police, however, were another factor. Initially positioned between the Klan rally and the demonstrators, they soon removed themselves to a phalanx position behind the coalition, sandwiching the picket line in between themselves and the screaming, taunting racists. If a fight had broken out – and there was more than one demonstrator who would gladly have thrown the sheeted bigots into the sea – the picket line would have been caught between two groups that had far more in common with each other than with the picketers.

Even so, the coalition members maintained the unity of the line and the volume of their chants until Wilkinson was under the protection of the police.

But as the line proceeded back down the march route toward the Civic Center, it soon became obvious that the night was not yet over. A mob of 40 to 50 White youth tagged along the side of the marchers, screaming racist insults and taunting the picketers. The police, meanwhile, were walking along behind the racists, trying to push them up into the line of march. Again, their actions could have easily provoked a fight and an attack on the picket line.

The line, however, never broke. Coalition members assigned to security formed a defense line along the outside of the marchers, turning back the attempts of the racists to split up the picketers. Finally, about a block from the end of the march, the demonstrators held a final rally, pledging to “continue to organize and build our movement till we can raise an army to wipe out racism and racists like the Klan once and for all, forever!”

Wilkinson left the area soon afterward, and while there has been no visible Klan organizing in Tidewater since then, the atmosphere of racist hatred which he tried to encourage bore some bitter fruit. A few days after the Klan rally, there was a cross-burning in a Virginia Beach trailor park. A week later, a 4 5-year-old Black youth was shot in the face with a shotgun by a group of White teenagers who had been taunting him with racial insults. In mid-November, two White Tidewater men were charged with shooting into a carload of Black students from Chowan College in North Carolina. And recently the local “patriots” have been busy trying to whip up a chauvinist hysteria against Iranians, an hysteria that bears a striking resemblence to the screaming mob at the October 5 Klan rally.

Nica Gobs, a spokesperson for the Workers World Party one of the organizations that played a leading role in building the local anti-Klan demonstration, offered her assessment: “The main thing I think we all learned was that you can’t rely on the government to stop the Klan. The City of Virginia Beach could have stopped the Klan rally, since it required a city permit and one was never issued. The mayor could have refused to allow the Klan to use his family’s property. The White city councilmen in the area could have condemned the rally. The Navy could have banned Klan recruitment and organizing in its ranks. And the cops could have spent their time harassing the racists instead of the anti-racists. But none of that was done. Instead, they all allowed and even encouraged the Klan to be public, visible, and active, and as a result the racist attacks and violence in the area have increased.

“That’s why from the beginning we encouraged the development of a broad-based coalition of labor and community groups to oppose the Klan. We have to rely on ourselves, on poor and working people, because we’re the ones with a real stake in destroying the cancer of racism.”

Phil Wilayto is a shop steward and writer in the Tidewater area.

Greensboro Deaths Were Foretold

By Peter B. Young

Vol. 2, No. 5, 1980, pp. 12

In 1968-1969, as a consultant to the President’s Commission on Violence I reported (as if from another planet) the existence of a large underclass of deeply troubled Whites in North Carolina and elsewhere. I described this phenomenon as a “White ghetto,” with social pathology remarkably similar to that which is so well known in the Black ghetto: ignorance, unemployment, poor health, a drenching saturation of racism and random Saturday night violence.

I further pointed out to the commission that routine police measures of surveillence and harassment were (and are) not only useless but also counterproductive. And I explicitly suggested the probability of a violent confrontation worse than any we had known in the 1960s.

A week ago, in the New York Times, it was painful (but not surprising) for me to read that the radical victims at Greensboro were college graduates, while their killers held “marginal jobs”.

Permit me to say something to these two groups, described in the media as “extremist fringe groups”.

To the radicals: The historic crisis of American radicalism has been its perennial failure to “break through ” to ordinary working people. The difference of class and culture have been virtually unbridgeable.

I respect your courage in going into the mills and becoming active in the labor movement. But I suspect your approach was “elitist”; you didn’t really listen to those folks. If you had listened, really listened, you would not have staged a rally around the slogan, “Death to the Klan”. An abstraction called “the Klan” is really all that exists in the White ghetto. These folks were born into “the Klan”, and it is all they have. (Ironically, it seems likely that the Greensboro assailants may not have been officially members of any Klan organization, yet they are so obviously born into “the Klan” as to pose a profound dilemma for the official Klan officers of the state.

To the Greensboro 14: I know who you are, and I know why you did it. One of you was quoted in the Times as saying, “God save America and this honorable court.” That is a way of saying you knew going in what the price would be and you were (and are) willing to pay that price. You were unable to follow the techniques of the late Dr. Martin Luther King; you could not commit a nonviolent act of civil disobedience so you committed a violent one. An atrociously violent act, I hasten to add. The deadly aim of your fire shows that marksmanship standards in the White ghetto remain at their usual high level. Now brothers (and wives and children), do some hard and long praying on what you have done.

The road to a decent American future continues to be difficult. Whoever thought it would be easy? We should pause now to mourn the dead, the wounded and, yes, those shattered “Klan” families in the Piedmont.

The writer, a public relations counselor in Massachusetts, covered state politics and civil rights, including the Ku Klux Klan for WRAL-TV in Raleigh in the mid-1960s. He was a consultant on White extremist groups to a study commission headed by Dr. Milton Eisenhower appointed by President Lyndon Johnson after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

(Reprinted from the Charlotte Observer.)

The Drama of Greensboro

By Charles Young

Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 14-19

Greensboro is the insurance capital of North Carolina, not a textile and tobacco town, as it was referred to in the national media back in November following the slaying of five leaders of the Communist Workers Party during the anti-Ku Klux Klan rally. The media may be excused its hasty retreat to historical stereotype, however, for the killings did take place in a Black neighborhood, and they were carried out by a band of raiding Klansmen. It is perhaps natural then, when viewing the incident from a distance, to assume that the attack falls into the pattern of old-fashioned Southern White-racists direct action. But the reality is a little more complicated than that.

While textiles and tobacco do play a significant role in the city’s economy, as employers of some of the lowest paid workers in the area, the real money is with insurance, and with those who look out for it, the bankers.

Greensboro’s skyline shows as much. Most of the traditional retail establishments, large and small, moved out long ago to the shopping malls. But the town is not dead. Far from it. The tall buildings are filled with bankers, lawyers, accountants and insurance executives, along with all the office support forces.

Lending its support is the recently completed city and county governmental center, a sprawling complex of fortress-like structures bedded down within broad open plazas liberally sprinkled with meticulously designed plantings and an abundance of those large round white-frosted lamppost lights so dear to the hearts of modern-day architects.

And within shouting distance in the next block is the newest jewel in the mid-town crown: another major insurance company is nearing completion of its own monument to growth and prosperity. The topping-out ceremony for this magnificent edifice took place just prior to a November 3rd rally which returned Greensboro to the nation’s attention.

The rally was an outgrowth of the frustration the Communist Workers Party had experienced in its effort to organize a union at one of the city’s textile mills. The CWP had found that not many workers were very much interested in aligning themselves with a group which advocated such stringent measures against the existing power structure, including the mill’s owners, a longestablished family dynasty that has contributed sianificantly to the city’s overall economic posture.

Probably in an attempt to draw greater attention to its cause, and to generate a more favorable public image, the CWP decided to switch its focus to the Klan and to stake itself out as the leader in the fight against what it described as the resurgence of Klan mentality, not only in the South but throughout the nation.

And it gave them a rallying cry: Death to the Klan.

The slogan began appearing on posters around town and in leaflets passed out at shopping centers. By the time November 3 rolled around the word had gone out that the CWP rally was to be a challenge to the cowardly Klan to show themselves. They would be exposed as anti-Black, anti-labor terrorists who were ignorantly following the dictates of the imperialistic power structure which was determined to suppress the poor and the underprivileged.

To many residents of Greensboro, this appeared to be a fairly standard garden variety accusation, coming from a group venting its spleen out of frustration at its own failure to put forth an

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effective and persuasive program of labor organizing. Consequently, the fateful rally attracted very little notice outside the ranks of the two opposing groups.

But then the shooting started. And a lot of things changed.

As word spread about the shootings, the local outrage was not so much a protest that the people had been killed as it was anger that the warring factions had chosen Greensboro as the site for their battle. Eventually both groups were identified as outsiders and not representative of the nature of this city.

But after the smoke cleared it appeared that the Klansmen were interlopers and the CWP people, for the most part, were local and some with close ties to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and others associated with more recent leftist activities.

It was a sticky situation for the defenders of Greensboro’s reputation as an enlightened and open society, in which all divergent viewpoints were tolerated. To some it appeared that an opportunity had presented itself for the city to reach out and lay firm claim to its liberal reputation by issuing a blanket condemnation of the Klan. To others the idea of coming down on the side of militant leftists; especially union organizers, was anathema. Apparently, the viewpoint held by the CWP was just a bit too far left.

As a result, the city’s leaders assumed a somewhat remote posture, seemingly content to let blame for the killings rest equally at the feet of both groups, neither of which deserved much regard. The important thing, according to the city fathers, was to provide protection for the general public, in case these groups of crazies got together again for further attempts to ventilate each other’s ranks.

The funeral march on November 11 for the five casualties provoked a rash of bitterness. Threats of retaliation and revenge had been daily utterances for a week. Otherwise disinterested citizens were busy making plans to be as far away from the march as possible. Rumors were rampant that the Klan would be in town armed and along the march route, eager to take advantage of the opportunity to pick off a few more of its enemies.

Consequently, a massive show of power was mounted by the city and the state. A state-ofemergency was declared, suspending the right to bear arms. Just under a thousand local police, state highway patrolmen and National Guardsmen were called out, ostensibly to protect the marchers but more realistically to prevent anyone with a weapon from getting into the area, whatever his viewpoint.

About two thousand people showed up for the procession, from various parts of the eastern seaboard. Media coverage was heavy. The day was rainy and cold, lending credence to the cliche about appropriate weather for a funeral. The mood was tense, faces grim. The riot troops, in full battle gear, formed a gauntlet along the funeral route. Swat teams manned rooftops and overpasses, combing the area with binoculars. Military helicopters fluttered back and forth above the scene, guns visible in open doorways.

For about three hours the crowd waited in the rain for the march to get underway while local officials and parade organizers argued about the CWP’s insistence that its members be allowed to carry arms to protect themselves from further Klan attack. A compromise was reached, and the CWP leaders were allowed to carry their guns but without ammunition.

The procession moved off, the caskets bearing the bodies of the five slain CWP members in th, lead. The march covered the two miles to the cemetery without incident.

With emotions running high, anti-Klan groups here set in motion an effort to organize a march later in the month as a general civil rights protest. However, general apathy toward the proposed march soon emerged among Black community

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leaders, and although rio one was talking publicly, in private it was conceded that it was risky business for local Blacks to let themselves become too closely identified with leftist extremists.

Clearly, there was going to have to be a change in leadership among the anti-Klan groups if any successful march could be staged. The CWP simply was too radical to serve as a catalyst for the kind of coalition that would be necessary to attract favorable attention from activists over a broad spectrum. The result was the birth of a February 2 Mobilization Committee, with a Black New York minister as its leader.

What followed then was perhaps the most carefully organized civil rights effort ever undertaken in Greensboro. Even the city’s demonstrations of the 1960s could not compare in degree of detail with what was to come. Organizations from a wide area of the country were to be courted and, if at all possible, brought into the fold. The umbrella was to be inclusive of any and all groups who could keep their private differences private and would pledge to participate peacefully.

The principal complicating factor, and the one which produced the most heartburn among the more cautious local liberals, was that the Mobilization Committee was planning its demonstration on February 2, the day after the 20th anniversary of the original civil rights sitins at a local dime-store lunch counter. The sit-ins in 1960 by four Black students from a local college had led to a nationwide breakdown in segregated eating facilities, raising the four to the status of folk heroes.

The February 2

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Committee’s timing was causing problems for the people in town who wanted to bring the four catalysts back for a commemorative celebration of the event. The four had now been successfully assimilated into the established system and the passing years had been kind to them, making them suitable figures to honor in public ceremony.

The February 2 people were just barely tolerant of the February 1 people. Friendships among Blacks and Whites in both groups were, to say the least, being stretched and strained. The February 2 people didn’t seem to find any particular fault in the desire of the February 1 people to bestow praise on the four students twenty years later. It was just that, so far as the February 2 people were concerned, theirs was a far more timely and important undertaking: a renewed commitment to fight suppression of all people everywhere.

The city fathers were not conspicuous in their willingness to cooperate with either group. For example, through some oversight along the way, the money to pay for the historical marker to commemorate the 1960 sit-ins had not been appropriated. When the state came through with a plaque, a sequence of events then occurred which led to a serious breakdown between the city and the Mobilization Committee.

An application by the Mobilization Committee for use of the city’s coliseum as its rally site was turned down, with the explanation that the facility had already been rented for the proposed date. Later it came to light that the city had agreed with an out-of-town promoter to co-sponsor a rhythm-and-blues concert made up of little-known entertainers. The co-sponsorship arrangement meant that the city would bear half the cost of putting on the show and would reap half the profits or losses.

This one maneuver probably aroused more local public argument than any other preliminary activity. To the Mobilization Committee it appeared to be nothing less than a clumsy obstructionist tactic. And to the general taxpaying public it appeared to be an expensive way of trying to prevent what, by that time, had become an inevitable happening. The memory of the $80,000 cost to the city as its share of the expenses for the November 11 funeral march was still fresh in the minds of many taxpayers.

The lines were drawn between the city and the Mobilization Committee.

There were charges and counter-charges, none of which did anything to reassure the observing public. Angry words crystalized in a civil suit filed by the Mobilization Committee to force the city to make the coliseum available for the rally.

After much agonizing and soul-searching, and with a little nudge from the federal judge who was to hear the suit, the city reversed itself. By this time, the city administration may have realized that its adversary role had provided the impetus which would surely result in a far larger turnout for the rally.

On Saturday morning, February 2, the cars and buses began rolling into the parking areas around the stadium early. They were coming from all over the eastern and southern parts of the country, and there were even some from the Midwest.

The day was bright and sunny and cold, with wind whipping across the asphalt

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stirring up swirls of dust through the ranks of the debarking visitors. Most were solemn-faced, subdued and bleary-eyed from rides overnight and longer from such places as Memphis and Atlanta and Chicago and Detroit and Philadelphia and New York and Washington.

By noon the sunny parts of the stands at the ballpark and the infield and a large part of the outfield of the stadium where the march would begin were filled with effusive rally-goers searching for their groups, guided by the red, black, yellow, green and orange banners announcing their origins. Laughter and shouts of recognition between friends tended to drown out the efforts by some of the organizers to issue instructions over a malfunctioning loudspeaker system.

Outside the stadium entrance the leaders of the various groups conferred about the order of march which would move across town to the coliseum. Provocateurs roamed about shouting out their particular messages of protest against one thing and another, and the more serious ones passed out pamphlets and handbills describing the general state of unhealthy affairs within the system. A few budding capitalists sold fried chicken and tee shirts.

The city had organized a contingent of special police and the state highway patrol had been assigned the duty of blocking off streets and roadways leading to the march route. The governor had ordered the National Guard to town again and they were scattered about in out-of-the-way places. Although the law enforcement body was sizeable, the mood of the day bore little resemblance to the tension that had prevailed at the November funeral procession.

The march itself moved off in an orderly fashion to the chants of freedom and power, banners held high in the pristine air, and proceeded at a brisk clip through the city streets and along the four-mile route to the rally site at the coliseum and arrived without incident.

It is a festive crowd,noisy and restless. About 7,000 people in a coliseum seating roughly 15,000 have gathered. Cheers come easily. Speaker after speaker is greeted with rousing ovations following even the mildest admonishments to the power structure. There are warnings to the president and warnings to the governor and warnings to the city’s mayor. They are told that they had better wake up and start responding to the needs of the people before it is too late.

With a few exceptions, this group of speakers is not eloquent. It seems that they are not intended to be. They are the nuts-and-bolts leaders representing civil rights and leftist factions from many parts of the country, and each is given three minutes to get his message across. It is very much like a political convention, with each speaker saying pretty much the same things but trying to do so in slightly different words.

And not everybody is listening. Many are roaming about visiting with their friends and gazing up into the stands searching for another familiar face.

But the general message seems to get across. These are not the days for violence. These are not the days for confrontation. But rather, these are the days for organization. These are the days for building up the ranks of leadership. These are the days for bringing economic pressure to the marketplace. There are a couple of factions on the floor who do not agree, and they boo from time to time. But it is only a minor distraction.

The strength of the rally seems to lie in the determination to organize and to play a more dominant role in politics and business. Toward the end there is a brief moment of tension when it is announced that one of the speakers has received a death threat. But that soon dissipates as the final speakers deliver their messages.

And then it is over. There has been no violence.

Outside, night has fallen on Greensboro and all across the parking lot the buses are firing up for the return trip to the distant cities. Great clouds of diesel smoke rise in the cold night air, like curtains closing at the completion of a long and drawn-out melodrama.

(Publisher’s Note: This is an excerpt from a book being written about the November 3, 1979 killings in Greensboro, N.C., of five members of the Communist Workers Party. Copyright 1980 by Charles Young. All rights reserved. No portion of this article may be reprinted without written permission of the author.)

Charles Young is a free-lance writer based in Greensboro.

McDuffie: The Case Behind Miami’s Riots

By Patrice Gaines-Carter

Vol. 2, No. 7, 1980, pp. 20-23

The story has changed several times since its beginning the morning of December 17, in Miami, Florida. It was about 1:50 a.m when police officers there say they spotted Arthur Lee MeDuffie, a Black insurance executive, doing daredevil stunts on his motorcycle.

After a high-speed chase, McDuffie was caught. At least a dozen police officers encircled him. For 20 minutes, according to reports, they beat him with nightsticks and flashlights. Four days later, after slipping into a coma, McDuffie, 33, was dead.

The police officers wrote up an accident report, saying McDuffie sustained injuries when his motorcycle hit a curb and went out of control. But, the pieces didn’t fit. The Dade County medical examiner became suspicious. Rumors about the “accident” were whispered throughout the police department, prompting an internal investigation of the case.

Working together, the medical examiner and police investigators found that McDuffie was handcuffed when he was beaten. The killing blow had crashed into his forehead at 90 times the force of gravity. The medical examiner believed

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the weapon that killed McDuffie to be a heavy-duty flashlight, swung two-handed like an ax. It cracked the skull cleanly in half, from front to back.

McDuffie’s death has shaken Miami, especially its Black community, like nothing prior to it in this decade. People who earlier dismissed Black cries of police brutality are now listening. “When all the facts are made known,” one investigating officer said, “it will make your hair stand on end.”

“Frenzied” was the term used by some officers who witnessed the beating. They said officers fought each other for a chance to beat McDuffie. One witness said, “It looked like a bunch of animals fighting for meat.”

One officer told a morning newspaper: “What really happened out there (the morning of December 17) is that the cops just went crazy. There’s no question that it never should have happened. The only way you could have stopped what was happening would have been to start killing cops. The feeling afterwards was that this guy was a nigger who was running from the police, and he deserved everything he got.”

Frederica, McDuffie’s ex-wife, whom he planned on remarrying last February, agreed that McDuffie’s death occurred because he was Black and outran the police. “Once they got him they got upset and they wanted to teach him a lesson.” She says she has taught their two daughters that they “can’t judge them all (police) by something a few did.” Her explanations help Shedrica, 8, but mean nothing to 2-year-old Bwana, who still runs to their living room window when a car drives up, and yells, “Daddy! Daddy!”

“They killed the wrong man this time,” a Black woman who watched McDuffie’s funeral procession said at the time. The insurance executive’s death and beating were different from the other cries of police brutality in the Miami community. For one thing, the victim died. Then secondly, in this instance, there were many witnesses, and the witnesses were police officers. Thirdly, McDuffie was a clean-cut, ex-Marine police officer, businessman, volunteer worker and father. He was no dope pusher; no drug addict; no robber. He ran from the police because his license had expired and he had already received one ticket for driving without it.

All of the officers charged were fired by their police director, Bobby Jones, on February 2. Then on March 31st in Tampa, Florida, five Dade County police officers—four Whites and one Latin—went on trial for charges stemming from the beating of Arthur McDuffie.

The trial was moved to Tampa after defense attorneys for the officers argued for a change of venue, claiming because of excess media coverage in Miami their clients could not receive a fair trial in Dade County.

Judge Lenore Nesbitt granted the change in venue, moving the trial to Tampa. In her decision, Judge Nesbitt said, “In fundamental justice to the defendants and for the welfare of the community, I am compelled to grant a change in venue.” She called the case “a timebomb I don’t want to go off in my courtroom or this community.”

Originally, six officers were to stand trial for charges in the death. But in pre-trial hearings, Judge Nesbitt dismissed as evidence the testimony given by officer William Hanlon, 27, during a polygraph examination. She discarded the testimony because Hanlon had not been told of his right to remain silent and to have legal counsel present during the examination.

Hanlon’s attorney called the verdict “a victory,” and it turned out to be just that when the judge later ruled that charges be dropped against Hanlon. The state attorney’s office found it impossible to prosecute Hanlon without the testimony in question.

Hanlon’s testimony is also considered crucial in the prosecution of Alex Marrero, the 25-year-old Cuban charged with second-degree murder. Hanlon testified during his polygraph examination that he saw Marrero swing his heavy-duty flashlight with two hands and strike the forehead of McDuffie. He said that after the blow McDuffie’s face was covered with blood.

Hanlon had faced a possible sentence of nearly 80 years for his charges of manslaughter and aggravated battery. Sgt. Ira Diggs and officer Michael Watts still face charges of manslaughter and aggravated battery. Officers Ubaldo Deltoro and Sgt. Herbert Evans Jr. are charged with accessory after the fact.

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Some people in the Cuban community are raising money for the defense of officer Marrero, claiming because he is a minority he was given the heavier charge. The claim has gotten some support in the Black community. However, the Black community has called for murder charges against all of the officers involved in the beating. The McDuffie family has filed a multimillion dollar suit against the county.

Dade County encompasses both Miami and Miami Beach as well as nearly a dozen other south Florida municipalities. The tropical land, billed by the Chamber of Commerce as a vacationland under the sun, has always felt the heat of racial tension. Until 1965, Blacks had to carry employment identification cards to get into wealthy Miami Beach. The cards explained why that person was on the beach usually as a day worker in the home of a wealthy family or a street laborer hired to keep the area clean.

The county has become one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country over the past decade. It covers 2,054 square miles, and its population has been fed steadily by the influx of immigrants to its shores. The population is approximately a million and a half.

Blacks, Latins and Anglos make up the population mix. It is expected after the 1980 census that all three will have less than 50 percent of the total population.

The Latin community consists mainly of Cuban refugees, with Colombians and other South and Central American groups on the increase. The Black community, about 14.4 percent of the population, contains Bahamians, Jamaicans and other West Indians.

The police department is a special sore spot for the Black community. Dozens of complaints of police brutality have been filed by Blacks over the years. In fact, some of the officers involved in the McDuffie case have extensive records of alleged brutality.

“The public is aware that there is a group of policemen who are headhunters, who are aggressive and seek out combat situations. They become violent at the drop of a hat,” said Robert Simms, director of the Community Relations Board. These people have been called the goon squad.

The suit filed by the McDuffie family is the second of its kind to be filed against the Dade County (also called Metro) police department recently. In February 1979 the Metro police officers burst into the home of a Black school teacher by mistake. The officers went to the wrong address during a drug raid. Nathaniel LaFleur, his son and his wife were beaten. LaFleur filed a $3 million lawsuit that is still pending against the county, but the state attorney’s office absolved the officers involved in the drug raid of any wrongdoing.

After the LaFleur incident, the Black community, with other supporters, asked for a citizen’s review board to oversee police complaints.

A year later, in February of 1980, the Metro Commission created the independent Review Panel to investigate “serious complaints or grievances” against county employees or agencies. The panel will have no investigative staff or subpoena power.

At a public hearing preceding the commission’s approval of the panel, nearly half of the speakers endorsed a competing proposal for a more powerful board with subpoena power. But fewer than 100 people showed up at the hearing and a third of them were grade-school children. Metro’s lone Black commissioner voted against the adopted structure for the panel.

While the panel is still being established, the Metro police department has done some in-house cleaning. A 1976 discrimination suit filed against the department was settled in January, after four years. Filed by the Progressive Officers Club, 76 Black county police officers, the suit charged discrimination in hiring, promotion, transfers and disciplinary actions. In the settlement, the police department agreed to pay all court costs, reconsider 200 Blacks who were turned down for police jobs prior to the suit and reconsider officers who were on a list for possible promotion to sergeant when the suit was filed.

Under the new agreement Blacks are guaranteed at least one-third of the available police commander, corporal and master sergeant positions. “It means two positions as police commanders, about 20 as corporals and two as master sergeants,” said Progressive Club member Lonnie Lawrence.

The agreement also calls for some revamping of the Metro Police Department’s policies and a requirement that all police officers undergo a psychological test as part of the department’s application.

In addition to the revamping, the department has a new police chief appointed in January. The former chief was fired from his position after the LaFleur raiding. Officer Bobby Jones, the new chief, decided to be a candidate for the position

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after the McDuffie beating, saying that it offered “a challenge” to him to weed out bad officers, create better relationships with the community and boost morale within the department.

Leaders in the Black community are suspicious of Jones’ motives, noting that he has worked alongside of the very officers charged in the McDuffie beating. Still, they have thrown their support behind Jones, calling for unity in the Black community. If Jones is to be the chief, the leaders say, there must be a unified Black voice for him to listen to. And, Jones has been a strong supporter of the Independent Review Panel.

Shortly after Jones’ appointment in January, another disclosure surrounding the McDuffie case upset the Black community. The Dade County Police Benevolent Association announced it had agreed to pay up to $2,000 for the defense of each police officer charged in the McDuffie case.

“They have shown their true racist color,” an editorial on a popular Black radio station stated.

Blacks in Miami waited for a verdict to see what the end of this chapter of confusion and anger in the community would be. But not without skepticism. They expressed outrage over the dismissal of officer Hanlon’s crucial testimony. “Are we to believe that police officers forgot to inform another officer of his Miranda Rights?” asked Marvin Dunn, an outspoken community activist in Miami.

There was also concern over the new site for the trial. The NAACP sent a telegram to the Justice Department, asking that they send someone to monitor the Tampa trial. Even Tampa residents questioned whether or not justice could be found there, where a Black youth was shot by a White police officer a few weeks before the trial began. The officer was absolved of any wrongdoing. The shooting is still a controversial issue in Tampa.

Following McDuffie’s death the Black community marched and demonstrated, led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Achievers of Greater Miami. They carried signs with messages like “Justice Now” “Who’s Going to Police the Police,” and “Remember McDuffie.” Five months to the day after McDuffie was killed, the all-White Tampa jury found the policemen innocent and three days of violence in Miami’s central city erupted, opening another violent chapter in a case which official police reports from last December still list as “accidental.”

Patrice Gaines-Carter is a reporter for the Miami News.

Sidebar: “We Are Tired of Praying”

Vol. 2, No. 7, 1980, p. 23

On May 17, in Tampa, Florida, four Dade County police officers charged in the beating death of Black insurance executive Arthur McDuffie were found innocent of all charges by a six member, all-male White jury. The jury deliberated only two hours before returning their verdict. What could have been the end to a grizzly story of police violence and brutality turned out to be only another part of it. By ten o’clock that night the city of Miami was a battleground and the battle cry was “McDuffie.”

When the verdict was given at 2:30 p m. Saturday afternoon, McDuffie’s mother Eula, cried, “They are guilty, they are guilty. God will take care of them.” The whole Black community of Miami was stunned.

The NAACP called for a protest demonstration at 8:00 p.m. and approximately 1,000 people gathered for a march to the Dade County Justice Department building. The marchers were made up of all elements of the Black community—businessmen in suits, young children in shorts, and old ladies in aprons. Their numbers grew as they marched. The march was reminiscent of the peaceful demonstrations of the 60s as the crowd moved toward the Justice Department building singing “We Shall Overcome.” When they stopped on the steps of the Justice Department building a community leader, Marvin Dunn, called for a prayer but someone in the crowd responded, “We are tired of praying. Let’s march in the streets.” The crowd grew out of control and some gave away to vented anger. A brick was thrown through a window and a police car was burned.

In the meantime, six miles north in Black, impoverished Liberty City, violence also broke out among Blacks, Whites and police officers. Fires were set, stores were looted and people were beaten, maimed and killed. Many witnesses reported that the police vandalized cars, smashed windows and spray-painted the words “Looter” and “Thief” on walls.

With sixteen people dead from the three days of disturbances in Miami, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it will seek civil rights indictments against the four policemen who were acquitted and a complete review of “past, present and future” reports of brutality by police and inaction by local judicial officers. The issues of “McDuffie” are now more than one case. They are the symbols of today’s race relations.

What’s Wrong with Justice in Wrightsville

By Ron Taylor

Vol. 2, No. 8, 1980, pp. 22-24

Johnson County Sheriff Roland Attaway keeps two microphones dangling from the roof outside his office in Wrightsville, Georgia, for the purpose of tape recording his critics. The last few months, he has not liked what he has heard. Moreover, the criticism has made it difficult for him to run his county the way he is accustomed to running it. A host of “outside agitators,” liberal lawyers and nosy newsmen have poked fun at his habit of arresting people without charging them with anything.

In the last roundup, following sniper fire in a Black section of that racially troubled town, Attaway managed to nab at least 38 suspects (he never seemed to know just how many himself) and succeeded in getting two leaders of the Black protest there indicted on a host of curious charges that included inciting a riot that apparently his deputies helped start. During the past few months, Blacks and Whites in Wrightsville have scuffled on the courthouse lawn; a little girl, a woman and a policeman have been wounded, and every extremist group in Georgia, left and right, has shown its colors there. The miracle, say those who have watched the painful developments, is that nobody has been killed.

Wrightsville is an anachronism of the most disturbing kind. All the tired marches and all the old songs serve up reminders of hopes still unfulfilled, of how far we have not come. Wrightsville is not Miami, not the ash and mutilation of a decade just begun. It is not Greensboro, North Carolina, not the ugly clash of intransigent ideologies sticking up like the tip of some awful polarization freezing inside America’s frustrated foundation. Instead, Wrightsville hangs at the damaged roots of all that did not grow after the sixties.

It is a mean little town, this South Central Georgia farming village of barely 2,000 people at the seat of a county hardly much

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bigger, holding 7,000 people altogether. Almost daily, when the tensions are properly dangerous, a White mob gathers outside the courthouse, a gang of loafers come to complain about loafers and to skip pebbles and shout threats at journalists. Why have we come, they ask. And the temptation is precariously great to tell them.

Wrightsville is depressingly similar to most other rural Deep South towns that sit just beyond somewhere, not far from nowhere. It is far enough away from the reconstructed Southern mainstream to practice its peculiar standards of justice, but close enough to cause embarassment. That basically is why Wrightsville has become another landmark in the civil rights movement that has been declared dead quite prematurely, more than once in recent years. In June, while half the world is watching, Gov. George Busbee got news of Wrightsville in China”, some of its White citizens persist in practicing political voodoo.

It is a place where, as one former resident observes, a landowner is as apt as not to let slip his racial patronage by declaring, “This is my land, this is my tractor, and this is my nigger.” The half dozen families of property, among hundreds who have nothing, entrust the order of things to Sheriff Attaway, who has handled affairs to their liking for almost 20 years. Until the Rev. E.J. Wilson came to town wearing a brass cross around his neck and his social conscience on his shoulder, nobody questioned how Attaway executed his mandate.

To those who don’t have to deal with his law-and-order eccentricities, Sheriff Attaway is a hard man not to like. There is a sophisticated shyness about the man, not the sort of gladhanding, good-old-boy deception one often finds in boondock counties. And he has an open streak of human vanity. He keeps a bottle of Grecian Formula 9 hair dye on his desk and absolutely refuses to tell his age (around 63, by most calculations). And he can boast legitimately that through the years he has kept his county almost free of violent crime. How he apparently has managed to do that is what disturbs some people.

During the sixties, Attaway was the constant target of civil rights complaints, and in one publicized incident, he roughed up a Black teenager who had been drinking at a water fountain that had once been for Whites only. He has been known to come knocking on a citizen’s door for the mere collection of a debt some merchant had complained of.

So Black residents along South Valley Street were not especially surprised to hear Attaway and his deputies pounding on their doors the night violence erupted again in Wrightsville in mid-May. He showed up at Dearest Davis’ front door wearing a black riot helmet and holding a shotgun. He ordered everybody out on the porch, including 2-year-old James Eddie Wilson, who, at his mother’s prompting, does a squealy imitation of the sheriff’s angry command, “Get down off that bed!” Attaway and his deputies hauled away Mrs. Davis; a neighbor and two teenage girls. The Rev. Wilson and John Martin, local president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, already had been arrested that evening, as had been a group of people meeting at Wilson’s church, which Attaway’s deputies stormed with pointing guns.

Within the next two days. it would become abundantly clear that Attaway’s roundup had not achieved one important purpose: determining who fired the shots that left one woman seriously wounded and a policeman grazed and sent bullets whizzing by volunteer firemen attempting to put out a blaze set by arsonists at a South Valley cafe. Instead, Attaway wove a more bizarre case.

The sheriff spent much of the next day behind closed doors, plotting his strategy and fending off questions from reporters and lawyers alike as to just how many had been arrested (the count ranged from 25 to 44 before Attaway settled briefly on 38) and just what they were being charged with (Attaway changed the charges, too). Meanwhile, prisoners were shuttled in and out. Some new ones were brought in for questioning; some that had been held were quietly released without explanation. At one point, Reber Boult, an activist lawyer from Atlanta, attempted to question the Rev. Cornelius Horton, who was sitting inside a police car awaiting transport to a hospital for needed insulin he had been denied since his arrest hours earlier. Boult was shoved aside by an officer. Horton, whose car had been demolished during the first burst of violence in April, was one of the last prisoners released. He said he was never told what he was being held for.

By the second day, only three people remained behind bars; Wilson and Martin, the two leaders of the movement in

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Wrightsville, and Boult. Boult was wrestled to a cell by Attaway and a policeman after protesting Attaway’s accusation that he had interfered with an officer in trying to talk with his client. Attaway ordered witnessing lawyers out of his office and slammed the door in the face of baffled newsmen.

By the time the preliminary hearing got under way that afternoon, it was clear Attaway had achieved at least one of his aims. Wilson and Martin, the sheriff’s arch-nemeses, would have to stand before the bar of Wrightsville justice for all the grief they had caused the sheriff.

Wilson had been giving Attaway headaches since he arrived in town last autumn to pastor the Neeler Chapel AME Church. Wilson had earned his civil rights stripes back in 1961 during lunch-counter sit-ins in Albany, Georgia. As a minister in Hancock County, he worked briefly with the late John McCowan, the controversial Black leader who brought Black-majority rule to Hancock. When he got to Wrightsville, Wilson’s practiced eye told him that Blacks were not getting a fair shake. He began picketing, often alone, for more jobs for Blacks at a local supermarket. As the protest grew, so did the tension. When Wilson and Martin would lead their followers to the courthouse steps, a White mob usually waited for them to shout jeers and taunts reminiscent of the ugly days of Selma and Birmingham. The two sides clashed bitterly the night of April 8. Several Blacks were beaten, and reporters on the scene say deputies and policemen were eager participants.

It was that disturbance—not the more recent sniper incident—that Attaway finally decided to try to pin on Wilson and Martin more than a month later. Actually, not even the two’s lawyers, led by State Rep. William Randall, whose father helped drive the mule-drawn wagon during the original Poor People’s March on Washington, knew what the charges were until Attaway handed them the list just before the hearing.

One of the charges was that of obstruction of justice, involving some convoluted quarrel in the sheriff’s office over a woman’s role in a traffic accident, and another accused the pair of criminal defamation, alleging that during one of the rallies under Attaway’s microphones, they had called the sheriff a “lying bastard”. Testifying to that charge with a sense of outrage was Georgia Bureau of Investigation Agent Harold Moorman, who said he reported the cursing to Attaway, his close friend of 17 years.

More to the point were a series of inciting to riot charges. Two of the incidents cited actually were demonstrations that resulted in no rioting at all. Witness after prosecution witness conceded that neither Wilson nor Martin had advocated physical violence, even on the day of the melee.

Hearing the case was State Court Judge Joe W. Rowland of Johnson County, one of several local officials said to owe his job to the considerable influence of Sheriff Attaway. Rowland listened patiently to the defense attorneys’ repeated arguments that testimony had failed to establish that Wilson and Martin had provoked a breach of the peace, one of the principle criteria for letting such a charge stand. With the testy explanation that he didn’t have to explain his reasons, Rowland bound over Wilson and Martin to the grand jury, a vastly White body that also picks the county school board. Two weeks later, they indicted Wilson and Martin.

Attaway has stated publicly that he hopes to see the two protest leaders go to prison, but, more likely, the mysteries of Wrightsville justice will have to be unraveled by the federal courts before the issue is resolved. Meanwhile, the little town rests uneasily in its time warp.

Ron Taylor is a reporter for the Atlanta Journal.

Protest and Survive. Edited by E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981 $4.95.

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, p. 4

Protest and Survive is a powerful gift from European Nuclear Disarmament (END) to the growing American movement. The book originated as a reaction to “Protect and Survive.” a take-cover pamphlet prepared in 1980 by British civil defense. The U.S. version contains historian E.P. Thompson’s “A Letter to America,” and 11 other essays exploring the current arms race, nuclear war, military bureaucracy and the prospects for peacemaking.

The introduction by Daniel Ellsberg details the secret history of U.S. nuclear threats against other governments since the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The instances include Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran. “Every president,” writes Ellsberg, “from Truman to Reagan, with the possible exception of Ford, has felt compelled to consider or direct serious preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing, intense, non-nuclear conflict or crisis.” Most recently, the threats have appeared as public policy in the Carter Doctrine endorsed by the present administration, which would start World War III to protect Western oil interests in the Persian Gulf.

Emma Rothschild opens her essay with the observation that “the United States may buy itself two things with its $1 trillion defense budget of 1981 to 1985. The first is an economic decline of the sort that comes about once or twice in a century. The second is a nuclear war.” She examines the destructive costs of the American arms boom.

A former U.S. War Department analyst, Henry T. Nash, writes about his job with the Air Targets Division of the Air Force in the 1950s and 60s. He tells of the secrecy and professional competition existing in the bureaucratic preparation for mass homicide. Ambitious young analysts select and justify targets in the Soviet Union appropriate for receiving our nuclear warheads. If an analyst’s proposed target is selected for the official “Bombing Encyclopedia,” he may merit promotion and entree into even deadlier, more classified information.

Having left the Air Force project and become a teacher, Nash is now visited by “haunting memories of his work.” “What,” he asks, “enabled us calmly to plan to incinerate vast numbers of unknown human beings without any sense of moral revulsion?” He describes some of the “forces within the system that work against such self-examination.”

Amid insane circumstances worthy of all despair, the present disarmament movement now stirs on an international level. Protest and Survive is one sign that there is still a chance to save ourselves from ourselves. That the chance is genuine we can believe from the history of one of the nuclear threats which Dan Ellsberg recounts. In November of 1969, Henry Kissinger conveyed the warning to the Vietnamese at Hanoi “that Nixon would escalate the war massively, including the possible use of nuclear weapons, if they did not accept his terms.” Hanoi didn’t accept the terms and Nixon didn’t carry out his nuclear threat. Why not? As Nixon himself records in his memoirs, there were already too many Americans in the streets protesting the U.S. war policy.

Allen Tullos is a native Alabamian who is now completing his doctoral dissertation in history at Yale University.