He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  When croppers like Doug Washington settled with the landowner at the end of the season, they often discovered they owed more than they earned. “You couldn’t argue with them,” one cropper recalled. “You couldn’t ask no questions.” A black man dared not challenge a white man’s reckoning; they had to stand by and take what they got. Each year Washington worked harder, earned less, and slipped deeper in debt. “It was just like he was in prison,” his son Caliph later recalled. “So they would always keep you and say you’re going to have to stay another year or two before you can be relieved of this debt. So when the year would come up, you would never come up with what they wanted.”

  For the Washingtons and other blacks in Pickens County, conflict with the white landowners was constant. “If you didn’t do exactly what they wanted you to do,” Caliph said, “regardless of what your parents told you to do, then they would come out and riot at night and try and frighten us. Sometimes they would whip some, and sometimes they would kill some.”

  In the 1940s, Doug Washington quit farming and joined the exodus of rural folks looking for economic freedom in Birmingham’s industrial district. He found a permanent job as an iron ore miner at U.S. Steel’s Muscoda Mines in Bessemer. Muscoda was a slope mine that took advantage of the large outcrop of iron ore on Red Mountain by boring into the seam horizontally, at a downward angle. “The ore mines sorta grows on the men,” one worker believed. Down in the mines, Doug found reprieve from some of the aboveground racial tensions. “Weren’t no black nor white in the mines, just miners,” one of Doug’s fellow black workers later recalled. “There was no friction at all.” Both races rode the skip down into the mines together, came back together, and ate together. Everybody brought their own lunch: biscuits and fried meat rolled up in the newspapers.”

  Still, Bessemer shared many of the same impoverished characteristics of other Alabama Black Belt towns. Blacks made up 61 percent of the city’s population and held the lowest-paying jobs. The median income for all citizens in the city was among the lowest in Alabama, while the unemployment rate was one of the highest. Only 23 percent of Bessemer’s citizens had a high school education, and on average most residents had attended just beyond the eighth grade. Most of the city’s black population lived on unpaved streets in poorly constructed firetrap homes with inadequate plumbing. The 1950 census found two-thirds of the housing in the city substandard, with no indoor toilets. Public housing facilities in the city numbered zero.

  From Caliph Washington’s perspective, however, the move was a vast improvement from the hard living in rural Pickens County. For the first time in his life, he lived in a house with electric lights, a reliable coal-burning furnace, running water, and unlike most blacks in Bessemer, indoor plumbing. The Washington children now had enough food to eat, a warm place to live, and clothes without patches all over and shoes without holes and worn soles. The move to Bessemer also gave Caliph Washington hope for a better life. “When we got up here,” he remembered, “I could see all types of opportunities before my eyes,” especially in education.

  In the 1950s, Washington attended the all-black Dunbar High School. Originally named Bessemer Colored High School, the school opened in 1923 in a stately brick building located at 2715 Sixth Avenue North. Five years later, local educator Pearl Shelton Blevins suggested renaming the high school for the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose writings, at times, gently and ironically bespoke the tragedy of black life in America. “I know why the caged bird sings,” he wrote in “Sympathy,” “ah me / When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— / When he beats his bars and he would be free; / It is not a carol of joy or glee.” In “The Haunted Oak” he wrote from the perspective of a tree used to lynch a guiltless man: “I feel the rope against my bark / And the weight of him in my grain / I feel in the throe of his final woe / The touch of my own last pain.”

  Despite the promise of a high school education, Caliph Washington dropped out of school at fourteen, and like his father before him, he worked hard, earned little, and clashed with the white people. His opportunities for a better life soon slipped away. On July 14, 1957, his only hope was to run away from Bessemer and avoid a possible death on the branches of some haunted oak tree.

  In the early afternoon, the Greyhound bus entered the densely wooded Holly Springs National Forest and crossed Mississippi’s muddy Tallahatchie River. Only three more stops remained on the schedule: Holly Springs, Byhalia, and Olive Branch. In two hours or so, Washington hoped to arrive at the bus terminal in Memphis—a major transfer station located on Union Street, near the banks of the Mississippi River—where he would begin the next leg of his journey. For the first time in days, he relaxed just a little, and he chatted with a few fellow Greyhound travelers. Washington’s thoughts, however, never drifted far from the death of the white lawman—he knew from personal experience what would await him if he ever returned to Bessemer. “It was pretty hard growing up as a colored person in Bessemer,” he once said. “The white folks made you feel so . . . so small.”

  TWO YEARS BEFORE, on a late summer evening in 1955, Caliph and his older brother Joseph were at home while the rest of the family attended a church service. The weather that summer seemed downright tropical, as a suffocating heat wave sapped the energy from nearly every living thing. Caliph tried to keep cool by stripping down to his white cotton boxer shorts and matching T-shirt. He dozed fitfully in his bed—trying to get comfortable in ways you never can when it’s that hot—while Joseph, or “Doogie” as he was called, took a cold shower in the cramped bathroom adjacent to the enclosed back porch.

  The Washingtons lived at 418 Short Fifteenth Street, in a tiny shack located on the south side of Bessemer in the Thompson Town settlement. The area, one of Bessemer’s original land tracts from the 1880s, was once a respectable working-class neighborhood filled with miners and other industrial workers. Located on a level scrap of land near the base of Red Mountain, Thompson Town was once a center of union activities during the Great Depression, but by the 1950s it was a used-up community made up of Bessemer’s poorest black residents.

  The Washingtons resided in one of sixteen dilapidated shotgun shacks, all spaced close together, one room wide, one story high, and five rooms deep. Shotgun houses took their name from their simple, narrow design: a shotgun shell fired through the front door would come out the back without touching a wall. But the name was also a reminder that in the South, and especially in towns like Bessemer, guns were more than just architectural metaphors—they were rooted in everyday life.

  These shotgun houses were situated on a small tract of land in the center of a square block accessible only by a dusty unpaved back alley. Bessemer zoning regulations prohibited blacks from living in white-designated residential areas. “It shall be unlawful,” the code mandated, “for any person, other than persons of the white race, to reside within the areas described.” The boundary lines between black and white neighborhoods ran willy-nilly throughout Bessemer and separated the races along streets, alleys, blocks, and even lots. “They would separate us,” Caliph Washington later recalled, “and they had a square around you” that kept the races apart. In spite of the laws, the two races still lived in close proximity; the Washingtons resided in a tiny black island of homes surrounded by nearby white neighbors.

  Out the back door of the Washington home and across an overgrown field covered in tall summer weeds lived their nearest white neighbors, Margaret S. Parsons and her two teenage daughters, located at 428 Sixteenth Street. The manager of the nearby American Deluxe Cleaners, Margaret was the estranged wife of Ira “Dick” Parsons, a patrolman on the Bessemer police force. On the evening of August 29, this same Parsons, an ill-humored, hot-headed Irishman, was visiting his two daughters when he heard some noise behind the house. What happened that night would later be debated in court. “I looked out of my window and saw two boys whistling and waving at my daughters,” Parsons recalled. “I told one of my daughters to parade by the window to keep the boys
’ attention until I could go downstairs and see who they were. They were Caliph and Joseph Washington, both had nothing on but their underwear.”

  Parsons called the police department, and although off duty, he grabbed his gun and handcuffs and headed across the field. It was 10 p.m. Unaware of the coming trouble, Joseph walked onto the back porch and hung the mop he used to clean the bathroom over the rail to dry. As he turned to go back through the screen door inside, he caught a glimpse of a white man coming out of the darkness. Parsons leaped onto the porch and pistol-whipped Joseph on the head, back, and shoulders. He fell hard onto the rough-hewn plank floor. Parsons cocked back his dusty boots and began kicking Joseph in the ribs.

  When Joseph was lying half-conscious in the doorway, Parsons stepped over him and entered the house. He jerked Caliph out of bed and began hitting him over the head with the pistol. Caliph begged the officer to stop, but the pistol kept coming down again and again like a miner’s nine-pound hammer. Caliph was on his knees in front of Parsons. Blood flowed from the cuts on his head and stained his white T-shirt with a crimson hue. He tried to fall forward onto the floor and curl into a fetal position, but Parsons stood in the way, huffing, sweating, and cursing. The best Caliph Washington could do was grab the policeman around the legs and rest his head on Parsons’s kneecaps. When he felt the teenager received enough punishment, Parsons pulled the handcuffs out and placed them around the young man’s wrists. Just then, Bessemer police officers J. I. Jones and Herman Lowery entered the front door. They watched as Parsons struck Caliph another hammer blow to the head. Parsons stepped back, and the young man crumpled to the floor.

  Lowery and Jones, patrolmen working the three-to-eleven evening shift, picked the bloody and bruised Washington brothers off the floor, placed them under arrest, and transported them to the city jail. At 10:40 p.m., the desk sergeant on duty, Lawton Grimes, Jr., a tough-talking, chain-smoking lawman, charged the lads with indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Grimes, in charge of the department’s photographic services, snapped the pair’s mug shots (with Caliph’s head wrapped in bandages), took their fingerprints, and placed the boys in one of the windowless jail cells—cagelike structures with heavy iron bars, two metal bunk beds, and a slop bucket. The boys spent a long, sleepless night in the cell.

  Many whites, like Dick Parsons, hated the thought of black men having any contact with white women. “You couldn’t look at a white woman, not hard,” Washington later remembered. “Therefore if you looked at them and they said anything, the men would come out and beat you up. That’s what they used to try to do. They were telling us that they were keeping us in our place.”

  THE WASHINGTON BROTHERS were not the only ones facing the wrath of white men “protecting their women.” Even as they awaited trial in Bessemer, Robert Hodges, a Mississippi fisherman, discovered the body of young Emmett Till in the waters of the meandering Tallahatchie River. In August 1955, the fourteen-year-old Till, just a few months younger than Caliph Washington, violated southern social customs by innocently flirting with an older white woman. Two white men pulled Till from his uncle’s home, beat him, shot him through the head, tied a 125-pound cast-iron cotton gin wheel to his body, and dumped his corpse in the river. Washington and others of his generation understood that committing real or perceived crimes against whites would bring swift and deadly vigilante justice—something young Till, a northerner from Chicago, did not realize.

  On the morning of August 31, 1955, the Washington brothers, with bloody bandaged heads, entered a modest municipal courtroom. On the bench sat somber-faced, high-strung James Hamrick, a magistrate who was once reprimanded by the Bessemer City Commission for using profanity from the bench in earshot of a fashionable lady of high community standing. Defending the two brothers was Bessemer’s only black lawyer, David Hood, Jr. The husband of Caliph’s elementary school teacher, Hood was a tall, distinguished man with a soft voice and a quiet, gentle nature. Born on October 5, 1919, in Bessemer, Hood attended Dunbar High School, where he became a protégé of Principal Arthur Shores, who was studying and practicing law on the side and would one day become the state’s most respected civil rights attorney. Shores inspired Hood to follow in his footsteps, because the legal field in the South provided unlimited prospects for black lawyers. “No greater opportunity,” Shores said, “is offered anywhere in the country to raise the level of the Negro through the efforts of the Negro lawyer and be amply compensated, than here in the Deep South.” When David Hood graduated from Howard University School of Law, he joined Shores’s law firm, where he specialized in civil rights and constitutional issues.

  In the late summer of 1955, Hood was sitting across the courtroom from Bessemer city attorney Lee Bains, who prosecuted the complaint for the city. He called Officer Dick Parsons as the first witness. Parsons testified that the Washington boys “came out on the back porch of the Washington home dressed in only their under clothing, whistled ‘wolf calls’ and waved at my two daughters,” who could be seen in the second-story window of the home across the field. Officer J. I. Jones testified next, explaining that he saw the Washington boys in their shorts and T-shirts but he did not “see any exposure of their privates.” Jones added that he saw Parsons “strike at Caliph, but I don’t know whether he struck him.” Herman Lowery was next on the witness stand, testifying that neither of the boys resisted arrest while he was in their presence. “Both were bleeding about their heads,” he added, “when Officer Jones and I arrived on the scene.”

  Attorney Hood called Caliph to the stand in his own defense. “Officer Parsons came into the house and jerked me out of bed,” he testified, “and started hitting me over my head with a pistol. He hit me again after I was handcuffed.” Both Washington boys denied being outside the house whistling at anyone that night.

  Called back to the stand, Officer Parsons admitted that when Caliph grabbed him around the legs, “I struck Caliph more than one time with my pistol.” Hood also compelled Parsons to admit that “at first I did not know nor could I tell who the boys were from that distance away.” The Birmingham World, the area’s largest-circulation black newspaper, reported that tall weeds and a giant, unmovable, rusted, broken-down truck obstructed Dick Parsons’s view of the back porch of the Washington home. The porch was over two hundred feet away, a reporter for the paper observed, “and was built-in-side-of-the-house . . . which cannot be seen from the Parsons’ home.” Hood also called several of the Washingtons’ neighbors, Willie Mae Dean, Mary Dean, Annie Jones, and Reverend J. C. Snider, all of whom testified that they did not hear anyone whistling or calling anybody that night. The World concluded that Lawyer Hood presented a “terrific, rugged, brilliant argument for the defense,” contending that Officer Parsons could not see who the boys were from that distance.

  Following testimony, Judge Hamrick threw out the indecent exposure charge against Caliph and Joseph Washington but divided the two remaining counts between the boys. He found Joseph guilty of resisting arrest and gave him a $60 fine and court costs. The court convicted Caliph of disorderly conduct and ordered him to pay a fine of $100 plus court costs and to serve a nine-day hard-labor jail sentence.

  The Washington brothers paid their fines, and Caliph served his time on a city work crew, but the physical and mental scars from the incident remained. “We didn’t leave it alone,” he later recalled, “’cause we had skull cracks and everything.” With the help of David Hood, the brothers sued the City of Bessemer for use of excessive force. The suit only inflamed local politicians, lawmen, and vigilantes. Harassment and intimidation by local whites became more frequent, and the Washingtons moved to a home in the “Pipe Shop” community on the north side of Bessemer, away from the watchful eye of Dick Parsons.

  In the fall of 1955, the entire state seemed on edge. U.S. Steel had recently shut down many of the iron ore mines along Red Mountain, sending Doug Washington and others looking for work. Civil rights emerged as an important issue as Birmingham’s federa
l district judge Harlan H. Grooms ruled that the University of Alabama must admit a qualified black applicant, Autherine Lucy. At the time, Lucy prophetically warned, “I know there is going to be some unpleasantness.” When she began classes in February 1956, the resulting riots infuriated her legal defense team, and they filed a complaint that accused the university of conspiring with unruly mobs to prevent integration. The university board of trustees responded by expelling Lucy. No further attempt to integrate the university would come until 1963.

  In the Bessemer public school system, blacks made up almost 70 percent of the school-age population. In light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Brown v. Board of Education, integration seemed a looming reality. The previous May, in the second Brown ruling, the high court announced that integration should proceed at “all deliberate speed.” For most whites in Bessemer, integration at any speed, slow or fast, was unacceptable.