He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  When these rowdy men from the mining villages and steel mills were not fighting, they were watching other beasts kill each other, flocking to dog, bear, cock, and wildcat fights held in pits near the center of town, where they placed bets with their hard-earned wages. Professional gamblers set up shop in this frontier atmosphere and profited mightily from games of blackjack, craps, and five-card stud. Each day, trains arrived from Birmingham and other areas of the South with “gambling dandies” aboard; travelers hoped to participate in the city’s free-flowing “sporting activities” and the “unusual array of corruption and wickedness.” All this activity thrived in spite of city ordinances outlawing gambling houses, cockfighting, and all games and sports of an “indecent character.” One Bessemer citizen demanded city officials impose severe penalties on the men who ran the gambling rooms “before it was too late” and God’s wrath destroyed this modern Sodom and Gomorrah.

  A few reform-minded citizens blamed Bessemer’s lawlessness on its distance from the county’s governmental, judicial, and political center in Birmingham. Residents resented the inconvenience of having to travel over poor roads to take care of business in Birmingham or use the seventy-five-minute one-way ride on the slow-moving dummy train line—the forerunner of the streetcar line between the two cities. Bessemer maintained a begrudging and uneasy relationship with Birmingham. The two cities shared similar virtues, vices, fortunes, and misfortunes. Like Birmingham, Bessemer was a blend of western brutality, northern capital, and New South hype. Both fought to become the South’s greatest industrial city, and both promoted themselves as the “Pittsburgh of the South.” But it was Birmingham, nicknamed the Magic City, that emerged as the region’s industrial giant, while Bessemer lagged far behind. This calamity convinced Bessemer’s political leaders that Birmingham stood in the way of the path to greatness for the Marvel City. “For many years,” one politician proclaimed, “Bessemer has been . . . the south end of a northbound mule to the rest of the county.”

  With this butt-of-a-mule inferiority complex in concert with crime and corruption, Bessemer struggled with status anxiety, poor civic self-esteem, and an identity crisis. Hoping to alleviate these problems, the Alabama legislature in 1893 established a separate judicial territory in western Jefferson County, excluded Birmingham’s circuit court authority, and created the Bessemer Division of the Jefferson County Circuit Court or the “Bessemer Cutoff.”

  Residents were less than satisfied. “Jefferson County has long ago ceased to have a government representative of her people,” the Bessemer Workman opined in 1901. The alternative, the newspaper proposed, was to carve out a Bessemer County and provide citizens with “the right of local self-government.” Bessemer politicians pressed for it, but the idea failed to gain support. “Aside from the giving of several men good offices, it is hard to see the advantage of a division,” a journalist observed, “it would be doubling the expense of county government without advantage of the governed.” In 1901, Birmingham politicians constitutionally restricted the formation of new counties in Alabama.

  This “final” resolution, however, did little to quell Bessemer’s quest for secession and independence. For decades more, local antipathy toward Birmingham compelled politicians to keep up the fight for a new county. Only that way, they felt, could Bessemer establish an identity separate from Birmingham. Politicians tapped into this festering resentment by promising to lead Bessemer out of Birmingham’s shadow, but Bessemer’s widespread violence, crooked politicians, and illegal activities made some folks in the Magic City long for greater distance between the two locales.

  The Bessemer Cutoff arrangement did little to bring law and order to the area or reduce its vice and violence. Even when these vices were conducted in private, they would disgrace any community, but in Bessemer the debauchery took place in the center of town. City laws prohibited “houses of ill fame” and barred “lewd women” from visiting saloons or living within fifty feet of one, but as a politician once quipped, “You can make prostitution illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.” Residents complained that prostitutes promenaded along every Bessemer street and solicited customers “over, in, under, and about” all downtown businesses in the “most flagrant and outrageous violations” of city and state laws—statutes that the mayor, town marshal, and the entire police force knew as well as the “sun which rose each morning.” This was “worse than a crime,” another citizen observed, because it degraded the moral standing of “those whom the community had selected to protect it from such inflictions.” Still another local demanded that officials “remove these lewd women” because of the “shame and disgrace” of allowing “these women to live where they do and go at will upon the main streets. It should be stopped. It must be stopped.” But during Bessemer’s first two decades, politicians and lawmen ignored community pleas to enforce the laws.

  In the early twentieth century, local newspapers headlined the incessant and sadistic violence: “L. F. Duff Found Stabbed on Street,” “Fight in Bank Saloon,” “Fatal Blow Dealt by Whisky Flask,” “A Negro Killed in Bloody Encounter.” On December 23, 1906, a writer for the Birmingham Age-Herald reported that police “came upon one of the most horrible and bloody scenes that has ever been known to the local force.” They discovered Albert Gray, a laborer, at his home lying on the floor “cold in death” with his jugular vein cut out and a puncture wound through the heart. “There was hardly a spot on the floor of the two rooms that was not covered with blood,” an observer noted. “It was also splattered over the walls and ceiling.”

  Had he lived that long, even old Devil John Jones might have found the level of violence beyond the norms of Scots-Irish frontier life. Bessemer’s murder rate was one of the highest in the country, and the victims were often innocent citizens who happened to stroll by when the bullets commenced to flying.

  TEMPERANCE REFORMERS BELIEVED they had the answer to the high crime rates in Bessemer and Birmingham: shut down the saloons, and Satan shall be subdued. Saloons, one overzealous Alabamian argued in 1907, resulted in crime, poverty, insanity, and murders; they brutalized manhood, degraded womanhood, and resulted in suffering childhood. But closing the saloons would bring about prosperous homes, contented wives, joyful mothers, happy children, useful men, peaceful communities, prosperous businesses, reduced crime, and fewer criminals. With Bessemer as the example, it would be hard to argue with their assessment.

  Following a 1907 vote in favor of countywide prohibition, these reformers succeeded in restricting legal alcohol sales in Alabama, but they failed to end the heavy consumption of liquor in the state, especially in Bessemer. “Blind Tigers,” “Blind Pigs,” roadhouses, speakeasies, and shot houses served illegal hooch at locations in or near the Marvel City. Some locals became walking “Blind Tigers” and served up liquor hidden in traveling bags, in fruit crates, or inside an overcoat or bathrobe. One Bessemer police officer described one of these dispensaries:

  Weaving along the sidewalk came an apparition presaging trouble and dressed in an old bath robe designed for someone several sizes larger, its onetime blue expanse unacquainted with soap and water, oversized bedroom slippers, and a once gay-colored handkerchief around her head. Wrinkled, toothless, always repulsive looking, old Rachel was coming . . . talking to herself. Rachel made a precarious living selling a concoction of canned heat, denatured alcohol, embalming fluid, and any other ill-smelling liquid that came to hand, which she called whiskey. Proving that she believed her sales talk, Rachel had become her own best customer.

  Old Rachel had plenty of help in meeting the demand of the alcohol-deprived citizens, as moonshiners produced increasing quantities of corn liquor, which one Bessemer citizen described as some of “the best made” in the United States.

  With easy access to such resources, the closing of Bessemer’s saloons also had little effect on the area’s crime, violence, and debauchery. In 1911, Jefferson County citizens voted to repeal prohibition and reopen the saloons. The next year, as Bes
semer celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday, the editor of the Weekly complained that the city was still “one of the most lawless” in the South. “The precentage [sic] of shootings and killings being notably high has long been acknowledged even by the most loyal citizens and also that this is due largely to the indiscriminate carrying of firearms.”

  To mention just one example: in 1912 Will Smith, a black man accused of shooting a Bessemer police officer, barricaded himself in the home of a white resident, J. G. Bruce. More than 150 armed whites from all over town surrounded the house and unleashed a “rain of bullets” into the residence. When the bloody Smith appeared on the back porch, the Weekly reported, “a perfect fusillade of shots followed and he fell and a rush was made on him and his body was hauled out. . . . The negro . . . was an ugly dirty looking specimen about 30 or 35.” In 1916, Police Chief Thomas Benjamin Wallace died of a gunshot wound as he and Bessemer deputies wrestled with a farmer who resisted arrest.

  During the 1920s, a booming economy and more workers living in close proximity led to more murders and more demands for whiskey—even with nationwide prohibition throughout the decade. When the economy went bust in the 1930s, the culture of violence intensified further. The Great Depression brought strikes and other direct challenges to the economic status quo from those seeking better wages, collective bargaining, union recognition, and voting rights for working-class whites and blacks. On the left, Communist Party officials and labor union organizers seized upon the local economic downturn to try to expand support among workers. “The time was ripe,” one laborer later recalled, “for organizations to rise up and struggle against oppressive conditions.”

  But such efforts brought down a reign of terror. Officials of U.S. Steel’s Tennessee Coal and Iron division (TCI) brought in strikebreakers and hired gunhands, while Alabama governor Benjamin Meek Miller deployed the National Guard to repress the rebellion and restore order and stability. On Red Mountain, one Bessemer resident recalled, “it was just like a battleground sometimes. And they would have to send the guards to quell them.” The ACLU reported that repression and violence in the area was “continuous, not incidental.” To maintain the status quo, one observer noted, the steel industry in the area “fostered a climate of opinion in which violence against radicals flourished.”

  Intimidation took various forms. Sheriff’s deputies and city police raided homes and enforced an antisedition law that made it a crime to “possess more than one copy of any material advocating overthrow of the government.” Urban vigilantes, like the Ku Klux Klan, resorted to kidnappings, beatings, bombings, floggings, and shootings in defense of the “existing order.” Any perceived threat to the racial and economic establishment compelled this new southern vigilantism. Steel company officials, to maximize profits, needed a docile black workforce that would accept low pay and long hours without question. Enforcing racial codes and strict company rules through violence kept blacks in a subservient role and separate from whites. Vigilantism in Alabama had a long tradition stretching back to the frontier days of Devil John Jones and other rough-hewn men who enforced their own laws in preservation of the status quo.

  Many whites in Bessemer, as in other areas of the South, saw violence as the first, and best, method to preserve regional traditions and the southern way of life. “From a generally narrow concern with the classic frontier problems of horse thieves and counterfeiters,” wrote a keen observer of the southern scene, “vigilantism broadened its scope to include a variety of targets connected with the tension of the new America: Catholics, Jews, Negroes, immigrants, laboring men and labor leaders, political radicals, advocates of civil liberties, and nonconformists in general.” When one union organizer complained about the violence and extralegal activities, a lawyer in the Bessemer circuit solicitor’s office told him, “I know it’s not constitutional, but some things are laws that are not constitutional. That’s the way we do [things] in Bessemer.”

  3

  “THESE WHITE FOLKS WILL KILL YOU”

  The Bessemer Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan was one of the largest in the South—so powerful that they erected this sign at the Bessemer city limits in 1959.

  CALIPH WASHINGTON’S MIND was elsewhere. As he drove down South Bessemer Road just after midnight on Friday, July 12, 1957, his thoughts drifted to the evening’s fun with a pretty young woman from Birmingham. Several hours earlier, he borrowed his father’s shiny two-tone, crystal-green-metallic-over-mist-green 1950 Chevrolet Styleline sedan to take his buddy Robert Shields on a double date with sisters Mary and Birdie Robinson. Washington left his parents’ home in northern Bessemer about 4:30 p.m. and drove the five miles to Shields’s house in an area of southwestern Birmingham called Travellick. Shields climbed into the car, and the duo drove to pick up the Robinson sisters, who lived on Avenue T in the smoggy industrial suburb of Ensley.

  With no particular place to go, the four teenagers (Mary paired with Washington and Birdie with Shields) spent the evening engaged in aimless fun and distraction: laughing, talking, and driving. They stopped at the Dairy Frost in Smithfield in northwestern Birmingham for ice cream; paid a call on the sisters’ aunt in Bessemer; then dropped in on Washington’s older brother George, who lived nearby. On the way back to Ensley, the quartet stopped at Grant Judkins’s Blue Gardenia nightclub in Brighton for sandwiches, Cokes, and dancing. About ten minutes before midnight, Washington and Shields dropped the girls off at their Ensley home and drove back to Travellick.

  In front of Shields’s house on Park Avenue Southwest, the teenagers chatted about the girls. Washington seemed to be smitten by Mary Robinson. “I need to see her again,” he told Shields. “I really do like her.” Shields stepped out of the car and told his dreamy-eyed friend to be careful while driving home that time of night. It was late, after midnight, and the seventeen-year-old promised his mama that he would be home at a decent hour. Washington supposed that she might make a fuss about the time, so he decided to spend the night with his brother George in southern Bessemer.

  But as he drove the Chevrolet down the hill from Shields’s house, Washington’s mind focused mostly on the young lady, and at the time little else mattered. He turned left onto near-deserted South Bessemer Road and headed west toward home. He rested his elbow out the window and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in rhythm with the R&B music on the radio. A few late cars drifted by as he drove down the dimly lit road. Traveling southwest, Washington soon crossed from Birmingham into the small municipality of Brownville and then along the narrow path through Lipscomb. In 1957, Lipscomb was virtually all white, and blacks from outside the cloistered village were expected, as one observer later noted, “to come through but not stop.” This vengeful spirit was about to intersect with the life of Caliph Washington.

  FEWER THAN THREE thousand people lived in Lipscomb’s three square miles. A quiet mining village once known as East End, the insulated town grew up around the old Lipscomb Station stop on the Birmingham-to-Bessemer dummy train line. In the 1920s, Lipscomb was along the original 1,696-mile U.S. Highway 11 route that stretched from Rouses Point, New York, to New Orleans, Louisiana. On its thirteen-mile run from Birmingham to Bessemer, U.S. 11 followed a snaking, narrow path along the northern base of Red Mountain and crossed a dozen or more heavily used railroad lines—delays and police speed traps were just around any curve of this dangerous road.

  Soon after the route opened in 1927, Alabama highway officials designed plans to build a new road, patterned after the German Autobahn, to connect Jefferson County’s two largest cities. The result was a straight and wide four-lane road that local residents dubbed the “Bessemer Super Highway.” With the addition of streetlights in 1940, locals boasted that this super road was the longest “white way” east of the Rocky Mountains. It seemed an apt description when a few years later, the Ku Klux Klan erected a welcome sign at the city limits that showed a horse-riding, hooded Klansman holding a Confederate battle flag. When the Bessemer Ministerial Association refused to dema
nd the removal of the sign, the president of the organization quit in protest and proclaimed that “erecting that sign was an un-Christian act that pierced the heart of every Negro who saw it.” That was but one of the many sins being committed up and down what some locals began referring to as the “Klan Highway.”

  Lipscomb officials fought to keep Bessemer’s un-Christian acts from corrupting their tiny kingdom. One evening, police officers discovered a car just inside Lipscomb’s city limits with an inebriated woman passed out in the front seat. They knew that she had her fill of sin in Bessemer, so the lawmen pushed the car a few feet across the city line and reported the incident to the Bessemer Police Department. When they arrived, Bessemer officers shoved the car into Lipscomb and called back and told Lipscomb police to deal with the drunk. According to one officer, this went back and forth for quite a while until the woman sobered up and drove off.

  Lipscomb’s ministers preached often on sin and prayed to the Lord to keep pure the souls of the city’s residents. “Lord, thank you for this little town of Lipscomb,” a pastor prayed one evening. “Thank you Lord, that we don’t have no gambling joints in Lipscomb. And thank you Lord that we don’t have no bawdy houses in Lipscomb, and Lord thank you that we don’t have no beer joints in Lipscomb. Lord thank you that we don’t have no dance halls in Lipscomb.” In the congregation, one churchgoer mumbled in response, “Lord, we ain’t got nothing.”