He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  Although Hood and Billingsley were strong and successful attorneys, Bessemer, where white supremacy and racial superiority were so deeply ingrained, was no place for a black lawyer to defend a black man. So on September 23, 1957, Judge Mathews appointed Kermit Charles Edwards “to defend one Caliph Washington, an indigent defendant, on trial for murder.” Edwards had fourteen days to prepare a defense for a capital crime.

  A sullen man with a tired oval face and dark eyes, K. C., as he preferred to be called, was a 1932 graduate of the University of Alabama with a bachelor of laws. Born on May 6, 1909, the Summerland, Mississippi, native became a lawyer, as he wrote in 1931, because of a “desire on my part to engage in an honorable profession for the benefit of the public with a fair compensation for myself.” This quest for cash, however, led Edwards to push the boundaries of ethical conduct throughout his legal career in Birmingham. He frequently solicited cases in the black community, especially personal injury claims, and gained a reputation as an opportunist and an “ambulance chaser.” In 1938, a lawyer complained to the Alabama State Bar Association that Edwards was engaged in some of the “most damaging cases of solicitation” he had ever witnessed.

  Nonetheless, on this day in open court, K. C. Edwards stood with Caliph Washington as Judge Mathews read out the charge of murder in the first degree. “How do you plead?” Mathews asked.

  Washington pleaded not guilty by reason of self-defense. It was now up to the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant should be convicted of murder in the first degree.

  Four days later, on September 27, attorney David Hood filed motions to delay the trial. He first moved to “quash the venire” (to annul and void the jury pool) and “quash the indictment” (to void the accusation of the crime issued by the grand jury) because the systematic exclusion of blacks from jury service would deprive Caliph Washington of his rights guaranteed under the constitution and laws of Alabama and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Hood also asked the court to suspend the trial because Caliph was insane at the time of the alleged crime, and an inquiry was needed into his mental condition.

  At the pretrial hearing on September 30, attorneys Hood, Billingsley, and Edwards showed the court that in spite of making up a majority of the city’s population, almost no black names were listed on Bessemer’s jury rolls since its founding. Hood pointed out a special notation beside the name of Willis Nesbit, the only black on the jury roll for September 9—the letters “C.O.L.” He argued that the calling of Nesbit and the other blacks for the September 9 jury pool was a fluke or a deliberate attempt to undermine one of the key aspects of the defense’s court case. Several white Bessemer attorneys testified that they never struck a black man from a jury roll or seen one on a jury. William C. Smithson began practicing law in Bessemer in 1917, and he testified that “I just didn’t see them [blacks on juries] or come in contact with them in my work.”

  In response, prosecutor Howard Sullinger argued that there was no systematic exclusion of black men from juries, and that the defense’s arguments were so broad that they were frivolous and provided no answer to the question of whether Caliph Washington could get a fair trial. “He’s covering everything from Genesis to Revelation,” Sullinger proclaimed, “just on the theory that he might be able to prove something somewhere down the line.” Blacks, Sullinger believed, “don’t come in here with constitutional rights to sit on any case. I think the attorneys have a right to select their own juries.” Judge Mathews agreed.

  Nonetheless, David Hood continued to hammer his point about race-based jury exclusion. Washington’s defense team called dozens of black men from the Bessemer Cutoff who met the qualifications but had never been called to serve on a jury. “No persons of negro blood,” Hood concluded, “have been called to serve on the jury venires” from the community where they lived. The attorneys knew that the conservative white judge would never grant the motions they requested, but they demonstrated for a future appeal that the defendant would be neither indicted nor tried by a jury of his black peers.

  This was the same legal strategy behind Hood’s decision to test the waters of an insanity plea. He hoped to delay or sidestep what he believed to be an inevitable guilty verdict from an all-white Bessemer jury. But Dr. Frank A. Kay, head of the psychiatric department at the University of Alabama Medical College of Alabama in Birmingham, testified that Washington was not psychotic or insane. “There is nothing in his history to suggest that he has ever had any mental disturbance that would affect his mental competency,” Kay concluded. David Hood quietly dropped the idea of the insanity defense, as all of his attempts to delay or postpone the trial failed.

  IN THE FALL of 1957, as Caliph Washington’s trial grew closer, Bessemer police detective Stud Grimes and his partner Andrew M. “Andy” Eubanks trailed defense attorneys Hood and Billingsley to their homes, offices, and “wherever they went,” Billingsley later recalled. They were an intimidating presence. Andy Eubanks was a slack-jawed sourpuss detective with bright-white, slicked-down-comb-over hair. At seventy-two, Eubanks had worked in law enforcement for over fifty years, having begun his career as a Birmingham police patrolman with a horse and wagon in 1906. When Grimes and Eubanks teamed as crime-solving partners in 1949, they quickly gained a hard-boiled reputation. “Safe crackers, murderers, burglars with reputable names in the Cutoff are all known to these keen veterans,” the Birmingham News reported in 1955. They were the type of flatfoots that solved crimes with a slap, a kick, a knee, a fist, and a nightstick. When necessary, they used a revolver.

  In the days and weeks leading up to Washington’s trial, Grimes and Eubanks put on street clothes and tailed the two lawyers in an unmarked Oldsmobile. They seldom said a word or left their car. They watched, waited, and smoked. “You should get in that car when both of our pipes are going full blast,” Grimes once said. “It’s quite a sight and smell also.”

  On Saturday, October 5, two days before Washington’s trial, Grimes and Eubanks approached attorney Hood as he exited his law office with an employee, Betty Fears. For whatever reason, the crime-fighting duo decided to search Hood and Fears. Grimes snatched Hood’s briefcase from his hand and opened the latches. Inside, on top of a stack of legal documents and notes, was the lawyer’s pistol. Eubanks rumbled through Fears’s purse and pulled out a switchblade knife. Given the rough nature of Bessemer politics, most lawyers, black and white, carried a weapon for protection. Regardless, in the days before this racially charged trial, Bessemer police badgered anyone who dared defend Caliph Washington. Grimes and Eubanks arrested Fears and Hood. Police charged Fears with carrying a switchblade knife or a knife longer than three inches, and Hood with a violation of the state firearms act. A judge later fined Hood $100 and sentenced him to ninety days in jail.

  Hood believed these tactics were retaliation for his involvement in the Caliph Washington case as well as civil rights lawsuits. A few weeks earlier, Hood filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Bessemer on behalf of two black residents, William Thomas and Bleven Stout, who were denied admission to all-white Roosevelt Park. When the two men attempted to use a tennis court at the park, an irate mob of armed white men confronted them, and one yelled, “We plan to keep our community white.” Bessemer police arrested the men for their own protection. Attorney Hood claimed in the suit that the Bessemer city code, which denied blacks the use of parks and swimming pools, was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. Bessemer officials promised to build a separate but equal park for the city’s black residents, whereupon Thomas and Stout dropped the lawsuit. As soon as the federal judge dismissed the case, Judge Gardner F. Goodwyn, Jr., reduced the sentence for Hood’s concealed-weapons charge to a fine of $10 and no prison time. Although the forces of segregation won this fight, the intimidation of David Hood continued from police officers and the Klan, who were often one and the same.

  During Washington’s trial, Hood would discover two unexploded sticks of dynamite behind his home, an
d he received threatening phone calls night and day. Persons unknown broke into his home one day and stole $500, and that night they robbed his office of another $700—Hood never trusted banks and kept large sums of cash in a desk drawer at work and under his mattress at home. He installed large security lights around his home, but the harassment seemed to grow worse. Hood then hired three men to guard his house at night but soon dismissed them because of the cost. He decided to guard the house himself and began sleeping on the couch in the front room while clutching a loaded rifle.

  Early one morning at 1:30 a.m., someone tossed several sticks of dynamite toward the front porch but missed the target. The bomb rolled away from the porch and exploded—dislodging bricks from the house and showering Hood with glass. He ran outside with the gun but found no one to shoot. “In my opinion,” the attorney said soon afterward, “whoever threw the dynamite was afraid to get close to the house and stood across the street and didn’t throw it as far [as] intended.” His wife and two children, asleep in a back bedroom, were uninjured. Although Hood feared for his life and the safety of his family, he remained undeterred in the quest for integration in Bessemer and civil rights for its black community.

  IN 1957, AN end to racial segregation in Bessemer seemed inevitable, but most whites resisted the change. They joined other communities throughout the South and organized a local White Citizens’ Council chapter to preserve the laws and customs of segregation through a “lawful and logical” program of raising public awareness and disseminating information. The Bessemer Citizens’ Council distributed segregationist literature that included such titles as God Laughs at the Race-Mixers, We’ve Reached Era of Judicial Tyranny, The Supreme Court Must Be Curbed, God the Original Segregationist, and Let’s Restore to Africa Her Stolen Children. The rhetoric in these pamphlets was unmistakably clear. Black Christians, as one writer believed, should remain content with being “our brothers in Christ without also wanting to become our brothers-in-law.” Another essayist wrote that cannibalism persisted in parts of Africa because the natives had no contact with white civilization. “That is still the way the Africans act,” he supposed, “when they don’t have one single Southern White man around to hold them back.”

  The Bessemer Citizens’ Council held a number of community forums during 1957, one featuring a fiery speech by Judge George Corley Wallace. The thirty-seven-year-old Wallace was just beginning his first campaign for governor. As a circuit judge in Barbour County, he was a populist showman with shifting political convictions. In 1948, he remained a loyalist to the national Democratic Party at a moment when most Alabama delegates bolted the convention over civil rights. As historian Dan Carter concluded, Wallace was a segregationist, “but he wasn’t a stupid segregationist.” But his stance on segregation was immovable.

  By the mid-1950s, he was a vocal opponent of federal government attempts to end segregation, and he urged white southerners to resist these intrusions. Addressing four hundred whites in the auditorium at Bessemer High School, Wallace warned listeners not to be lulled into a belief that integration was inevitable. “It definitely is not,” he said. “We should keep telling the Supreme Court, the Congress, the President, and the Communist Party that we are not going to integrate, and that’s that.” The only way that forced integration would occur, Wallace insisted, was to “subvert by force” the constitutional rights of the majority of the southerners. “Therefore, the fight that you and I and other southerners are making against unlawful and unjustified interference by the federal government in local affairs,” he said, “is a fight to preserve constitutional government in this country and to guarantee that all citizens of this nation remain free.”

  For many whites in the Alabama of 1957 and 1958, Wallace’s rhetoric was too flaccid. When he criticized primary opponent John Patterson’s connections to the Ku Klux Klan, he picked up the endorsement of the state’s chapter of the NAACP. With this unwelcome support from the state’s leading civil rights organization, he finished a distant second to Patterson in statewide balloting. Judge Wallace returned to the bench, where he focused on ways to defy federal court orders for his own political gain.

  Wallace’s call for the end of federal interference must have seemed prophetic in September 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower ordered riot-trained units from the 101st Airborne Division to enforce integration at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Senator John Sparkman (D-AL) called on Eisenhower to withdraw the troops as a “first step toward restoring the principle of States Rights, and rebuilding the confidence and goodwill between the two races so essential to the well-being of both.” Local papers reprinted a telegram Sparkman sent to Eisenhower in which he argued that one of the “great tragedies” of Brown v. Board of Education was the “destruction of friendly relations between Negro and White in the South and the engendering of hatred and intolerance.” The tremendous gains of both races were now “lost or endangered.”

  These nationwide tensions served as a volatile backdrop and further poisoned the racial climate in Bessemer as Caliph Washington’s trial began at 9 a.m. on October 7, 1957, with defense attorney K. C. Edwards and prosecutor Howard Sullinger striking the jury. In the end, twelve white men from the Bessemer Cutoff area were the final selection. When all the witnesses in the case were sworn in, Judge Mathews turned to Sullinger and Edwards and proclaimed, “All right, gentlemen, state your case.”

  IN THE WEEKS leading up to the trial, Sullinger built a strong case against Caliph Washington based on forensic and ballistics reports obtained from the Bessemer Police Department. Chief Barron, following Cowboy Clark’s death, ordered a detailed autopsy and a thorough scientific investigation. This modern approach to crime solving was part of Barron’s meager effort to establish professional standards for his force, but he did little to teach his men that a suspect, even a black one like Caliph Washington, was presumed innocent until proven guilty. But in a racial crime, especially when a black man was accused of murdering a white lawman, whether in 1907 or 1957, the assumption of guilt permeated the investigation, trial, verdict, and sentencing. This preordained conclusion empowered Sullinger to portray seventeen-year-old Caliph Washington as a cold-blooded, ruthless murderer.

  Testimony on behalf of the state began with Dr. Lun Hsun Kwong, the pathologist at West End Baptist Hospital in Birmingham who performed the autopsy on Cowboy Clark around 2 a.m. on Friday, July 12. A native of Beijing, Kwong passed the examinations administered by the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners a month before performing Clark’s autopsy. During the exam, he was asked to describe the “gluteus maximus muscle” and to give its “origin, insertion, and relationship to other structures.” In response, Kwong described the buttocks as a “powerful muscle.” A few weeks later, as the now-licensed pathologist sat in the witness chair, he told the court that after removing Clark’s clothes, he noticed a small opening on the dead man’s chest, three to four inches below the nipple on the left side; the wound corresponded with a hole in Clark’s bloody blue shirt. He opened the abdomen to locate the object inside. He worked his way through the extensive internal hemorrhaging, examined each organ, and discovered two holes in the stomach made by the object that penetrated the skin. As he searched further, he found that the projectile had cut into the pancreas and punctured the aorta, the main blood vessel. “An aorta is like a water pipe or garden hose . . . a rounded tube,” Kwong explained. Once it was ruptured, Clark went into immediate shock and was dead in twenty minutes.

  As the pathologist continued to trace the path of destruction, he discovered a bullet lodged in Cowboy Clark’s lumbar vertebrae. Removing it was tedious, but Kwong chiseled around Clark’s vertebrae and made certain the bullet remained in its original condition, without any added scratches or deformities. Deputy coroner James Thompson carefully pulled it out and wrapped it in cotton gauze. This lone bullet, Kwong testified, was flattened on one side, having followed a straight, diagonal path of destruction through Clark’s body.

  Kwong not
ed that the bullet first nicked Clark’s left forearm, then entered below his nipple at a 45-degree descending angle. It traveled six to seven inches before lodging in the backbone. On cross-examination, Kermit Edwards asked Kwong to explain how the bullet entered at such a strange downward angle, considering that Clark stood over six feet tall and Washington was around five foot seven. That was a difficult question, Kwong responded, because the answer depended on the position of the victim and the location of the gun. If Clark was standing, the gun could have been higher, but perhaps Cowboy was bent over at a 45-degree angle. “A bullet can travel in all kinds of directions,” Kwong added. “It’s very hard to predict. It will not follow the same truth, as you would imagine.”

  THE NEXT WITNESS was Dr. Carl J. Rehling, director of the Alabama Department of Toxicology. Within days of Cowboy Clark’s death, he received the pistol, bullet, and bloody shirt from Chief Barron. Rehling was one of the pioneers of toxicology in Alabama. In the early 1930s, as a twenty-seven-year-old instructor of analytical and organic chemistry at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (later Auburn University), he and Herbert W. Nixon developed the idea for a state crime lab. In the wake of the sensationalist and bungled Scottsboro Boys trials, the state legislature passed, and Governor Bibb Graves signed into law, a bill that created the state department of toxicology. In the depths of the Great Depression, Alabama appropriated a meager $8,500 per year (which included salaries) and mandated that the agency cooperate with coroners throughout the state to determine cause of death in cases involving “foul play” and provide scientific assistance to all law enforcement agencies.