Morgan took personal charge of the grand jury, while his handpicked assistants, Ken Moore and Harry Pickens, began working through the judicial backlog, which included Caliph Washington’s case. The testimony was emotionally charged as witness after witness stepped forward to tell of Hammonds’s activities. “I was scared,” one witness said, “and still am . . . so many rumors and what you read in the newspapers and it’s hard to know what to believe and who to believe.” Before his testimony, the witness asked Morgan, “Could you keep me from being bumped off?”
By the end of the summer of 1967, Hammonds was indicted on six counts of bribery and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. He was arrested and placed in a cell in Bessemer’s Jefferson County Jail, not far from Caliph Washington. Hammonds quickly posted $10,000 bond and was released. Rudy Pipolo received an indictment on one count of conspiracy to commit murder. He quietly surrendered to authorities and was later acquitted by a Bessemer jury that found little convincing evidence that he was involved in this plot to murder the judge. Soon afterward, Pipolo filed a $400,000 libel suit against the Birmingham News for publishing a story that identified Pipolo as a Mafia figure involved in a murder plot. Pipolo said the accusations left him embarrassed, humiliated, and suffering from poor health and severe financial losses. At the trial, FBI agents testified about their “personal knowledge” of Rudy Pipolo, which, as one lawyer later explained, enabled the jury to “draw the correct inference as to . . . the truth” and reject the libel suit. Pipolo returned to New York, where the FBI continued to monitor his activities until his death in 1983.
In response to the indictment, Hammonds charged that the grand jury proceedings were being orchestrated by his “political enemies” and that he had “discharged the duties of his office without fear or favor to anyone.” He predicted that he would be cleared of all charges “when the light of truth finally exposes my accusers.” Hammonds sued Morgan and Alabama attorney general MacDonald Gallion in an effort to regain the duties of his office that went with the title he still held, deputy district attorney for the Bessemer Division of Jefferson County. He also fought efforts by the Alabama State Bar to censor him for the “alleged misconduct.”
Hammonds received some measure of exoneration the next year when juries dropped seven of the eight charges against him. In March 1968, he was found guilty on one charge of bribery. “I was wrongfully convicted,” he later told an official with the Alabama State Bar, and “although I am innocent of that charge, I have elected not to appeal the same.” Hammonds cited finances as his reason to not file an appeal.
In May 1968, on the eve of his sentencing, Hammonds also gave up the fight to remain district attorney and resigned. “The affairs of this elective office had been in a state of uncertainty,” he added, “and I felt it in the public interest to terminate litigation over this office . . . out of a regard for the people who elected me.” Hammonds was sentenced to two years imprisonment but was placed on probation and never served any jail time.
Hammonds also surrendered his law license, rather than facing disciplinary action by the Alabama Bar. “It is . . . my desire to surrender my privilege to practice law,” he wrote, “until such time as the controversy over my conduct has been resolved.” Hammonds never practiced law again.
The week following Hammonds’s resignation, Alabama governor Albert Brewer appointed Harry E. Pickens as the new district attorney for the Bessemer Cutoff. He was a short, wiry, long-faced man of fifty, with generous ears, deep-set eyes, and the un-southern habit of talking too fast in the courtroom. “These jurors might have trouble hearing you,” a judge once scolded him. “You talk like a machine gun.” Pickens was a native of the Bessemer area and earned a law degree from the University of Alabama. Earl Morgan called the decision a splendid choice: “I think the people of the Cutoff area are extremely fortunate to have the services of a man of Mr. Pickens’s high character and with twelve years of experience.”
Pickens’s appointment closed another chapter in Bessemer’s tumultuous history, but Caliph Washington still waited for his closure behind a cell door in the Jefferson County Jail in Bessemer—almost three years since Judge Frank Johnson ordered him released. He made a note in his diary: “Bessemer Attorney Harry Picken [sic] enter office May 15 or 16, Thursday noon 1968, after Hammond [sic] resigning.” While James Hammonds fought for money and power in Bessemer, Caliph Washington sat in his cell and prayed for freedom.
14
WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN
In a bitter irony, ACLU attorney Charles “Chuck” Morgan used Caliph Washington to integrate Alabama’s prisons, but he did little to help Washington gain his release.
ASLEE WASHINGTON, CALIPH’S mother, could not understand why her son was still in jail. She believed that God worked a miracle through Judge Frank Johnson, and she wanted to thank him and ask him why Caliph remained behind bars. Aslee, who never learned to read or write, asked a friend to write Johnson and request an audience with him. “She would like very much to thank you personally for ordering his release,” the friend wrote, “and would also like to see your order.” In July 1965, Washington’s family and friends believed that Johnson’s decree would result in Caliph’s immediate release from prison. “There are so many things about his release and re-arrest that are puzzling,” the family friend wrote Johnson.
In response, the judge wrote Aslee Washington that her request for a private meeting was inappropriate and unnecessary. “This Court’s order was based strictly upon the applicable and controlling laws as I understood it,” he explained. “Nothing else entered into the matter; therefore, no expression of appreciation is appropriate.” Johnson explained that Caliph Washington was represented in his court by “competent counsel,” and that any questions should be directed to that attorney, Fred Blanton.
Blanton, however, would not represent Caliph Washington during the appeal of Johnson’s ruling. “I would have liked very much to have supported your decision in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit,” Blanton wrote Johnson. “I had hoped the court in New Orleans would have appointed me, but such was not the case.” He complained that the Washington family talked with attorneys for the ACLU and the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP and that he had been “frozen out of the picture.” He wanted to help “indigent defendants,” like Caliph Washington, receive quality legal advice, but “to be upstaged, especially after that hectic day in Montgomery last December, is hard to take.”
What Blanton did not realize was that the Washington family had no patience to gamble on another court-appointed attorney. They needed some certainty after the last public defendant, Kermit Edwards, mounted defenses that twice resulted in the death penalty for his client. Within days of the state’s appeal to the Fifth Circuit, the Washington family formally retained Orzell Billingsley, Jr., and David Hood, Jr., to represent Caliph in all state and federal courts. Part of that agreement “authorized and empowered” them to “employ any and all other attorneys” that they deemed necessary to “represent us in this matter.” Since the Washingtons had no money to pay attorneys, Billingsley looked for funding sources (and legal assistance) elsewhere—namely from the NAACP and the ACLU.
Orzell Billingsley asked for assistance from his close friend and longtime drinking partner, Charles “Chuck” Morgan, Jr., who opened the ACLU’s southern regional office in Atlanta in 1964. The thirty-four-year-old Morgan earned a law degree from the University of Alabama and maintained a lucrative private law practice in Birmingham until he became involved in several high-profile civil rights cases during the 1950s and 1960s. This brought Morgan and Billingsley into the same legal circles and highlighted their mutual passion for equal justice, unbridled notoriety, high legal fees, and smooth bourbon. “We did our drinking ‘across the tracks,’” Morgan remembered, “usually at Orzell’s house, which stood beside the railroad tracks, so near to them that it literally shook when trains approached. In Birmingham the lines were so clearly drawn that it was against the law even to fis
h or to play checkers with blacks, let alone to ‘socialize’ or plot with them. But plot we did.”
In 1963, the flamboyant and outspoken Morgan left Birmingham following the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and a highly publicized rant in which he placed the blame on the white community. “Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb,” Morgan wrote. Following a brief stint with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he went to work for the ACLU in Atlanta, but the plotting and drinking with Orzell continued—even if the communication took place by telephone and the whiskey flowed from separate bottles.
Late afternoons for these two lawyers, as Morgan later recalled, were a “thigh slapping, tornadic event.” Morgan pulled a bottle of bourbon from his bottom desk drawer, as one writer later observed, began drinking heavily, and called Billingsley or one of his “Alabama cronies” to “dream up schemes” saturated with “whiskey soaked optimism.” Perhaps on one of those long-distance binges, Billingsley and Morgan agreed to help Washington to simultaneously gain his freedom and to make a legal challenge to racial segregation in Alabama’s prisons and jails.
On September 2, 1965, Morgan wrote a letter informing Edward W. Wadsworth, the clerk for Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that he would appear at the court on behalf of lawyers Billingsley and Hood and appellant Caliph Washington. In reality, however, Morgan decided to focus almost exclusively on the jail segregation case and turn over the appeal to Erskine Smith, a leader in the Alabama ACLU, and a partner in the progressive-minded firm of Berkowitz, Lefkovits, Vann, Patrick & Smith. The thirty-one-year-old reform-minded Smith moved with his family from Los Angeles to Birmingham in 1947 and, like many new residents, found the racial tensions perplexing. After graduating high school, he moved to Washington, D.C., and worked as an administrative assistant to Alabama congressman Laurie Battle to provide enough money to pay for college at George Washington University. He later received his law degree at the University of Alabama and returned to Birmingham to practice law. In the early 1960s, Smith was among other young Birmingham attorneys who successfully fought to change the city’s form of government, which ultimately ended the political career of Eugene “Bull” Connor—Birmingham’s longtime city commissioner who ordered the use of police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators in May 1963. Two years later, in 1965, the Caliph Washington case intrigued Smith. “I have offered to assist in the defense of this case without compensation,” he wrote, “but I will not be able to devote sufficient time, without assistance.” Smith and Morgan would bring the power and prestige (and Billingsley hoped the money) of the ACLU to Washington’s defense team.
Orzell Billingsley also solicited legal assistance from the NAACP, which just a few months before reopened its Alabama chapter headquarters for the first time since the state barred the organization from operating in the state in 1956. On June 1, 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama had no constitutional basis to prohibit the NAACP from operating in the state. Billingsley was one of the lawyers that fought the case for eight years through fourteen state and federal court appeals and four Supreme Court appeals.
For Caliph Washington’s case, Billingsley contacted the new Alabama field director, Julian Hall, told him Washington’s story, and urged the organization to get involved in “just about the best case . . . at this time in Alabama.” In turn, Hall contacted attorney Robert Carter, senior counsel with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York, and asked for support “not only for the benefit of the defendant, but because of the publicity to be derived.” Although Hall was no lawyer and professed ignorance as to the “legal ramifications of this case,” Billingsley assured him that a favorable outcome was not in doubt because of Washington’s strong legal position. Come see for yourself, Hall wrote Carter, and “investigate the merits of this case.”
In response, Barbara Morris, an associate counsel with the defense fund, explained to Hall that Bessemer was a long way from New York City and that the local field directors had to investigate civil rights cases and provide research materials so the office could evaluate its merits. “I would suggest this course of action to you,” she wrote Hall.
Orzell Billingsley, in turn, sent scraps of information on Caliph Washington to the defense fund, which brought another response from Barbara Morris. “Inasmuch as you have not sent a letter,” she wrote, “I am at a loss to know what you desire me to do.” She wondered if Billingsley was seeking financial and legal assistance from her office. “If that is a fact,” she continued, “we would be pleased to know who Caliph Washington is, why he is in jail, or on what grounds he bases his plea to be released from jail (since I have a notion that would be his desire) and any other facts which would enable me to know what on earth you are talking about.”
Billingsley never responded to Morris’s letter—most likely because he had already surreptitiously added Robert Carter of the NAACP as an attorney of record to documents filed with the Fifth Circuit Court. When the NAACP sent no monetary or legal support for Caliph Washington’s appeal, Erskine Smith wrote Robert Carter and asked him to employ Billingsley and Hood on behalf of the NAACP. The Birmingham lawyer described the Washington case as “meritorious” and one that might become “landmark” in its impact. “I believe that your organization would gain a great deal of respect by undertaking the defense,” he emphasized.
NAACP representatives noted that “our name was entered in the case without our knowledge” and expressed doubt that the organization would “undertake financial responsibility” for Washington’s legal expenses—especially since Orzell Billingsley “had quoted some exorbitant fee” for his legal services. Barbara Morris complained to Erskine Smith that Billingsley had never responded to previous requests for additional materials related to the Caliph Washington case “so that we can intelligently evaluate our ability to participate in the litigation.” Billingsley, however, still offered no response but continued to submit court documents bearing the name of the NAACP.
The Alabama chapter of NAACP and Julian Hall were nonetheless eager to participate in Washington’s defense, but they had no money to finance the case. This was the first local civil rights organization to show substantial interest in Caliph Washington—over eight years after his arrest. Through the years Caliph’s mother, Aslee, asked for assistance at a few mass meetings of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR, an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the driving force behind the civil rights protests in Birmingham). At times, the group took up a special “love offering” for Washington and provided prayers for the imprisoned man but little else. “We could have done more,” recalled Reverend Abraham Woods, an ACMHR leader, “and we should have done more, but we were fighting for voting rights and the hiring of black police officers. We had to focus on the big picture. It was tragic to leave him behind, but that was the reality.”
Reverend C. Herbert Oliver, executive secretary of the Inter-Citizens Committee (Birmingham), a group that publicized cases of alleged police brutality and unjust crimes committed against blacks, said that Caliph Washington’s was “not one of the cases we highlighted.” Nonetheless, just before he left Birmingham for a position in New York in 1965, Oliver researched and wrote a lengthy “synopsis” of the case and criticized state courts for giving Washington the death penalty while awarding the widow insurance money for an accidental death. “When the death certificate, the coroner’s certificate, and the whole Alabama Court system concur in the judgment of homicide and award death,” Oliver wrote, “how can this whole system turn around and award money on grounds that it was accidental? We have no objection to the widow receiving money by some means, but why should Washington receive death? Should a man be put to death for first degree murder when the Alabama Court system says in effect it was not murder but accidental?”
Oliver’s synopsis of the
case was widely circulated locally and attracted the attention of the Concerned White Citizens of Alabama (CWCA). The organization had its origins in early 1965, when seventy-two white Alabamians traveled to Selma and marched to the Dallas County Courthouse to proclaim that there were “white people in Alabama who . . . speak out against” police brutality, voter registration intimidation, the absence of public civility, and suppression of dissent. On March 6, 1965, Reverend Joseph Ellwanger, a Lutheran minister of a predominately black congregation in Birmingham, proclaimed from the Dallas County Courthouse steps, “We are sickened by the totalitarian atmosphere of intimidation and fear.” The next day, state and local police fought several hundred civil rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma.
During the weeks following the march, the CWCA drafted bylaws, elected officers, and approved a mission statement:
The purpose of this organization shall be to promote by non-violent and non-partisan action, the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the United States of America, The Bill of Rights and the constitution of the state of Alabama. Violations of these principles shall be brought to the attention of the public and of elected officials. It shall be our concern that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be shared equally by all persons in Alabama.
The officers included Reverend Joseph Ellwanger (president), Congregationalist minister Al Henry (vice president), Helen Morin (treasurer), and Eileen Walbert (secretary).
Eileen Kelley Walbert was one of Birmingham’s most outspoken critics of the racial status quo. In the years following World War II, she moved to Birmingham from New York with her musician husband Jim and grew to abhor the city’s racial climate. “The fact that we couldn’t associate with anybody we wanted to was just wrong,” she later recalled. “Our husbands and friends had just returned from Europe fighting against fascists and here we were living in a fascist state. It was not democratic. We were not living by the Constitution.” Eileen joined the Birmingham Council on Human Relations and worked for racial equality and many other causes, including her passionate opposition to capital punishment.
He Calls Me by Lightning Page 24
