In early April 1968, Coleman stood trial in the same Eutaw courtroom alongside the same lawyer, Orzell Billingsley, before the same judge, and listened to the same prosecutor question the same witnesses. But unlike his trial six years before, when Coleman faced an all-white jury, this time his guilt or innocence would be determined by an all-black jury. Following two days of testimony and summations, the jury retired to consider the evidence and emerged in just two hours to declare “Big Time” Coleman not guilty of murder. The verdict brought forth shouts of jubilation from the black spectators in the courtroom; at the first trial, just six years before, local blacks were too intimidated to attend. At a mass community meeting that followed the trial, a local pastor proclaimed that this was just the beginning of “what can happen when black folks stick together.” A teary-eyed Coleman agreed. “A change is going to come about,” he said. “And I’m a symbol of it.”
While Coleman celebrated freedom, eighty miles north of Eutaw in Bessemer, Caliph Washington waited for his opportunity for justice. Frustrated by years of delays, he felt abandoned by the band of lawyers who used his name to set legal precedent in Washington v. Lee but did little or nothing to help him gain his freedom. Chuck Morgan, the iconic civil libertarian, refused to take Caliph’s case, having already moved on to his next high-profile battle. During April 1968, Washington complained to a friend that not one of his attorneys—Billingsley, Hood, or Smith—had come to see him in “many, many months,” and he prayed for legal guidance.
When no help arrived, Washington read up on criminal procedure and composed a handwritten application for designation as in forma pauperis—in the hope of getting a court-appointed attorney. “Come now Caliph Washington,” he wrote,
who is under oath, states:
1.He is a citizen of the United States of legal age.
2.He is a pauper without funds to pay the cost of this action.
3.He seeks the relief petition in good faith.
4.He feels he is entitled to the relief entitled under the guarantees of the Constitution of the United States and proceeds with his case without prepayment of cost.
Washington’s notes suggest that he mailed a copy of this application to various court officials in Bessemer; if he did so, the application was never acted upon.
As time permitted, and without Caliph’s knowledge, Orzell Billingsley and Erskine Smith continued their pro bono work. In January 1968, while awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision in Lee v. Washington, Billingsley wrote another writ of habeas corpus and mailed a draft to Erskine Smith. In response, Smith wrote that he still did not understand “what writ or warrant” Caliph was being held under and whether he was reindicted. “Although we believe a speedy trial has been denied the defendant, we may have a lengthy series of independent litigation on this through the state and federal courts and the petition may precipitate an early trial in the case,” Smith wrote, and Caliph needed to understand the “possible consequences of filing this petition.” But Smith believed that now was the time to file the petition after they “gathered the necessary information as to the present status” of the case. For whatever reason (perhaps due to the upheaval in the district attorney’s office in Bessemer), Billingsley delayed filing the writ and was still contemplating the legal maneuver in May 1968, when Chuck Morgan told him to “go ahead and file and see what happens.” But Billingsley did not heed Morgan’s advice.
In the meantime, the individuals supporting the imprisoned man organized a new group, the Caliph Washington Defense Committee, to keep the pressure on Caliph’s lawyers and public officials—the type of support that rallied around Johnnie Coleman in Greene County. The defense committee included Reverend Larry Morkert and Eilleen Walbert of the Concerned White Citizens of Alabama; union activist and Bessemer civil rights leader Asbury Howard; Caliph’s mother, Aslee; and Reverend Ralph Galt of the Birmingham Council on Human Relations.
A newcomer to the area, Ralph Galt was a recent faculty hire at Miles College, a traditionally black institution in Fairfield, the second largest city in the Bessemer Cutoff. As a white Congregationalist minister on a Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) campus, Galt saw his work as a prophetic calling of God. “I do not consider myself an outsider in the community,” he once wrote, “but rather a messenger, preacher, or missionary sent by God.” Gray-haired and bookish, Galt’s quiet appearance masked his raging evangelistic fervor for God and justice. Born in Baoding, China (southwest of Beijing) on September 6, 1915, Ralph was the son of Congregationalist missionaries. His father, Elmer, was a bike-riding evangelist who spent thirty-one years ministering to the spiritual and social needs in Hebei province. His mother, Altie Cumings, was a teacher in the mission schools. Young Ralph inherited his parents’ love of China and their hunger for knowledge. He became fluent in Mandarin Chinese and was so completely acculturated that he thought of himself as more Chinese than American. Yet he chose the faith of his father rather than the Buddhism that surrounded him. “They do not pray to a Christian God,” Galt once wrote, “but to an all-powerful creative spirit. My father always believed, and I believe, that you must leave all other religions behind to become a Christian.”
Ralph also shared his father’s pacifist views on war. “For as far back as I can remember,” Galt wrote later, “our family, my father, and I, were pacifist although this was not a tradition in our church.” These antiwar and antiviolence perspectives drew young Galt to the writings and teachings of Gandhi, Toyohiko Kagawa, and E. Stanley Jones. From Gandhi, he learned the philosophy of nonviolence and direct action that would be used so effectively by Martin Luther King, Jr. Jones’s teachings deepened Galt’s opposition to war, and Kagawa’s writings influenced his views on Christianity, socialism, and economic cooperatives.
In the mid-1930s, Ralph Galt came to America and entered tiny Grinnell College in Iowa, where he quickly organized a chapter of the pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and invited Toyohiko Kagawa to speak on campus. Following his graduation from Grinnell, Galt began studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he worked with poor people through the FOR. “I felt like I had two cultural homes,” Galt said, “and I was like a bridge. I was never unhappy about that but considered it a privilege.”
By 1940, Galt married, graduated from seminary, and returned to China, where he served the rural poor near his father’s mission. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese forces that occupied the area designated the Galts as “enemy aliens” and placed them under house arrest. After six months, they allowed the Galts to return to the United States in exchange for some prisoners of war, but before releasing them, the Japanese staged a propaganda interview before the media. When Japanese officials tried to get the Galts to publicly blame the United States for the war, Ralph said that “all who engage in war are sinning against man and God and . . . Japan sinned by invading China. We should have peace together, not war.”
When the family returned to the United States in 1942, they found an America solidly behind the war effort. Ralph Galt, however, went on a speaking tour of conscientious objector camps on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. When the government required him to register for the wartime draft, Galt refused. “I am not trying to shirk my social responsibility,” he wrote in September 1942, “and I try to obey all just and equitable laws,” but the Selective Service Act was an unjust law because war was a “great evil” and a horrible sin in the eyes of God. Like an Old Testament prophet, Galt warned that if America continued to participate in a sinful war, God’s judgment would soon follow. “God does not want men,” Galt proclaimed, “his creatures, to kill and hate each other in war.
Federal officials responded swiftly and arrested Galt. He was tried in federal court and sentenced to serve five years in the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, where he served alongside bootleggers, conscientious objectors, and others who refused to register for the draft. According to Galt, he convinced prison officials to perm
it racial integration in dining halls and recreation rooms at the prison, where he met the black pacifist Bayard Rustin. Over a decade later, Rustin served as a key adviser to Martin Luther King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and provided King with a deeper understanding of the philosophy and tactics of nonviolent direct action.
After twenty-one months in prison (one-third of the sentence), Galt received parole, moved to Oklahoma, and began a ministry on a Shawnee Indian reservation in 1944. Galt established several social ministries to the Shawnees, including a series of co-ops, which compelled outsiders to brand the minister a Communist. Galt rejected the notion. “My faith includes social action,” he said, “in the name of, and because of, my faith in Jesus Christ.” Co-ops, he added, were neither capitalist nor Communist but simply cooperative.
For the next twenty years, he served as a pastor in small churches in the upper South and the Midwest, before moving to Birmingham in 1966, where he believed he could act as a peacemaker in the wake of violent upheavals in the state. Galt and his wife Louise quickly joined civil and human rights organizations, assisted students in registering as conscientious objectors, started cooperatives, registered new black voters, and established a prison ministry. The last brought him into contact with Caliph Washington.
On April 28, 1968, Galt visited Washington, who had been transferred to the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham, most likely because of space issues in Bessemer—although Galt later claimed that county officials moved Caliph from jail to jail and at times isolated him as punishment for the Washington v. Lee case. Washington told Reverend Galt that he would stand trial sometime in May 1968. “I did not understand exactly how he learned this,” Galt wrote after the meeting, but “he feels that he could expect no justice in such a trial.” Washington pleaded with Galt to send at least one of his attorneys to visit him in jail immediately. Following the meeting, Galt wrote to each of the lawyers and relayed Caliph’s request for “closer direct contact” with the men who supposedly represented him. Washington was frustrated and wanted the attorneys to seek his release through a writ of habeas corpus, filed on the grounds that the state violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial. “He has already served in jail more time than a minimum required for a life sentence,” Galt added, and none of Caliph’s prison time would count as time served if another white Bessemer jury convicted him a third time.
In early May, sheriff’s deputies moved Caliph back to the county jail in Bessemer, presumably to stand trial, but nothing happened: no lawyers came to visit, he saw no judge, and he had no trial. Throughout May and June, members of his defense committee kept the pressure on the individual attorneys, the ACLU, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to take some action on Washington’s behalf. None came. In July, a frustrated Washington wrote to the one man who helped him in the past, Judge Frank Johnson. He explained that after Johnson ordered his release in July 1965, he had been incarcerated in Bessemer or Birmingham without benefit of counsel. “I haven’t even been inside a courtroom since I have been here,” he wrote, “and no one ever has informed me of no court date.” Caliph understood that Judge Johnson’s order required Bessemer officials to retry the case or release him from custody. “Three years have fully passed and still I sit here not knowing anything,” he wrote. Caliph asked the judge to order the state to release him or appoint a lawyer to represent him in Johnson’s court on a new writ of habeas corpus. “Sir, I will appreciate this greatly,” he added, “because I have been denied my right to a speedy trial.” He added:
On July 14th this year I have be [sic] in confinement eleven years. Never has I been allowed bond at no time, even though I don’t have money to make one anyway. Sir, I hope that my writing this letter, wont [sic] be bothersome to you, because it is about all I can do, for I have prayed for things to be righted. But, some people just don’t seem to care for anything but money. And the only reason I writing to you is that I’ve been reading about how honorable you are. And I believe that you are about the most just man there is where the law are concern. [sic] I take it that you are a Christian at heart, and I pray for you and your family each day. Because you, really has done a great deed for me and my family. If there are anything more you can spare towards us, it will be so much appreciated.
Judge Frank Johnson, however, could offer Caliph no advice or assistance in his predicament.
In August, Bessemer district attorney Harry Pickens wrote a letter to Caliph’s mother, Aslee, and requested that she come see him at his office in the Jefferson County Courthouse in Bessemer. She brought several witnesses with her to listen to Pickens explain that Caliph had no lawyers on record to defend him. “You must get a defense lawyer for him,” he said, and submit his name as the attorney of record for him. If she failed to do so, the court would appoint a lawyer for him. Aslee was stunned and “quite agitated.” Ralph Galt tried to soothe her with the promise of hiring a “real good active lawyer” before the deadline, but she had no money to pay for one—the age-old problem of poor people lacking access to quality legal representation. But where were all those other attorneys who had provided Caliph legal assistance for over eleven years? What happened to Fred Blanton and Robert Morel Montgomery? Where were Erskine Smith, Chuck Morgan, and Robert Carter? And what had become of K. C. Edwards, David Hood, and Orzell Billingsley?
Caliph also wondered what happened to Orzell. “I am quite disappointed in your service of my case,” he wrote Billingsley, and it seems “to me that you are no longer interested in this case of mines [sic].” Washington heard on several different occasions that Billingsley repeatedly denied being Caliph’s attorney. “So now I ask that you let me know how you stand on this case,” he wrote, “so, I’ll know what to do for myself. If you are my attorney, then I do expect to hear from you personally.”
Orzell Billingsley must have responded immediately, because within days of Caliph’s letter, on October 8, 1968, he filed the long-hoped-for writ of habeas corpus in the Jefferson County Court in Bessemer. The writ would require the sheriff of Jefferson County or any authorized deputy sheriff to bring Caliph Washington before the county court in Bessemer and show cause, if there be any, of his detention.
Ten days later, on October 18, Special Circuit Judge Robert W. Gwin granted the writ and “ordered, adjudged and decreed” that the sheriff “produce the body of Caliph Washington before this court” on November 11 at 10 a.m. If Harry Pickens could not justify the ongoing incarceration of Washington, then a circuit judge could set the captive free. At least the case was finally moving forward after years of waiting.
The news thrilled Erskine Smith, and he wrote Orzell Billingsley that he was “most anxious to be of assistance” in helping Caliph Washington. Smith sent Billingsley a copy of the Needel v. Scafati decision—a Massachusetts case that Smith believed applied directly and clearly to Washington’s situation. The case involved a man held under warrant without indictment or arraignment who was indigent, ignorant, without counsel, and in no position to claim his right. “Caliph seems to fit in all of these categories,” Smith wrote, “but we must be aware of the fact that the district attorney will contend, because of our appearance in the Fifth Circuit, that he continuously had a lawyer since we entered the case.” Erskine Smith said he told Harry Pickens that although David Hood and Orzell Billingsley appeared on the brief submitted to the Fifth Circuit, they were never paid, nor were they ever entered as the attorneys of record. Smith wanted to establish before the court that Caliph Washington was without representation since the Fifth’s ruling and had no lawyer to advise him that there was a “lack of a speedy trial.” Erskine advised Orzell to tell Harry Pickens and the judge in the habeas proceedings that he was recently engaged to represent Caliph Washington in filing the writ. “I think this would be accurate,” Smith added, “since Caliph Washington has continually and insistently asked some, almost any, lawyer, to file a petition for habeas corpus on his behalf.”
Caliph’s habeas corpus proceedings began at just after 11 a.m
. on November 11, 1968, in the courtroom of Judge Edward L. Ball, the same judge who presided over the jury that awarded James “Cowboy” Clark’s widow the money from the accidental death insurance policy a decade earlier. Orzell Billingsley stood before the judge on behalf of Caliph Washington. Harry Pickens represented the state and spoke first, reviewing the history of the case and explaining why Washington was still in custody. Billingsley argued that Caliph’s confinement without bond was a violation of the cruel and unusual provision of the Eighth Amendment, the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Alabama Constitution. Not to mention, Billingsley quickly made note for the record, “he was tried by a jury in this court and the jury consisted of all white male citizens.”
Since courts set aside the convictions of 1957 and 1959, Judge Ball believed the proceedings should focus on why Caliph Washington was still imprisoned after the 1965 order of Judge Frank Johnson and its subsequent affirmation by the Fifth Circuit in 1966. “As I read Judge Johnson’s order,” he said, “—just my thinking on it—he did not enjoin the state from rearresting him or reprosecuting . . . , but it looks like we’re down to whether or not he has been denied a fair and speedy trial. I believe that’s the guts of your petition.” Billingsley agreed.
Harry Pickens argued that his office had made a good faith effort to bring Caliph Washington to trial. He first learned of the case in November 1967 following “certain changes” in the personnel in the district attorney’s office (the removal of James Hammonds) and immediately began searching for witnesses. “It’s been a long time since 1959,” he added, but he eventually located Furman Jones, who was missing from the last trial but was willing now to come testify. Pickens discovered that a few of the witnesses died during the last decade, but he located enough of the others to set a trial date of Monday, June 17, 1968. Nonetheless, he could find no attorney representing Caliph Washington.
He Calls Me by Lightning Page 30
