He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  In spite of her preconceived notions, Christine accepted Caliph’s invitations, and the pair began an interracial dating relationship in the Bessemer Cutoff of 1971—where fears of race mixing and miscegenation ran deep in the community. For most residents, both black and white, it was an unusual, if not improbable, sight. Only four years earlier, in June 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated all laws prohibiting mixed race marriage in Loving v. Virginia, but Alabama continued to enforce its laws until a 1970 district court ended the practice in United States v. Brittain. Even then, the long-standing statute in the Alabama Constitution of 1901 prohibited the legislature from ever passing any laws to “authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or descendant of a Negro.” Although it went unenforced, the miscegenation prohibition remained on the books until Alabama voters annulled the law in 2000—the last state in the nation to do so.

  FOR GENERATIONS, THE notion of a black man and a white woman remained an existential threat to southern society and provided justification for segregation, violence, and incarceration. During the 1970s, the social stigma of interracial courtship and marriage in Alabama compelled some people to fix their eyes upon Washington and Luna. “I was used to people staring at me,” she later recalled, “and talking about me . . . and the way I walked.” While he never lived in fear, Washington recognized, at some level, that someone staring might be an official from Bessemer who would remember him, arrest him, and place him on trial for a fourth time.

  Nonetheless, he remained a free man the remainder of 1971, but the threat of indictment lingered in the shadows. In January 1972, Judge Ed Ball convened a new grand jury, and Harry Pickens brought the 1957 murder of James Clark before the eighteen citizens of the Bessemer Cutoff. Pickens summoned a host of witnesses to testify that a suspect (“whose name to the grand jury is otherwise unknown”) murdered Clark. Witnesses included Bessemer police chief George Barron, former Lipscomb police chief Thurman Avery, Bessemer police officer O. E. Kendrick, sheriff’s deputies Walter Dean and A. J. Wood, and “eyewitness” Mary Davidson. On January 14, 1972, the grand jury indicted Caliph Washington for “unlawfully and with malice aforethought” killing James Clark by shooting him with a pistol. Jefferson County sheriff Mel Bailey issued an arrest warrant, and on January 21, two sheriff’s deputies arrived at the Washington home at 2232 Fifteenth Street North in the Pipe Shop community of Bessemer. They arrested Washington and took him across town to the Jefferson County Jail—back to where it started almost fifteen years before.

  Within a few hours, however, attorney David Hood secured a $5,000 bond, and an emotionally ravaged thirty-two-year-old Caliph Washington returned home. On January 28, 1972, Caliph was arraigned in Judge Ball’s courtroom, where he pleaded not guilty. Attorneys Orzell Billingsley and David Hood objected to the arraignment and argued that the court was without jurisdiction. “To arraign the defendant,” Hood wrote, “. . . constitutes cruel, unusual, and unjust punishment.”

  In darker moments, Caliph Washington predicted that the prosecutors would never give up until they saw him back in jail for life. “They can’t let me go free,” he said at the time, “because that would be saying they held me unfairly.” Yet his faith brought forth hope. “I pray that their minds will be opened and they’ll see things differently.” In reality, this latest action by Bessemer officials seemed part of an epic struggle for justice, fairness, and equality. “My problem began when I was born,” he once said. A fair and just trial could not be had in Bessemer, he believed, because of the racist attitudes and actions of police officers and jurors from 1957 onward.

  Orzell Billingsley, the champion of forgotten black men, vowed to fight for Washington’s release all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, because his client was not guilty. “Heretofore,” he said, “we’ve only received illegal trials at the Bessemer Circuit Court, but we’ll get by that and get him free.” He and Hood filed a petition for removal to Federal Judge Clarence Allgood to have Washington’s case moved from the country court in Bessemer to the federal court in Birmingham. The attorneys had to prove to the federal court that this action was warranted. They restated the same well-worn arguments: (1) as an indigent, Caliph had been denied his right to counsel; (2) the state had violated the defendant’s right to a speedy trial; (3) his years of confinement without trial was cruel and unusual punishment; (4) the selection of grand and petit jurors was discriminatory and violated the due process clause; and (5) Washington had been denied civil rights guaranteed under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the U.S. Constitution.

  While awaiting a decision, Judge Ball moved Caliph’s fourth trial to March 8. On February 23, 1972, Judge Allgood denied the petition and sent the case back to Bessemer for trial. In response, Hood filed a motion for emergency relief to Judge Allgood and requested a stay on any trial of Caliph Washington while an appeal was heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Allgood denied the motion. The trial could go forward.

  But on March 8, 1972, the day the trial was scheduled to begin, Judge Ball decided, for unclear reasons, to move it to May 22, 1972. In the meantime, the Fifth Circuit dismissed the appeal of Judge Allgood’s decision because Washington’s lawyers failed to “timely docket the appeal within the time fixed by the rules.” Regardless, the trial never began on May 22 or in the months to follow. On October 12, 1972, Judge Ball wrote that legal action in Caliph Washington’s case was still pending before the Fifth Circuit on the matter of “remandment” of his cause. “It is hereby ordered,” he wrote, “that this case not be reset until this matter is resolved or upon the request of the district attorney.” The Fifth Circuit, however, took no further action, leaving the decision to try Caliph Washington a fourth time up to Harry Pickens.

  As 1972 yielded to 1973, a period in which the dark clouds of Watergate began to shadow the nation, Pickens had still scheduled no trial. That same year Governor George Wallace appointed him to a circuit judgeship in the Bessemer Cutoff. “I’ll miss being a district attorney,” Pickens said at the time, but the new job would carry a great responsibility to the public that required “more dedication on my part than ever.” When Pickens left the district attorney’s office, he passed along the case file for the fourth trial of Caliph Washington to his successor in the Bessemer Cutoff, Dan Reynolds. Years later, U. W. Clemon said he believed the district attorney’s office was looking for a way to save face in the Washington matter. “But it became clear,” he added, “that they were not going to save face, but they were still reluctant to dismiss the case.” So the case stayed active—leaving Caliph Washington with no closure.

  THE YEAR 1974 saw the first resignation of an American president, and locally it was the year that Jess “Big Daddy” Lanier closed his political career and chose not seek reelection as mayor of Bessemer following eighteen years in the position. “The city needs a rest from me,” he said, “and I need a rest from it.” Before the election, Bessemer’s commissioner of public improvements, Tom Ashley, resigned after a grand jury indicted him for “misconduct of a public officer.” Apparently, Ashley ordered Bessemer city workers to perform jobs, billed the city for the work, and then pocketed the funds. Lanier’s retirement and Ashley’s resignation marked the beginning of slow, simmering political unrest that would boil over by the end of the decade.

  Jess Lanier picked fellow city commissioner, Ed Porter, as his successor, but the political drama would come over who would succeed Porter as commissioner of public safety and govern Chief Barron and the Bessemer Police Department. In an unusual role reversal, Aubrey “Snuffy” Garrett, a ten-year veteran of the force, won the closely contested election in 1974 and found himself serving as boss to his former boss. Garrett later claimed that the main reason he resigned from the police force to run for the commission was because Barron was a tyrannical bully. “Barron was not a very well-liked person,” he wrote, “and his reputation had been fractured by years of underhanded incidents.” Another Bessemer policeman recalled that if s
omeone refused to do what Barron asked, or even disagreed with something he said, “he would have your home staked out and put under surveillance on a 24-hour basis until he felt you abided by his wishes. He was a very cruel man.” After the election, Garrett remembered telling Barron that he could keep his job as chief if he stopped taking payoffs and bribes from the various forces of illegal activity in Bessemer. Barron agreed, but the new commissioner believed from that day forward the chief began working toward “how he could cause my defeat in four years.”

  The 1978 election proved a brutal contest between Garrett and the man he defeated four years before, Max Williams—a used car salesman and the former police chief in the nearby municipality of Brownsville. Williams, with his dark curly hair and homespun humor, described himself as the “common man’s man, compassionate above all.” But threats of physical violence and intimidation on both sides marred the election. Garrett later claimed that George Barron and his wife worked behind the scenes to sabotage his campaign by spreading rumors in the Italian and black communities that Snuffy Garrett hated “dagos” and “niggers.” In addition, Garrett believed that the chief enlisted black taxicab and jitney drivers around town to transport black voters to the polls on election day with marked ballots. Someone, he claimed, paid black preachers thousands of dollars to endorse Williams in front of their congregations.

  When the election results came in, Williams won. But he alienated many voters in a campaign that divided the city and the police department, which he would now oversee. He believed that leaders in the Bessemer Police Department had done little to clean up the vice that still ran rampant throughout Bessemer. The city was as it always had been—corrupt, vice ridden, and violent. The new commissioner decided to change that by forming his own vice squad that would report directly to him and not to Chief Barron. “He told me he’d run the vice squad,” Barron later said, “and I could run the rest of the department and what the vice squad did was essentially none of my business.” Williams used a small area on the third floor of the city hall—just down the hall from his office, but far from the police station—to house the squad. Officers in the police department divided over the issue between the Barron loyalists and the Williams faction—some stayed out of the fray and maintained a professional decorum. Almost immediately, Williams later claimed, he began receiving death threats.

  IT WAS JUST one year after the bitterly contested election that Dan Reynolds, in 1979, took Harold Pickens’s place as a circuit judge and handed the Caliph Washington file to William A. “Pete” Short, who became district attorney on April 27, 1979. Five days later, however, Short’s attention would focus on the most “horrible, unthinkable” event in Bessemer’s violence-filled history.

  Just after 7 a.m. on May 2, Gene Lint, the executive assistant to the mayor, stopped at the Bessemer Post Office and picked up the mail—an errand he did every weekday morning before going to his office in City Hall. A package in the mail that day was stamped return to sender with the office of the new commissioner of public safety, Max Williams, written as the return address. Lint brought the package into Max Williams’s office, where Clifford Hill, a Bessemer police officer, was chatting with the commissioner.

  Lint placed the box in front of Williams, who was sitting behind his desk. He struggled to open the tightly taped package. Hill stepped forward, pulled out a pocket knife, and said, “Let me see it.” As he sliced through the tape, the package exploded. It was 7:39 a.m. Hill died instantly. Barely able to see and missing his left hand, Williams cried out, “Oh God! Who could do anything like this? Help me!” At the moment of the explosion, Lint recalled, “Everything went black. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t hear anything.” Inside that package that he unwittingly delivered was dynamite, nails, screws, and BBs—designed to inflict maximum pain and suffering—and a frequent bomb-making technique of the Klan.

  The blast shattered the windows and littered the street with broken glass. Police and firemen quickly sealed off the area. Those working in downtown looked on in horror. A few hours later, investigators looking for clues discovered Max Williams’s fingers on top of a nearby building. The explosion that morning also shattered a strange quietude that had settled over the city in recent years. All the heavy industry that once dominated the local economy and added to the city’s dirty appearance had all gone silent. Mills and plants with locked gates stood rusting. A ubiquitous canopy of kudzu covered the remains of once vibrant iron ore mines. Unemployment in the Marvel City hovered at 22.5 percent. Racial and economic tensions still ran high, but that was the norm in Bessemer.

  According to most accounts, the investigation of the bombing was mishandled. FBI agents urged Bessemer officials to work methodically and thoroughly to track down the culprit or culprits. (Perhaps they remembered how state and local officials botched the investigation into the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963.) But Chief Barron took charge of the investigation and made a haphazard rush to judgment, announcing that the bombing was a result of the bitter commissioner election in 1978. “You’ve got to remember,” he said, “that we went through a pretty hot election here about eight months ago.” According to Snuffy Garrett, this placed the blame on him and other former Bessemer police officers, including Tom Fullman and Carter Roberts. Barron chose the “direction for the investigation,” Garrett argued, which required that divisive local politics provoked the assassination attempt on Max Williams.

  This explosion produced a new level of mayhem and violence in Bessemer’s long troubled history. Some locals believed that the bombing would have never occurred if the “strong-armed political boss” Jess Lanier still served as mayor, kept city employees under control, and kept any controversies out of the local newspapers. Nonetheless, within days of the opening of the investigation, Chief Barron announced a major break in the case and said the name of the suspect “won’t be a surprise.” Behind the scenes, Garrett and Roberts gained immunity and helped investigators build the case against Tom Fullman, who was arrested and charged with murder in the death of Clifford Hill. In Barron’s mind, the arrest closed the case. Max Williams, however, was convinced that the act was not the work of one man alone but was part of a broader conspiracy.

  When the first trial of the suspect ended in a hung jury in the fall of 1979, Williams’s criticism of Barron boiled over into the public sphere. When a jury in the second trial acquitted Fullman and the state cleared all charges against him, Williams fired Barron. “I’m conducting an intense investigation of the bombing,” Williams announced, “and Chief Barron has stood in my way and I feel his removal will be instrumental for me to move forward in my investigation.” A few weeks later, the Jefferson County Personnel Board reinstated Barron as chief, but he soon retired, citing health concerns.

  The bombing became one of the great mysteries in Bessemer’s long history of violence, graft, and labor dispute. A reporter for the Birmingham News wrote that perhaps Max Williams, an outsider and newcomer to Bessemer hardball politics, was “onto something somebody didn’t want him involved in.” In 1981, two years after the bombing, Tommy Thedford, one of Williams’s vice squad officers and the ranking black police officer in Bessemer, was shot and killed while trying to recover stolen property. Some suggested that Thedford was “set up” to be killed.

  Two weeks later, Max Williams and several other officers on the vice squad were indicted by a federal grand jury for civil rights violations, including torturing prisoners with cattle prods and beating suspects with rubber hoses. At the trial, a number of witnesses came forward to testify of the sadistic cruelty of Williams’s small band of lawmen, who called their torture sessions with black prisoners “prayer meetings.” Vice squad agents allegedly picked up seventeen-year-old William Kenneth Kennard, the same age Caliph Washington was in 1957, and tortured him by holding a cattle prod to his groin until he confessed to a robbery he did not commit. The officers repeated the same questions to the high school junior over and over again. “I told [
them] I didn’t know anything and he began shocking me,” he said. “I hollered and screamed.” Kennard’s fingerprints matched none of the prints at the crime scene. Although an all-white jury acquitted the commissioner of public safety and the officers of these charges, the political damage to Max Williams was devastating.

  WITH AN EVER-FRAUGHT atmosphere of scheming, backbiting, corruption, and violence, the truth about the bombing of city hall and other enigmatic crimes may never be known. On the day George Barron retired in 1981, he told a Birmingham News reporter that he sensed an “uneasiness about Bessemer” that he had never felt in his over-thirty-five-year career as a policeman. “In the last three years, we’ve had a city hall blown away, two people maimed, two police officers killed, four officers indicted, a fire chief demoted, and a police chief resign. That sounds mighty abnormal to me.” For Bessemer residents, the storm cloud lingering over the city was the unsolved bombing that led to, as one journalist wrote, an “endless variety of dark conspiracies involving crooked politicians, the mafia, a jealous husband, or a bizarre plot to control local government.”

  In 1990, four Bessemer police officers reopened the investigation but, according to the Birmingham News, their supervisors quickly stopped the inquiry for unclear reasons. In 2005, the United States Postal Inspector Service renewed their examination of the case in hopes of using new DNA analysis on the reconstructed bomb, but county officials in Bessemer explained that they had no materials, and no one seemed to know what happened to the evidence. The same was true in the Caliph Washington case—gone was Cowboy Clark’s pearl handled pistol and everything else associated with the almost fifty-year-old incident. Earl Carter, the circuit clerk in Bessemer, searched throughout the courthouse, including the old county jail cells where Washington spent five years of his life and that were now used as storage. No evidence for the city hall bombing or the Washington case were found; both cases remained open in the judicial system.