He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  Even with a big family, Alphonso was a shy loner with few friends. He listened when Caliph Washington said, “I want to tell you my story—about what happened to me—I don’t want to see it happen to nobody else.” Caliph recounted how he was arrested when he was just a little older than January; how he survived long years on death row; and how he found comfort through his belief in God. “The Lord was good to me,” Washington said, as he shared his faith with the teenager. He encouraged January to accept this faith and give his life to Jesus Christ. “Being young then,” January later recalled, “I wasn’t thinking about the Lord. I just wanted to play basketball.” Reverend Washington recognized that basketball would be a good way to affect the lives of black teens in the most impoverished areas of Bessemer, so he decided to form his own squad.

  Caliph Washington called his team the Salvation Club, and like Jesus calling his disciples, he told Alphonso, “Come with me, we’re going to make something out of you.” With January as one of his first followers, he continued to drive through town and recruit teens to be “fishers of men” and shooters of hoops. Once he enlisted enough members to build the Salvation Club team, he began taking them to gyms in the area for games with other teams. He became the father to scores of fatherless young men, and he spent long hours bringing them to church and encouraging them to be disciplined and self-controlled and to keep away from drugs, alcohol, and foul language. Wherever he was—in the van, on the street, on a basketball court, in a grocery store, or at the mall—Washington was smiling, talking, sharing, and praying. “You don’t have to be out here,” he would tell a young man he just met. “There’s a better way.”

  Apart from his ministry, Caliph Washington continued to make a living at the vending company and later at a television station. He accepted a part-time call to serve as pastor of the tiny St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church in Lipscomb—not far from where Thurman Avery and Cowboy Clark had their stakeout in 1957. On Sundays, he preached fearless Gospel-tugging sermons to his church members, including the Salvation Club teens and other young people from the community, and later with his wife and six children in the audience. Through his faith and ministry, he found peace and hope, a kind that only a man who climbed from an airtight cage of hopelessness could understand. A big man with a bigger faith, Washington explained that even through fifteen years of solitude, he was never alone. “God was always with me,” he said. “His faith allowed him to move beyond bitterness,” his son Michael Washington once said. “He could hear the voice of God in all he did.”

  As the twentieth century came to a fitful close, Caliph Washington had witnessed the fruits of the civil rights movement as blacks made tremendous strides towards equality and gains in political power and participation. But the horrors of years of sedentary confinement, where he had no exercise and poor nutrition, took its toll on his body—he was overweight and battled against diabetes and high blood pressure. As one friend recalled in more human terms, “Racism didn’t kill him, but a bad diet did.”

  Caliph Washington died on May 24, 2001. “The things he did may not seem monumental,” Christine Washington said later, “but they were things important to many people. Everything he did was with love.” He was a man who “endured incredible suffering due to injustice,” she added, and one who “let God work through him to bring a message of peace and reconciliation to others.” She believed his legacy was in the “many souls God converted and called to the ministry through him. This legacy lives on in all of our lives.”

  EVEN THOUGH CALIPH Washington was finally free of this world, the charges against him were still alive. The case file continued to be passed down in Bessemer to each subsequent district attorney, and Judge Ball’s case records remained in the office of each of his successors. A few weeks after Washington’s death, Circuit Court Judge Mac Parsons pulled the box of old legal files from a high shelf in the outer office of his chambers in the Jefferson County Courthouse in Bessemer. The affable Parsons, who grew up in poverty near Bessemer, was a tireless advocate for the poor and homeless. The white judge read through the long neglected files related to the open indictment against Caliph Washington, which was still considered an active case in the judicial system. On June 21, 2001, with the lightning stroke of his pen, he dismissed the case that began over forty-four years earlier in that parched summer of 1957.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  James B. “Cowboy” Clark and stepdaughter June Orr.

  Two Alabama state troopers and a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy examine Cowboy Clark’s blood on Exeter Alley.

  Lipscomb mayor Bill Olvey (left), police chief Thurman Avery (behind car door), and an unidentified policeman at the scene of Cowboy Clark’s death.

  Caliph Washington surrounded by white lawmen in Mississippi.

  Bessemer police officer Lawton “Stud” Grimes talking with Bessemer Commissioner of Public Safety, Herman Thompson, and Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies Arvel Doss and Charlie Stamps.

  Kermit Charles Edwards was the attorney of record for the Caliph Washington trials in 1957 and 1959.

  With the courage of a lion, Orzell Billingsley, Jr., was one of Alabama’s most fearless black attorneys.

  The Alabama Supreme Court in 1958. Front row, left to right: Thomas S. Lawson, J. Ed Livingston, Robert T. Simpson. Back row, left to right: Pelham J. Merrill, Davis F. Stakely, John L. Goodwyn, and James S. Coleman.

  Asbury Howard hoped to display Jack Hamm’s cartoon in Bessemer, but instead he found himself arrested, tried, and beaten.

  Alabama governor George C. Wallace granted Caliph Washington thirteen stays of execution in 1963.

  The power of prayer sustained Caliph Washington during years of prison isolation and, once he was a free man, throughout his ministry. Here Washington offers a prayer at a wedding during the 1990s.

  Caliph and Christine Washington and their six children.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  THE LIFE OF a poor, barely literate black man in Alabama during the civil rights protest era is difficult to reconstruct historically, but those associated with Caliph Washington left long paper trails. By far, the most important sources used in this book were the thousands of pages of trial transcripts located at the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery—particularly the three State v. Washington cases held in 1957, 1959, and 1970. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once said that “Lawyers spend a great deal of their time shoveling smoke,” perhaps suggesting that attorneys spend too much time in minutia and never moving the case towards a speedy conclusion. But for a historian, as opposed to an aggravated jurist, that “smoke” provided rich personal and legal details most researchers rarely find. For example, instead of driving a generic sedan, Caliph Washington is driving a two-tone, crystal-green-metallic-over-mist-green 1950 Chevrolet Styleline sedan. More importantly, we can read the words of witnesses, accusers, and the defendant. We might even gain a new appreciation of the probing questions of lawyers, but then again, maybe not.

  These trial records, combined with newspaper sources and endless mounds of legal documents composed by lawyers, judges, and assorted paper-pushers, created tedious repetition in the citations. While rhetorical redundancies work well for baseball great Yogi Berra (“we made too many wrong mistakes”), they leave readers of footnotes dithering in a cockeyed monotony of repetitiveness—a frustration that led author Frank Sullivan to once write, “I’ll be damned if I read any more of your footnotes.”

  With this devil lurking in the details, the author and the editors at Liveright agreed to omit the repetitive citations and the long “garlands of ibids” that were garnishing the notes in every chapter. An extensive bibliography follows this essay on sources, but the following are the vital sources in this manuscript:

  All the court documents related to Caliph Washington are available at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the Birmingham Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscripts, and the National Archives in East
Point, Georgia. Other key legal documents are located in the Papers of the NAACP (Microfilm Edition, Part 23: Legal Department Case Files, 1956-1965), and in the American Civil Liberties Union Southern Regional Office Records in the McCain Library and Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi.

  Fortunately, newspapers throughout the country provided coverage of the trials of Caliph Washington, but the three local papers, Birmingham News, Birmingham Post-Herald, and Birmingham World had the most extensive articles.

  Great insight into the careers of George Barron, Lawton “Stud” Grimes, James Hammonds, Asbury Howard, and Rudy Pipolo can be found in the FBI’s surveillance files obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. The grand jury depositions in the Hammonds investigation provided significant details into the district attorney’s nefarious schemes and illegal activities. These files are located in James Hammonds’s Alabama State Bar Association membership file located in the state archives.

  Many people gave generously of their time for interviews and conversations with the author, including Edith Boswell Clark, Mason Clark, U. W. Clemon, Helen Cooley, Chriss Doss, Wilson Fallin, Alphonso January, Camille Morgan, David Orange, Eileen Walbert, Christine Washington, Michael Washington, and Abraham Woods. Other interviews were also helpful, including those at W. S. Hoole Special Collections at the University of Alabama, Southern Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Carolina, United Steelworkers of America and Labor Oral History Collection at Pennsylvania State University Special Collections Library, and the oral histories located in Samford University Special Collection. The essential interview for this project was the lone oral history with Caliph Washington conducted by Horace Huntley in 1998. The transcript and video recording are located in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Archives.

  Several memoirs offer a few scant details on Caliph Washington, including works by David Orange, From Segregation to Civil Rights and Beyond: A Story of the Southland; Wayne Greenhaw, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama; and Charles Morgan, Jr., One Man, One Voice. Although Morgan used Washington’s name to win a noteworthy legal victory, he did nothing to help win Washington’s release from prison, but in this memoir he disingenuously takes some credit for his freedom. “And so it went,” Morgan wrote, “beyond reason and prediction, in the struggle for equal justice.”

  No secondary works cover the life and trials of Caliph Washington. When he is briefly mentioned in a handful of these sources, it is usually in the context of the Washington v. Lee prison integration case. In addition, with so much focus on Birmingham and civil rights, Bessemer has been largely ignored by historians and writers—one reason for this is the surprising lack of primary sources related to the Marvel City’s past. Robin D. G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression provides a comprehensive look at the labor unrest in Bessemer.

  Overall, black Bessemer, especially with Asbury Howard’s leadership, fits somewhat into Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s notion of a “long civil rights movement” rooted in the racial liberalism of the New Deal era. Although Hall’s framework has limitations, it does provide some contextual links between radical racial unionism of the 1930s and the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

  While many secondary sources helped with the history and context of the state of Alabama, none were more important than Alabama: The History of a Deep South State by William Warren Rogers, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, and Wayne Flynt; Alabama Governors: A Political History of the State edited by Samuel L. Webb and Margaret E. Armbrester; and the scholarly articles in the online Encyclopedia of Alabama.

  Law review articles covered several legal issues—jury exclusion, capital punishment, law enforcement, imprisonment—that related directly or tangentially to Caliph Washington. The best source on the legal history of Alabama remains Tony A. Freyer’s and Paul M. Pruitt Jr.’s article in the Fall 2001 Alabama Law Review, “Reaction and Reform: Transforming the Judiciary Under Alabama’s Constitution, 1901–1975.” In addition, articles in the periodical Alabama Lawyer helped shed light on the legal philosophy of several judges and lawyers during the civil rights era.

  Several years ago, scholar Charles Eagles encouraged historians to “muster even greater imagination to write new histories” of the civil rights era in a more “detached, well-rounded, and balanced manner.” He Calls Me by Lightning provides readers with imaginative insight into the life of a forgotten man who spent the civil rights era sitting behind bars in the jails and prisons of Alabama.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS

  Government Records Collections. Alabama Department of Archives and History. Montgomery, Alabama.

  Alabama Attorney General’s Office civil rights case files, 1940–1974.

  Alabama Attorney General’s Office correspondence, 1878–1996.

  Alabama Board of Medical Examiners application for certificate of qualification to practice medicine, 1879–2012.

  Alabama Department of Corrections state publications, 1845–2011.

  Alabama Department of Corrections administrative files, 1885–1995.

  Alabama Department of Corrections and Institutions records of punishment, 1928–1951.

  Alabama Department of Corrections and Institutions death record of state convicts, 1939–1953.

  Alabama Governor (1951–1955: Persons) administrative files, 1950–1955.

  Alabama Governor (1955–1959: Folsom) administrative files, 1954–1959.

  Alabama Governor (1959–1963: Patterson) administrative files, 1959–1963.

  Alabama Governor (1971–1979: Wallace) administrative files, 1966–1979.

  Alabama Governor, Administrative assistants’ files, 1961–1972 and n.d.

  Alabama Governor, Administrative files, 1958–1968.

  Alabama Governor, Administrative files, 1962–1978.

  Alabama Governor, Administrative files—miscellaneous, 1963–1979.

  Alabama Governor (1959–1963: Patterson) appointments files, 1956–1962.

  Alabama Governor appointments files, 1963–2011.

  Alabama Governor (1939–1943: Dixon) clemency hearing case files, 1939–1942.

  Alabama Governor (1943–1947: Sparks) clemency hearing case files, 1943–1946.

  Alabama Governor (1947–1951: Folsom) clemency hearing case files, 1947–1950.

  Alabama Governor (1951–1955: Persons) clemency hearing case files, 1952–1954.

  Alabama Governor clemency hearing case files, 1951–1962.

  Alabama Governor death penalty case files, 1939–2003.

  Alabama Governor executive orders denying commutation of a death sentence, 1951–1959.

  Alabama Governor executive orders for transfer of convicts to state asylums, 1931–1994.

  Alabama Governor legal advisors’ files, 1963–1972.

  Alabama Governor legal case files, 1963–2008.

  Alabama Governor public relations files, 1954–1970.

  Alabama Governor’s record of death case reprieves and commutations, 1939–1946.

  Alabama Governor state institutions files, 1963–1979.

  Alabama State Bar Association membership files, 1920–2004.

  Alabama State Board of Medical Examiners examination questions, 1907–1969.

  Alabama Supreme Court cases files, 1820–2011.

  Public Information subject files—surname files, 1901–2010.

  Private Records Collections. Alabama Department of Archives and History. Montgomery, Ala.

  Charles Morgan papers, unprocessed.

  Frank Murray Dixon papers, LPR33.

  George C. Wallace collection, LPR124.

  Hugh Maddox papers, LPR103.

  James Elisha Folsom papers, LPR34.

  American Civil Liberties Union. Southern Regional Office Records. McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi. Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

  Bessemer Police Force. �
��Procedural General Order Manual, 1961.” Bessemer Hall of History. Bessemer, Ala.

  Concerned White Citizens of Alabama Collection. Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Archives. Birmingham, Ala.

  Department of Archives and Manuscripts. Birmingham Public Library. Birmingham, Ala.

  Alabama. Tenth Judicial Circuit Court Grand Jury Records.

  Aerial Maps of Jefferson County.

  Orzell Billingsley Jr. Papers.

  Dickinson, Horace. “Musings of a Country Cop.” Special Collection. Samford University Library. Birmingham, Ala.

  Federal Court Records. National Archives and Records Administration. East Point, Georgia.

  Forensic Case File (Caliph Washington/James B. Clark). Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences (formerly Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation). Auburn, Ala.

  Hazel the Mummy Clipping Files. Bessemer Hall of History. Bessemer, Ala.

  Howard, Asbury. United Steelworkers of America and Labor Oral History Collection. Pennsylvania State University Special Collections Library. University Park, Pennsylvania.