A Mighty Long Way

by Carlotta Walls Lanier

  As the hours slowly ticked away on this long night, I couldn’t close my eyes. I kept waiting for the familiar: the sound of his shoes, his voice, his laugh, something that said everything would be right again.

  Instead, the next morning, I was greeted with the newspaper headline: “Police Quiz Walls in Bombing: Probe Goes On in Secrecy.” In the distorted minds of white law enforcement officials, my father had something to do with the bombing! It was unfathomable to me that anyone could suspect that my father would be involved with attacking his own house while the love of his life and their three daughters slept inside.

  Those next forty-eight hours dragged, and Mother and I seemed to sleepwalk through them. A haze of shock and fear hung over us as we tried to go about our daily routines. At least two days had passed since Daddy was taken away, and I still hadn’t heard a word. Mother wasn’t the type to cry in front of the children, but all of a sudden, I noticed that she began to take “a rest” during the day. She would disappear for maybe an hour behind the closed door of her bedroom, but when she eventually emerged, she looked even wearier than before her brief retreat. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the Foxes were a constant presence in our house. Mrs. Fox would sit with Mother on the bar stools in the kitchen, while Mr. Fox sat with me and my sisters in front of the television in the den. Of course, no one discussed Daddy’s absence, but you could almost touch the tension.

  Dusk was setting in one evening as I stepped onto the front porch to breathe some fresh air. When I looked toward the street, I noticed the distant shadow of a tall man walking slowly down the hill toward our home. His walk was unmistakable.

  “Daddy!” I cried, dashing off the porch and down the road.

  I threw my arms around him and held on tightly, wanting not to let him go ever again. My eyes scanned him up and down. He was wearing the same khaki pants he’d had on the night he left for work. His dark overcoat was slung across his arm. He was all in one piece, but something was wrong. Daddy wouldn’t look at me. He kept staring straight ahead and didn’t say a word.

  I looked up at his face and found tears sliding down his cheeks. It was the first and last time I saw my father cry. Suddenly unable to speak, I just stood there. I felt as though I’d been submerged in ice water, cold and hardly able to breathe. My family was suffering profoundly because of me. And my determination to graduate from Central could have cost me my father. For the rest of the way home, Daddy and I walked side by side in silence.

  Once again, I didn’t dare ask questions. But, as always, I was paying attention and overheard things. Later, I heard Daddy telling Mother that the police had beaten him and tried to make him sign a confession, admitting that he and Maceo had planted the bomb to get the insurance money from the policy on the house. So this was what it was all about—the insurance money! In the narrow minds of the police, Daddy was just a desperate Negro willing to blow up his own home and possibly even kill his family to get his hands on some money. My heart raced and I could hardly breathe as I heard Daddy tell Mother how the police officers kept shouting at him:

  “Do you know Maceo Binns?”

  “Do you know Herbert Monts?”

  Hours had turned into days as the officers kept taking him back and forth from a jail cell to an interrogation room. In his words, they were determined to make this figment of the FBI’s imagination a reality—and they wouldn’t give up. But they didn’t know Cartelyou Walls. He wouldn’t give up, either. And he refused to budge from the truth.

  I stopped listening, went to my room, and wept quietly as I imagined Daddy’s face, strong and determined, even while the officers beat him.

  Within an hour of Daddy’s arrival home, family, friends, and neighbors began stopping by to visit him: our minister, Reverend O. W. Gibson, Mr. Fox, and several others. Daddy wasn’t in the mood for company, so our family friends were politely turned away at the door—all but Mrs. Bates. Daddy chatted with her awhile, and she insisted that he tell his story to Christopher Mercer, an attorney who was one of her advisers. We knew Mr. Mercer from our neighborhood, and the next day, Daddy left home to visit him. I never heard a word about what happened during that visit. But days later, I learned that indeed the police had suspected Daddy of concocting the bombing to get insurance money or as a ploy to raise money from people “up north” and that he’d paid Maceo and Herbert to pull it off.

  In the days afterward, Daddy’s spirit seemed bruised. He was quiet and somber. And for what seemed like the longest time, we didn’t hear his contagious laughter.

  CHAPTER 11

  Scapegoats

  My father was never charged in the bombing, but the ordeal was just beginning for Herbert and Maceo. Prosecutor Frank J. Holt sought a $50,000 bond for both of them, but a judge set it at $15,000—the same amount that had been set for the Labor Day bombers.

  “It sounds as if somebody’s trying to railroad somebody,” Mrs. Bates told the Gazette in a February 20 story, gauging the reaction of community leaders to the arraignment of Herbert and Maceo. “I can’t understand why they would charge these two fellows. I don’t know what evidence they have, but it sounds ridiculous to me.”

  Amis Guthridge, the white Citizens Council attorney, seemed to gloat over news of the arrests. He was quoted at length, taking credit for getting Chief Smith to stop pursuing white segregationists as suspects and look inside the black community. Guthridge even suggested that he might apply for the reward since he’d been first to hint that blacks might be involved. And of course, Governor Faubus chimed in, suggesting he knew more than he did. He said the bombing incident “looked peculiar from the beginning” and that he had questioned how such a thing could have benefited the segregationists.

  The same day, the Gazette editorial praised the work of the police: “Once again the department has proven itself to be one of Little Rock’s finest municipal assets.” The newspaper mentioned the absence of a motive but seemed to accept that the police had solved the case. In the same editorial, the newspaper declared that by all indications, “segregation extremists, like those convicted in the Labor Day explosions, had no hand in this case.”

  But the lack of a motive seemed to hang in the air. The next day, the Gazette again raised two questions:

  “Is that all of it, the two Negro suspects now in custody? If they did it, why?”

  I never even pondered the questions because I never—not for a moment—believed that Herbert and Maceo bombed my family’s home. Even though prosecutors had not charged my father, they didn’t back down from their claim that he was the mastermind. In fact, the entire case against Herbert and Maceo seemed built on the notion that my father had recruited the two of them as part of a grand moneymaking scheme. But I knew my father far too well to give credence to that ridiculous theory.

  Prosecutor Holt assured readers he had a “good case.” My gut told me that was not possible. But all I could do was hope that under the leadership of Chief Smith, who had always seemed fair and decent, the truth would come out somehow. I suspected the segregationists had bombed my home to send another message before my graduation from Central. I wondered if police had thoroughly investigated a neighbor’s report of seeing unfamiliar cars in the neighborhood just before and after the bombing. It had been a detailed description of the getaway car in the Labor Day bombings that helped police track down those suspects. But as Herbert and Maceo sat in jail, I felt helpless and guilty at the same time. Two innocent men could go to jail because of me, because I had been so determined to stay at Central.

  Within a month of the arrests, things would take another startling turn. I awakened one March morning to this shocking frontpage headline:

  POLICE CHIEF KILLS WIFE, TAKES OWN LIFE AT HOME.

  I gasped when I picked up the newspaper. I just could not believe that Chief Smith, then forty-seven years old, was capable of the kind of brutality described in the story. According to the newspaper, Smith had shot his wife in the chest while both were seated at the kitchen table on Marc
h 18, 1960. As she fell backward, he shot her in the abdomen twice more. Then he shot himself in the left temple.

  The story said that Smith had been expected at a meeting at the police station the next day, March 19. When he failed to show up, another police officer called his house but got no answer. Smith’s mother, who also had been trying to reach him without success, called and asked a neighbor to check on him. When the neighbor arrived, she found the couple’s front door unlocked, walked toward the kitchen, and called out for Smith’s wife, Mary. The television was blaring. When the neighbor reached the kitchen door, she froze. She screamed and backed out of the doorway when she saw the two bodies. Mary Smith lay across a chair, and her husband was sprawled in a pool of blood at her feet.

  The bullet had gone straight through the police chief’s head and lodged in the wall. Investigators estimated the couple had died twelve hours before they were found and that the shots had been fired from Smith’s .357 magnum pistol. There was no suicide note, and friends speculated that “marital woes” may have caused the shootings.

  On the morning they died, the Smiths had traveled together to Searcy, Arkansas, to attend a court appearance for their son, who had been arrested for burglary and was pleading guilty. At work later that day, Smith’s colleagues at the police department reported that he had been in good spirits. At the time of his death, Smith faced lawsuits totaling $450,000, mostly those filed by white segregationists still angry because of the actions he had taken to quell the violence on the first day of school in August 1959, while I was finishing summer school in Chicago.

  Mrs. Bates said that when she heard the news, she vomited and immediately had to be put to bed.

  “This must be a nightmare, it must be—but soon I’ll awaken,” she wrote in her memoir. “Smith is dead. … Maybe we’ll be next.”

  She didn’t believe the death of the couple was a murder-suicide. She suspected both had been murdered. Of course, no one will ever know for sure what happened in the Smith home that day. But to this day, I believe it is likely that the police chief and his wife were murdered.

  As the lawsuits against him indicated, Smith was loathed by white supremacists, who saw him as much too sympathetic to those of us involved in the integration of Central. Smith had been the assistant chief when my eight comrades and I entered Central High School in fall 1957. The following November, when Police Chief Marvin Potts retired, Smith was named acting chief. He was one of three men who took the civil service test on January 13, 1958, for the top position, but the segregationists fought his promotion. Then, after an unexplained delay of nearly two weeks, Smith was named chief on January 30. The wrath of segregationists toward him only grew in August 1959 when he ordered firefighters to use water hoses to disperse the protesters.

  Now, Smith was gone, his good name besmirched.

  The mainstream media seemed satisfied that both cases had been solved—the death of the Smiths and the bombing of my family’s home. After the arrests of Herbert and Maceo, the link the media had made regularly between the bombing of my home and the integration of Central High School disappeared from the headlines.

  But Herbert’s mother, Juanita Monts, wanted my family to know the truth about her son. She sent a message to Mother via Mrs. Fox that she wanted to talk. Then, one spring afternoon, when Mother answered a light knock at our front door, she found Juanita Monts standing there. Mother invited her inside. The two women stepped into our living room and sat on the sofa. I lingered in the hallway just outside the room.

  Mrs. Monts’s voice sounded tired and sad. I felt tremendous sorrow for her. She had eight other children, six more boys and two girls, all younger than Herbert. I could only imagine how worried she must have been about her oldest child, who was in jail awaiting trial. Her husband, Hutella Monts, worked nights at Bell Telephone, and Mrs. Monts mostly stayed home with the children. They were a close-knit, upstanding family. Mrs. Monts eventually would return to college and become a full-time teacher. She had come from a family of educators, including several sisters and brothers who held postgraduate degrees.

  Mrs. Monts spoke softly as she told Mother how terrible she felt about the bombing of our home. But she assured Mother that Herbert had nothing to do with it. It was important to her that we know that, she said. I’ve always thought that was such an honorable thing for her to do: to care enough about what my family thought of her son to tell Mother face-to-face that he was innocent.

  “I know,” Mother said softly.

  We all knew. Herbert and Maceo were just convenient scapegoats of a system that was eager to put to bed an irksome case. I will never forget the image that day of the two Juanitas sitting there, both hurting, both bound by the fates of their two children.

  On May 15, the Gazette ran a news story previewing Herbert’s jury trial to be held in circuit court the next day. Mother had been subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify. As usual, I got details about the trial from the newspaper and the bits I could pick up from conversation around the house afterward.

  About fifty spectators crowded into the courtroom for the first day. To no one’s surprise, the chosen jurors were all white. Prosecutor Holt indicated in his opening statement that he would seek a maximum sentence of five years in the state penitentiary and a $500 fine. Herbert was represented by Harold Flowers, who was a well-known civil rights attorney from Pine Bluff. A few years earlier, he had defended a group of black men accused of murdering a white man. Flowers’s clients faced the death penalty, but two of them had been acquitted. Another received a reduced sentence. The outcome of that trial angered the white establishment in Little Rock and likely cast an even darker cloud over Herbert’s trial before it even got started. Flowers sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds that Holt had violated the Constitution with a decision to file charges without a grand jury indictment. Flowers also asked the presiding judge, William J. Kirby, to transfer Herbert’s case to juvenile court. But both requests went nowhere.

  Over two days, the prosecution called seven witnesses, mostly detectives and FBI agents, who reported that Herbert had confessed. That was the first I’d heard of the alleged confession, but I suspected it was coerced. I remembered that the same law enforcement authorities had beaten my father and tried to force him to confess. But Daddy was a grown man, a military war veteran who had seen the world and wouldn’t be broken by the brute force and mental pressure of white law enforcement authorities. Herbert was just seventeen, on the precipice of manhood, and as grown up as he liked to act, I was sure he had been outmatched.

  According to prosecutor’s version of events, Herbert tried to light a match, but the head of the match broke off. Then Maceo lit the fuse while Herbert ran home, drank a cup of coffee, and went to bed. Officers testified that Herbert told them that when he heard the explosion, he got dressed again and went out to see the damage.

  The prosecutor also called my mother to the stand. Mother testified that she had been in bed about forty-five minutes and was asleep when the explosion occurred. When she was asked about the Monts family, she replied: “We’re good neighbors.”

  Mother also testified that the money from the insurance company had been just sufficient to cover the cost of the repairs, nothing more. The prosecution even tried to use Herbert’s intelligence against him by calling his science teacher to the stand to testify that Herbert was a good student, smart enough to build a homemade bomb. Before resting his case, Prosecutor Holt also called Marion Davis, who said he had been hanging out with Herbert at my grandfather’s place and that the two of them had left walking home together. Marion testified that they made it to his home first and that Herbert continued walking alone. Then Holt delivered what I’m sure he considered his “smoking gun.” One of our neighbors, Earzie Cunningham, whom I did not know, testified that he had seen Herbert running from the direction of my home at the time of the bombing.

  When it was Flowers’s turn to put on a defense, he called a single witness, our neighbor Reverend O. W.
Gibson, pastor of our family’s church, White Memorial Methodist. Reverend Gibson testified that he visited Monts in jail February 19 and noticed that one side of his face was swollen. But Holt called a rebuttal witness, an FBI agent. The agent testified that Reverend Gibson had filed an official complaint on March 2, saying that Herbert had told him he had been kneed and struck across the face by officers who interrogated him. The FBI agent, of course, denied that Herbert had been beaten.

  Flowers, as well-meaning as he was, did not call a single witness to challenge the timing of the prosecutor’s account—how long it might have taken, for example, for Herbert to run up the block from my home to his house, drink a cup of coffee, and get into bed. Nor did he challenge whether it was even feasible for all of this to occur while a fuse was burning down. He called no one to point out the glaring lack of fingerprints or any other physical evidence linking Herbert to the crime. Most important, he did not challenge the prosecution’s sole “evidence”—Herbert’s alleged confession. We would learn later when Maceo went to trial that such a challenge might have made all the difference for Herbert.

  The white jurors took just thirty-eight minutes to deliver their verdict: Guilty.

  Herbert was sentenced to the maximum five years in prison.

  The outcome did not surprise me. By then, I’d lost all hope that justice would prevail. But I hurt deeply for Herbert, his family, his compromised future, his deferred dreams. There was nothing I could do to help, and thinking about him hurt too much. So I pushed Herbert’s case to the back corners of my mind and heart, with all of the other injustices I’d endured and witnessed in Little Rock. It was the only way I knew to survive.

  Nearly fifty years would pass before I would allow myself to go back to all of that hurt. Then I’d learn the full story of how my friend had landed in the hands of the Little Rock police and what really happened to him.