Thurgood Marshall

by Juan Williams

  Early the next morning, Tuesday, the police force, troopers, and guardsmen began an assault against the poorly armed residents of Mink Slide. They chopped down the doors with axes and broke shop windows. And once inside businesses and homes, they tore apart furniture and stripped rugs from the floors. They claimed they were looking for weapons, ammunition, and hidden teams of gunmen. “The streets were soon littered with furniture hurled out of windows,” an NAACP study later reported. The greatest destruction was visited on James Morton’s funeral home, the most ornate and beautifully furnished place in the black community. The state troopers trashed everything in sight: “The hate-ridden orgy was topped off with a huge KKK scrawled in white chalk across one of the caskets.”7

  The large and angry force of police and state troopers ordered blacks out of their houses, confiscating guns and in some cases jewelry and cash before marching them to jail. That night and into the next morning, seventy black people were brought to jail and twelve were charged with murder. Police continued to make arrests through the week. A total of 101 blacks were arrested; only two whites were arrested, for drunkenness.

  “We urge the white citizens of the city and county to keep calm, cool and collected,” the Columbia Daily Herald wrote in a Tuesday afternoon editorial. “The situation is in the hands of the state troops and state police. They will round up those responsible for last night’s attack and clean up the city … there is no use in arguing the matter. The white people of the South … will not tolerate any racial disturbances without resenting it, which means bloodshed. The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realize this, the better off the race will be.”8

  The violence continued later that week while police were questioning two black suspects. The police said while they interrogated the two at the station house, one of the black men grabbed a weapon that had been confiscated from the rioters and tried to escape. Both men were shot and killed as police returned the gunfire.

  But while police said they shot in self-defense, Wallace Gordon, the brother of one of the suspects, blamed the police. Gordon claimed that the guns confiscated from blacks in Columbia had no ammunition. But the deaths of William Gordon and James Johnson were later ruled by the courts to be justifiable homicides.9

  Columbia’s black community, now sensing it was under siege, called the national office of the NAACP for help. Thurgood Marshall immediately understood the importance of this case. So did Walter White. They quickly phoned Maurice Weaver and asked him to help. But Weaver, who was ridiculed as a left-wing kook by many of the state’s segregationist politicians, had difficulty even getting into the jail to see any of the prisoners. With Weaver unable to help, Marshall got Z. Alexander Looby, who spoke with the West Indian accent of his native Jamaica, to rush to Columbia a day later.

  Working together, Looby and Weaver obtained cooperation from Sheriff Underwood and succeeded in getting most of the black prisoners out of jail within the next two weeks. Walter White, reading the sensational press coverage of the rioting and shooting, got Attorney General Tom Clark to begin an FBI investigation. A grand jury was convened to see if federal civil rights statutes were violated.

  Meanwhile, the Nashville Banner and other papers in the state began to report that several long-distance phone calls had been placed from Columbia on the night of the rioting. The papers speculated that Communists and black militants had been responsible for the riot.10 The state’s leading politicians were pushing reporters to write that black folks in Columbia would never have fought like that without “outside agitation.”

  After centuries of bowing and scraping, there was a new attitude growing among black Americans, and it was coming from the black veterans. They had gained more self-respect while fighting in the military and now demanded respect from whites. So Marshall understood the resentment that took shape that night in Columbia as black people fought against a white lynch mob. He felt that this resentment could be used to support an emerging civil rights movement and a growing NAACP. This was the reason he decided to personally defend the twenty-five blacks charged with inciting to riot and attempted murder.

  * * *

  When he arrived in Columbia on May 30, 1946, three months after that night of violence, Marshall found the town still tense. He and his defense team wanted to use that to their advantage. They attacked the allwhite power structure in Columbia as vicious and discriminatory. Marshall’s main plan was to get all the indictments thrown out because no blacks had served on the grand jury that had handed them down. Paul Bumpus, the tall, smooth-talking Maury County district attorney, responded that while it was true that blacks had not been invited to serve on juries, it was also true that many prominent whites had not served either. Marshall responded, “The fact that one or any number of white people have never been called for jury service has no bearing whatsoever on this case. Our pleas in abatement are directed at the contention that no Negroes have ever served on the jury and that no Negroes have been called for jury service.”11

  The judge ruled that the absence of blacks on the grand jury was not sufficient reason to throw out the indictments, but he agreed to move the trial to nearby Lawrence County to avoid having Maury County’s excited racial atmosphere taint the trial.

  The trial was set to start in August of 1946, but Marshall got seriously ill in late June with pneumonia. Even as he got sick, Marshall traveled to Columbia to prepare the case. But he became so ill that he had to go back to New York, and the trial began without him. A chain-smoker and a steady drinker, Marshall never exercised. His long work days, bad diet, and constant travel had begun to wear him down. Friends started to notice that he looked weak and they missed his normally loud, boisterous laugh.

  Marshall became so seriously ill that he went into Ward 2D at Harlem Hospital and special intensive-care nurses were assigned to keep constant watch over him. After visiting Marshall, Walter White wrote to the NAACP’s board to ask that they allocate $500 to pay his medical bills. “Mr. Marshall’s present condition is in a large measure due to the physical and mental strain of the Columbia, Tennessee trials, the last three days [of which] he continued going with a temperature of 103 degrees.” But by mid-July Marshall was looking better and his spirits were rising. “Give [the staff] the bad news that I’ll live,” he joked with White.12

  His clients in Columbia did not forget Marshall. He later told an oral history interviewer that he got a big package while in the hospital with a note attached: “ ‘Dear Lawyer … we decided to get you something.… The wives all wanted to send you flowers. But we knew what you’d rather have.’ They sent a twenty-pound ham.”13

  Marshall’s condition improved—he was soon able to walk across the room without losing his breath. But he was still too sick to go back to work. He and Buster took an extended leave—to the Virgin Islands, where Bill Hastie had been appointed governor by President Truman. “Mr. Marshall’s condition is due solely to the fact that he has worked himself almost to death without any thought of self,” White wrote the NAACP board, requesting approval for Marshall’s leave. Marshall and his wife also traveled to Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba.14

  While Marshall was recuperating, the Columbia riot trial was handled by Looby, Weaver, and the high-energy Howard law professor, Leon Ransom. They gave Marshall regular telephone reports, and he offered pointers for their use. The lawyers on the scene needed more than legal advice, however. They were under pressure inside and outside the courtroom. The black lawyers, for example, had no bathroom or water fountain available to them in the entire courthouse. And the courtroom crowd was hostile. One local paper said the trial was packed with spectators who came to town to see “those niggers up there wearing coats and ties and talking back to the judge just like they were white men.” The large group of black defendants were fenced off from the rest of the court by wooden pickets, and a reporter said that one white “oldtimer” sat nearby “spitting tobacco on each picket.”
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  Weaver, the lone white defense lawyer, was a special target for abuse by police and prosecutors. At one point in the middle of the trial, the district attorney asked him to come outside for a fistfight. The burly state safety director, Lynn Bomar, became infuriated with Weaver during one round of cross-examination. Bomar had a yardstick in his hand to point out landmarks on a map of the city. “For a split second newsmen and spectators held their breath while Bomar reddened and had to restrain an obvious desire to crack the young lawyer with the yardstick,” one paper reported.16

  In court the judge repeatedly ruled against the defense lawyers. Vincent Tubbs, a reporter for the Baltimore Afro who covered the trial, wrote: “During the past week no less than four major infractions of decency and due processes of law have been enacted in the dirty little county courthouse here.” One prosecutor referred to a black witness for the defense as “a nigger woman” before the judge told him to stop. The lead prosecutor called Ransom a “son-of-a-bitch” and later threatened to “wrap a chair around his God-Damn head.”17

  October 4, the final day of the trial, was tense. The jury returned quickly, and newspapers later wrote that the judge was in disbelief as he announced the verdict. The all-male, white jury acquitted twenty-three of the twenty-five black men charged in the riot; only two were found guilty of attempted murder for shooting a policeman, and the jury recommended a sentence of three years for each man.

  Paul Bumpus, the lead prosecutor, said the jury never seriously considered the case. He said the people in Lawrence County “felt Maury County had dumped its dirty laundry on them.” To get rid of the case, he said, the jury had convicted only two. “And those were the two weakest cases,” Bumpus said. “I didn’t think it was fair so I got up and asked the court to dismiss those two defendants.”18

  The Afro-American, reflecting the nationwide euphoria among black Americans, wrote in an editorial that the all-white jury’s verdict stood “in legal significance” alongside the infamous Dred Scott decision as one of American history’s landmark legal rulings. Walter White was quoted as saying: “American justice has triumphed over the Klan” and congratulated Looby, Ransom, and Weaver by describing them as lawyers who had “under the most trying conditions fought courageously to ensure the defendants a fair trial.”19

  * * *

  Despite the acquittals two other men still had to be tried on attempted murder charges that stemmed from the riot. William “Rooster Bill” Pillow and Lloyd “Papa Lloyd” Kennedy were charged with firing shots at Tennessee highway patrolmen. The other twenty-five defendants had been charged only with firing at Columbia police. The judge refused a change of venue for this case; the trial was held in Columbia. Marshall, now over his pneumonia, came back to town to handle the case on November 16, 1946.

  He tried to argue that the absence of blacks in the jury pool meant there would not be a fair trial, but the judge again dismissed his objections. Marshall was left with trying to convince the jury that the defendants had not fired the shots but were caught in the middle of a community simply trying to defend itself from a lynch mob. Marshall told the all-white jury that he was a fellow southerner from Baltimore, and he would not have traveled to Columbia to handle the case unless he sincerely believed these men were innocent.

  District Attorney Bumpus, always the quintessential southern gentleman, nonetheless belittled Marshall. “I wonder why he wanted you to believe that he wasn’t from New York,” Bumpus said to the jury. He quipped that if Marshall only represented innocent people, as he had claimed to the jury, “he belongs on Ripley’s radio program [Believe-It-Or-Not] as the greatest curiosity in the nation.”20

  The four-day trial ended with a “not guilty” verdict for Rooster Bill Pillow, but Papa Lloyd Kennedy was found guilty. “They were guilty and they weren’t guilty. They were defending themselves,” Marshall said in an interview. “The mob came down there, and the police were in front of the mob when they shot.”

  The trial ended at about 7:00 P.M. on November 18. Marshall, with Looby, Weaver, and Harry Raymond, the reporter for the Daily Worker, got into Looby’s car to go back to Nashville, celebrate their victory, and plan an appeal for Kennedy. It was then that state highway patrolmen and Columbia police stopped them and Marshall was pushed into the backseat of the unmarked police car.

  The police did not want any eyewitnesses. One of the plainclothesmen got out and told Looby he was to drive away immediately. Looby pulled off slowly, but when he saw the police car head in the other direction, he turned around and sped after it. He watched with growing horror as the car turned off the highway and headed down a dirt road toward the river. Undaunted by their threats, Looby followed the police car. Pulling over, one policeman got out shouting, his face red in anger, and ordered Looby to get back on the highway and drive to Nashville. Speaking slowly out of fear, Looby said he wasn’t leaving until he saw Marshall.

  Looby stood there, waiting to be arrested. But to his surprise the policeman stomped away to talk with the others in the car. The police were worried that even if Looby were to leave then, there would be witnesses to the fact that Marshall had not been driven back to town. There was also worry that if word of these events got back to Mink Slide, there might be another riot by blacks who now felt empowered after their court victories.

  The policeman got back in the car. To turn around they had to drive closer to the river, and that was when Marshall, from his uncomfortable perch in the backseat, saw an angry group of men waiting by the water. But the police car did not stop. It simply made a loop and headed back to the highway.

  With Looby still driving his car behind them, the police drove back to town. When they got to the square, they ordered Marshall out of the car and told him to go to the judge’s chamber on the second floor of the courthouse by himself. Marshall told them he would walk over, but only with them. “You ain’t gonna shoot me in the back. We’ll go together,” he said.

  Across the dusty and strangely empty street that separated the police station from the courthouse, Marshall and the officers walked side by side. Marshall kept turning his head, looking for trouble. Looby and the others had followed and stood outside their car watching. Inside the turn-of-the-century courthouse, Marshall was taken before an elderly judge, just over five feet tall and completely bald. The policemen told the judge: “We got this nigger for drunken driving.” The little judge looked up at the six-foot-one-inch Marshall and said: “Boy, you wanna take my test? I never had a drink in my life, and I can smell a drink a mile off. You want to take a chance?”

  All of Marshall’s legal training went out of his mind. He decided he had a better chance with this offbeat judge than he had an hour ago with the white mob at the river. So he blew into the judge’s face so hard that the judge rocked back. “That man hadn’t had a drink in twenty-four hours, what the hell are you talking about,” the judge declared. And in an instant the policemen left Marshall and walked out the door. “I turned around to look and they were gone,” he said.

  Marshall walked outside, and to his surprise Looby wasn’t there. Taking quick action, Marshall ran down to Mink Slide and found Looby and the other lawyers in a barbershop with several of Columbia’s leading black citizens. They hurriedly took Marshall into a back room to make sure he was okay. Then they made plans to leave town, this time in different cars. A decoy driver took Looby’s car in one direction while the lawyers went the other way. “And sure enough, the mob was coming around the corner when we left,” Marshall recalled. “So they followed Looby’s car, which we’d hoped they’d do. And incidentally, when they found out that I wasn’t in it, they beat the driver bad enough that he was in the hospital for a week.”

  The mob never caught up with Marshall. He made it back to Nashville, where he immediately called the U.S. attorney general, Tom Clark, Marshall recalled: “When I told him I was arrested for drunk driving, Tom said, ‘Well, were you drunk?’ I said, ‘No, but five minutes after I talk to you …’ ”

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p; In a 1993 interview Flo Fleming, the older brother of Billy Fleming, the radio repairman who was pushed through the window, setting off the events that led to the Columbia riot, said he was one of the men who arrested Marshall for drunk driving. “They were drunk, but the magistrate turned them loose,” said Fleming.21 Jack Lovett, who was a deputized member of the Columbia police force at the time of the riot, however, described Marshall’s drunk driving arrest as “a cock-and-bull story.” Lovett said, “They just wanted to harass him, that’s all. They had nothing to pick him up for.”

  The FBI, which was asked by the Justice Department to do an investigation, issued a report in which Flo Fleming was identified as the person responsible for stopping Marshall’s car. In the FBI report, one source claimed that “Fleming wanted to get a ‘last crack’ at Weaver, Looby and Marshall.”22

  The FBI never brought any federal charges in the case. And Papa Lloyd Kennedy, who was initially given a five-year sentence as the only person convicted in the Columbia riot, had his sentence reduced and served only ten months. Gladys and James Stephenson, the mother and son involved in the fight with Billy Fleming, were never charged with any crime.

  Three weeks after his near escape from Columbia, Marshall gave a speech to a youth conference in New Orleans. His usual confident and cocky personality was now muted. He had a newly found fear of white mobs and violent policemen.

  Asked if he supported the idea of nonviolent protest as exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign against the British in India, Marshall said nonviolent protest movements did not interest him. He said he wanted the right to defend himself against lynch parties. And as for nonviolent protests against segregation in the United States, Marshall said they would “result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”23