by Alex Heard
six
THE MALADY OF MEDDLER’S ITCH
In the 1940s, the CRC, the NAACP, the Daily Worker, and African-American newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the Atlanta World were often the first or only sources of substantial reporting when an incident like the blinding of Isaac Woodard took place. If these organizations didn’t publicize a story, it might go unnoticed, because mainstream newspapers, in and out of the South, still had a tendency to miss, bury, or ignore such events. Even sympathetic papers didn’t always know what to do with stories about racially motivated atrocities. There were a lot every year. Did you cover them all? If so, how much?
When in doubt, the New York Times would sometimes run a small wire-service dispatch and then not follow up. In July 1946, for example, a black farmer named Leon McAtee was found floating in a lake near Indianola, Mississippi, the victim of a flogging death at the hands of six men who accused him of stealing a saddle. The Times reported McAtee’s murder on page forty-eight, running a United Press story headlined “Negro Death Laid to Mississippians.” Three months later, in a brief follow-up, readers learned that five men, charged with manslaughter, were all acquitted.
For a while, the Woodard case fell through the cracks everywhere. It happened in February 1946, but, amazingly, the NAACP didn’t start publicizing it until July. The national office sent out a press release that month, which generated urgent headlines in African-American papers. “Veteran’s Eyes Gouged Out by Hate-Crazed Dixie Police,” read a Chicago Defender story from July 20. “Atrocity Called Dixie’s Worst In NAACP Probe.”
The Times weighed in, but it never found Woodard’s story quite as compelling. The editors didn’t ignore Woodard, but they did keep the reporting low-key throughout the paper’s coverage of his case in 1946 and 1947. This was typified by one of the early stories the Times published, a brief A.P. dispatch that ran on page thirty and carried the headline, “Negro Made Blind at Batesburg, S.C.”
In various ways, the years after World War II were a time of change on this front. The wave of postwar racial violence was so shocking that it couldn’t be put on the back burner completely, and some stories got prominent play from the start, including the Malcom and Dorsey lynchings in Georgia, which the Times treated as front-page news.
In late 1946, the Times, recognizing that race-based injustice and civil rights were becoming increasingly important, assigned its first full-on Southern correspondent, a reporter based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, named John N. Popham. The idea originated with a transplanted Mississippian, assistant managing editor Turner Catledge. Popham, a native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, was given the daunting task of covering every Southern state from Virginia to Texas behind the wheel of a car he called the Green Hornet—driving 50,000 miles a year and staying with friends and relatives whenever possible, because the Times needed to keep his traveling expenses low.
“The result was a free-wheeling sort of reporting, with Mr. Popham driving vast distances from friend to friend,” a Times obituary writer explained after Popham’s death in 1999. “He sent out 100 boxes of New Orleans pralines each year at his own expense, and his…network of contacts included old-school connections and distant relatives.”
Popham turned up everywhere over the next few years, and he often wrote stories set in Mississippi. He was in Jackson in early 1947 when state officials were busily trying to come up with new ways to prevent blacks from voting in the Democratic primary. He was there in 1948 when the city hosted disgruntled politicians and voters who organized a revolt against the pro–civil rights drift of the national Democratic Party. And he was there when the McGee case started getting noticed nationally in 1950. In fact, Popham’s journalism helped make that happen, spreading the word beyond the confines of the far left. Through his reports, the Times legitimized McGee in a way that coverage in the Daily Worker, by itself, never could have.
Another important change in 1946 took place in the heart and mind of the nation’s prime political mover, President Harry S. Truman, who surprised everybody by announcing his intention to push for federal civil rights legislation. That was one crusade neither FDR nor Congress had gotten around to.
Off and on for years, Congress had tried and failed to pass a federal anti-lynching bill, which sometimes made it out of the House of Representatives but always died under the weight of Southern filibusters in the Senate. FDR never publicly supported any of these bills, despite pressure from the NAACP and from Eleanor Roosevelt, who threw everything she had into getting him to back one of the best known of them, the Costigan-Wagner bill of 1934.
Costigan-Wagner was introduced after a resurgent year for lynching in 1933—there were at least twenty-eight nationwide, including one just ninety miles east of the White House, in Princess Anne, Maryland. The bill would have given the federal government authority to bring charges against local law enforcement officials who handed prisoners over to lynch mobs, and to sue counties for damages that would be awarded to victims’ families.
Southern legislators were opposed, arguing that lynching was a matter for local and state law enforcement to deal with. Yes, there were times when the system failed and men were mobbed, but Southerners claimed that, as the years went by, they would put an end to the problem themselves. Congressmen like Mississippi’s William Colmer, who fought against similar bills over the years, also argued that any such measure had to be universally applied. So he introduced a “gangster amendment,” which mandated federal intrusion if police in places like New York and Chicago failed to adequately investigate gangland slayings.
With Costigan-Wagner and other bills like it, Eleanor worked closely with Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, who knew the subject of lynching as well as anybody, thanks in part to his unusual physical appearance. Originally from Atlanta, White was of mixed-race descent, and he was light-skinned enough that he was usually assumed to be Caucasian. In a 1948 profile, the New Yorker described him as “a dapper, pink-cheeked, and polished man of fifty-five who is so non-Negroid in appearance and on such good terms with high-level statesmen that anyone meeting him for the first time at a Washington cocktail party could easily take him for some thoroughly Anglo-Saxon ambassador.”
White’s features had made it possible for him to work as an on-the-scene lynching investigator for the NAACP, starting in 1918. Over the next seven years, he traveled thousands of miles, risking his life as he gathered information on roughly fifty lynchings and violent race-oriented riots. In 1929, he published Rope and Faggot, an influential study of the history and causes of lynching in the United States.
By April 1934, White had reason to hope that Costigan-Wagner could pass. It had been endorsed by prominent officials, clergymen, journalists, and nonpartisan advocacy groups, and his head count indicated that the bill might make it out of the Senate if it were spared the usual Southern windbag offensive and put to a vote. Knowing that a public endorsement or private arm-twisting by FDR might tip the balance, Eleanor Roosevelt arranged a Sunday afternoon meeting in May that included the president, his mother, herself, and White. FDR seemed to take it in stride that his wife and mother were lined up against him on this issue, and White left feeling convinced that he’d swayed him. But the president did nothing, and the bill died yet again. Later, FDR told White that he couldn’t risk alienating his Southern power base.
“The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule…are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the House and Senate Committees,” he said. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”
The risk was just as great for Truman. He could have lost the presidency in 1948 as a result of flouting the South’s will on civil rights, and for a time it looked like he would. But he decided he had to move forward, and the bloody events of 1946 were a major reason why. Truman heard about them during face-to-face meetings with two prominent representati
ves of the mid-century civil rights movement.
One was a man he believed he could do business with, Walter White. The other was Paul Robeson, the famous ex-athlete, actor, singer, and Communist sympathizer who by then had become one of the most caustic voices on the left. Truman’s meeting with Robeson was a disaster, producing nothing but tension and ill will, and it solidified boundaries that would be in place four years later, when Truman was compelled to start responding to public clamor about the McGee case. By then, Robeson—a CRC member and spokesman—was one of McGee’s top supporters. From Truman’s perspective, this meant McGee was backed by the wrong kinds of people.
Truman met with White first, on September 19 at the White House, along with a delegation that included six officials representing labor, churches, and the African-American press. White wrote about the meeting in a syndicated column that ran in African-American newspapers, reporting that Truman was visibly stunned when they talked about Woodard’s blinding and the 1946 wave of lynchings.
“…Truman’s face became pale with horror,” White wrote. “His voice trembled with deep emotion as he assured us that steps must be taken immediately to stop this wave of terrorism before it got out of hand.”
The next day, in a memo to Attorney General Thomas C. Clark, Truman wrote that his callers “told me about an incident which happened in South Carolina where a negro Sergeant, who had been discharged from the Army just three hours, was taken off the bus and not only seriously beaten but his eyes deliberately put out, and that the Mayor of the town had bragged about committing this outrage….
“I know you have been looking into the…Georgia lynchings, and also been investigating the one in Louisiana, but I think it is going to take something more than the handling of each individual case after it happens—it is going to require the inauguration of some sort of policy to prevent such happenings.”
Four days later, Truman met with Robeson, who was in Washington to lead a protest rally that had been advertised for several weeks in the Daily Worker. Conceived by Robeson, the legendary black intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, and a white Washington lawyer named Bartley Crum, the event was billed as “an American crusade to end lynching.” Held on September 23, it was timed to take place near the anniversary of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, on September 22.
Truman might have been receptive, but Robeson seemed more interested in grandstanding than communicating. Before coming down from New York, he delivered a speech at Madison Square Garden in which he criticized the president for the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to do anything about lynching.
“This swelling wave of lynch murders and mob assaults…represents the ultimate limit of bestial brutality to which the enemies of democracy, be they German-Nazis or American Ku Kluxers, are ready to go in imposing their will,” Robeson boomed. “Are we going to give our America over to the Eastlands, Rankins and Bilbos? If not, then stop the lynchers! What about it, President Truman? Why have you failed to speak out against this evil?”
At the White House, Robeson led a seven-person delegation that included Mrs. Harper Sibley, whose husband was a former president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. During their meeting with Truman, the conversation turned prickly in a hurry. “Mrs. Sibley was the first to nettle him,” said a report in the Louisville Courier-Journal. “‘Discrimination against the Negroes in this country,’ she said, ‘is just as bad as the racism of Nazi Europe. We’re trying people in Nuremberg for war crimes; but if we really consider them guilty, Mr. President, we should consider those in this country who lynch Negroes are equally guilty.’”
Truman said the two situations weren’t the same, displaying ignorance about the nature of mob violence when he added, “We realize, and you must realize, that it is [the Nazis’] philosophy which has infected a few people in this country and is largely responsible for lynchings.”
Robeson lectured him along the same lines as Sibley, and Truman lectured him back. “You of all people ought to stand behind this country,” he snapped. “The United States and Great Britain are the last refuges of freedom in the world.” Truman may not have known that Robeson—in tune with long standing Communist Party doctrine—regarded Britain as part of the problem, not the solution, an imperial colonizer that oppressed people all over the planet. After Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946—where he issued his warnings about postwar Soviet expansionism—Robeson was the lead signatory on a letter that said British imperialism, propped up by financial support from the United States, was a bigger menace than anything the Soviets were up to. He informed Truman that Britain was “the greatest enslaver of human beings in the world.”
Faced with a choice between White’s centrist calm and Robeson’s thunderclaps, Truman assembled an establishment cast of advisers to help frame his race-relations ideas. On December 5, 1946, he created a Committee on Civil Rights, whose members and staff were charged with holding hearings and doing research that would lead to a major presidential statement about race in America. Most of the fifteen-member group were prominent white males from outside the South. There weren’t any Communists, of course, or anybody from the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.
Today, a presidential study commission might seem like the tamest solution to any subject, but it wasn’t tame back then. Based on the issue of race, Truman found himself with a problem that would influence everything that happened during the election of 1948. Because of his tough-with-the-Soviets line and his tentative moves on civil rights, he now had two sets of dedicated enemies in his own party, coming at him from opposite directions. With the Republicans powering up for their best chance to win the presidency since 1928, it seemed likely that his decision to interfere with the South would mean the end of his career.
Another unfortunate staple of the racial-atrocities beat were incidents in which white men accused of raping black women either weren’t indicted or were set free by a white jury, even when they were clearly guilty. For several weeks in late 1944 and early 1945, the Daily Worker and African-American newspapers publicized the story of Recy Taylor, a twenty-two-year-old black woman from small-town Alabama who was allegedly gang-raped by half a dozen young white males. A grand jury refused to indict them, giving the Worker an irresistible chance to slam everybody involved: the grand jurors, Alabama judges and state officials, and establishment newspapers that failed to report on what had happened.
“The Daily Worker and the Worker are the only newspapers, aside from the Negro press, which have mentioned this case,” one story said. The charge was accurate as far as the New York Times and Washington Post were concerned. Neither paper covered it.
With their nationwide network of activists and contacts, the CRC and the NAACP didn’t miss many of these stories. But in December 1946, just three weeks after McGee’s second guilty verdict, something monstrous happened in Laurel that escaped their notice. The Daily Worker missed it too. Otherwise, the paper surely would have given the news four-alarm treatment, because there was never a better example of the double standard applied to the punishment of black and white defendants in Mississippi rape cases.
At around 6 p.m. on December 6, 1946, a twenty-four-year-old white male named Laverne Yarbrough showed up at a small grocery store in the Queensburg section of town. The store’s owner, F. A. Hendry, didn’t know Yarbrough, but he noticed that he had a bottle of whiskey in his back pocket. Then he closed up for the night and drove home. It was already getting dark; Hendry remembered later that he had to turn on his car headlights to see.
Just down the street, two African-American boys—eleven-year-old Billie Earl Jernigan and twelve-year-old Willie Jones—were playing marbles on the pavement when they saw a man walk past them, leading a small black girl by the hand. They didn’t know who he was, but the girl, who was five, didn’t seem to mind. They noticed that the man was hiding his face with his hat. Then he picked up the girl and took her into a stand of woods, and the boy
s didn’t see them anymore.
Yarbrough allegedly raped the girl in the woods and ran away, leaving her bloody, terrified, and lost. Her mother had sent her out by herself earlier that day to look for an older sister at a neighborhood store. When her parents realized she was missing, they searched until they found her, hours later, walking alone on a side street, apparently the victim of sexual violence. They took her to the Laurel police department, and she was examined by a doctor that night. The doctor later testified that she was bleeding profusely from lacerations that indicated rape. In a second examination, he took a blood sample.
Local police hit the streets to find witnesses and hunt down the rapist. As they soon learned, various people had seen Yarbrough that afternoon and night, including the owner of a taxi company who said he showed up at his garage around 7:00 or 7:30, trying to get a check cashed. The man reported that Yarbrough had bloodstains on his hands, face, and clothes.
He was arrested at 11 p.m. by Laurel patrolman Jeff Montgomery and Deputy Sheriff Dave Shaw, who nabbed him at a roadside restaurant north of town. They took him to the city jail, where Wayne Valentine ordered him to take off his clothes, just as he’d done with McGee in Hattiesburg in 1945. At Yarbrough’s trial, which happened in March 1947, Valentine would testify that the clothing was spotted with blood.
Convinced they had the right man, the police cut a few corners as they compiled evidence for a case. Notably, blood-test evidence was never introduced—apparently, for Laurel investigators, the visual link of a bloody girl and blood on Yarbrough’s clothing and skin was enough. That night, the two boys, Jernigan and Jones, were brought in to identify the suspect, and the police ran the lineup in a way that any defense attorney would have objected to. First, they told the boys they were going to show them the man who “raped the little girl.” Then they took them inside a room where Yarbrough was sitting by himself. At Yarbrough’s trial, the boys were asked to describe how the procedure worked.
