Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  Both Mr. Marchant and Mr. Morrah gave the impression that they were stranded in the wrong century, like people locked in a train that has been shunted onto a siding. Mr. Morrah was as old-fashioned in appearance as Governor Dewey; he looked like a dandy of 1890. He was very likable, being small and delicately made yet obviously courageous; and there was nothing unlikable in his oratory. He told the court that he had known his cousin for twenty-five years and knew that he had never had a vicious thought, and he wished that it was possible for him to take John Marchant’s heart out of his breast and turn it over in his hand so that the jury could see that there was not an evil impulse in it. He was going on to say that he could picture John Marchant “with his mother, my aunt,” when Sam Watt rose and said, “I object. There is no evidence about the Marchant family.” The Judge allowed the objection. Mr. Morrah altered the phrase to “I can picture him surrounded by his loved ones,” and said that he “stood firmly bottomed, like a ship,” and warned the jury that if they convicted him, the facts “would rankle in the hearts of men throughout the state, from the rock-ribbed brow of Caesar’s Head to the marshes of Fort Sumter” and someplace else on the sea, and that “the ghosts of Hampton’s men would rise to haunt you.” But there was nothing barbarous in his speech. He was a transparently honest and kindly and dutiful person, and he depreciated no civilized standard, though it was startling when he ended his speech with the statement that the prosecution of Marchant reminded him of words spoken two thousand years ago, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” Mr. Marchant was really not that good.

  But great play was made with the Scripture; it might almost be called ball play. The Bible belonging to Greenville County Court House is in terrible shape. Like many Bibles, it has a flounce, or valance, of leather protecting its edges, and this is torn and crumbling, while its boards are cracked, and small wonder. Its quietest hours are when it is being sworn upon; at any other time, it is likely to be snatched up from the small stand on which it rests, which is like that used for potted plants in some homes, and waved in the air, held to an attorney’s breast, thrust out over the jury box, and hurled back to its resting place in a convulsion of religious ecstasy. Some of the Bible-tossing in this case was inspired by sincere conviction. But it looked as if a great deal was done in cold sacrilege to impress the jury, who were assumed to be naïvely pious. This was only one of the cynical efforts to exploit the presumed naïveté of the twelve men in the box. The subjects of these efforts were, as well as religion, alcohol, the hatred of the state for the nation, the hatred of the South for the North, and the hatred of the white man for the Negro. This last the Judge had expressly ruled should not be mentioned in court. Of the four defense attorneys, Mr. Morrah obeyed this ruling, Mr. John Bolt Culbertson and Mr. Thomas Wofford openly defied it, and Mr. Ben Bolt, who stood somewhere in the scale between Mr. Morrah and the other two, skated round it.

  Mr. Ben Bolt is a slow-moving, soft-voiced, gray-haired person of noble appearance, who is said to make many speeches about the common man. The industrial development of the South is evidently producing the same crop of liberal attorneys that were produced in England and the Northern states in the similar stage of their development. Mr. Bolt began his speech by a plea for racial tolerance, celebrating the life of dear old Aunt Hester, who aided his dear mother to guide his footsteps and who now lies in a grave that he often visits, always with the feeling that he ought to take his shoes off, since it is hallowed ground. Laying hold of the exhausted Bible, he changed the subject and recalled that the Supreme Court has ruled the Bible to be part of the common law of the State of South Carolina, and he pointed out that the Bible condemns conviction without several witnesses. It was not necessary to bring in the Bible to explain that, but Mr. Bolt was certainly going about his proper business when he proceeded to demonstrate the insufficiency of the evidence against the defendants. He passed on, however, to make an attack on the credibility of the witness U. G. Fowler that was embarrassing in its fatuity and seeming insincerity. This witness had been asked what his initials stood for, and had amazed the court by saying that he did not know, that they did not stand for anything but themselves. To people who questioned him outside court, he said that his mother had called him after a brother of hers and had never explained to him what his full name was. I am told by local experts that the uncle was probably called Huger, like many people in parts of South Carolina nearer the sea; it is the name of a Southern family of Huguenot origin, and it is pronounced “U.G.” by the simple folk who have borrowed it. Mr. Bolt tried to disseminate another explanation. “That don’t sound exactly Southern to me,” he said. “Those initials certainly don’t stand for Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson.” He was attempting to engender prejudice against this person by suggesting that his parents had christened him Ulysses Grant. This eminently sensible person was talking what he obviously knew to be humbug, out of his fathomless contempt for the jury. How little that school of thought realizes the dangers of contempt was demonstrated by a remark he made when he was representing the lynching as an episode that nobody but the meddlesome federal authorities would ever have thought of making a fuss over. When he was speaking of the F.B.I. agents, he said, “Why, you would have thought someone had found a new atomic bomb,” but “all it was was a dead nigger boy.” This is not a specifically Southern attitude. All over the world there are people who may use the atomic bomb because they have forgotten that it is our duty to regard all lives, however alien and even repellent, as equally sacred.

  Mr. John Bolt Culbertson’s speeches were untainted by any regard for the values of civilization. He went all the way over to the dead-nigger-boy school of thought. Mr. Culbertson is a slender, narrow-chested man with a narrow head. His sparse hair is prematurely white, his nose is sharp, and his face is colorless except for his very pink lips. He wears rimless spectacles and his lashes are white. The backs of his hands are thickly covered with fine white hairs. In certain lights, he gives the impression of being covered with frost. He has a great reputation in the South as a liberal. He is the local attorney for the C.I.O. and has worked actively for it. He has also been a friend to the emancipation of the Negroes and has supported their demands for better education and the extension of civil rights. He recently made an address to Negro veterans, which took courage on his part and gave them great happiness. He is one of the very few white men in these parts who shake hands with Negroes and give them the prefix of Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. Not long ago, an article in the New Republic hailed him as one of the true liberal leaders of the South. Many young people in Greenville who wish to play a part in the development of the New South look to him as an inspiring teacher, and many Negroes feel a peculiar devotion to him. Mr. Culbertson belongs to the school of oratory that walks up and down in front of the jury box. At the climactic points of his speeches, he adopts a crouching stance, puts his hands out in front of him, parallel to one another, and moves them in a rapid spin, as if he were a juggler and they were plates. Finally he shoots one hand forward and propels his argument with it. His choreography was especially vigorous when he was putting in a little work on the jury’s possible prejudice against alcohol. He was attempting to discredit the evidence of the tourist-camp proprietor who had identified the alleged lynchers. His knees went down. “Doesn’t this man”—his hands went forward—“own a honky-tonk . . . a camp”—his knees went lower; his hands came further forward—“where they sell”—his right hand shot out; his voice caught in his throat with horror and then cracked across space like a whip—“BEER?” It is not illegal to sell beer in South Carolina. I do not think that Mr. Culbertson, though a man of most sober habits, is a teetotaller. Had the outburst been simply an unlovely piece of hypocrisy, based on a profound contempt for his fellow-men, it would have sounded much the same; and it would have sounded equally irreconcilable with liberalism as that word is generally understood.

  Mr. Culbertson pandered to every folly that the jurors might be nursing in th
eir bosoms. He spoke of the defendants as “these So’th’n boys.” Only two or three could be considered boys. The ages of the others ranged from the late twenties to the fifties. It was interesting, by the way, to note how all the attorneys spoke with a much thicker Southern accent when they addressed the jury than when they were talking with their friends. Mr. Culbertson attacked the F.B.I. agents in terms that either meant nothing or meant that it was far less important to punish a murder than to keep out the federal authorities. He made the remark, strange to hear in a court of law, “If a Democratic administration could do that to us, what would a Republican administration do to us down here?” He appeared later to be declaring that the F.B.I. had been sent in by the administration to provide an anti-lynching case to win the Northern vote, in a Democratic seat that was not likely to go Republican even after a lynching prosecution. He himself, it may be noted, is a former F.B.I. agent, and was, it is said, famous for his zeal. He used his hope that the jury were xenophobes to make an attack on the freedom of the press. He pointed to the press table and declared that because of this fussy insistence on the investigation of a murder there was now a trial to which Northern papers had sent representatives; and the implication was that they had come for the purpose of mocking and insulting the South. “Lai-ai-aife and Tai-ai-aime,” he chanted with the accent that was so much stronger in the courtroom than it sounded in the hotel lobby or the drugstore, “have sent representatives.” The Judge pointed out that Mr. Culbertson had no evidence of the existence of these people and that they therefore could not be discussed.

  The thread on which these pearls were strung appeared to be the argument that the murder of Willie Earle was of very slight importance except for its remote political consequences. Mr. Culbertson was to prove that he did not give this impression inadvertently. He went into his crouching stance, his hands were spinning, he shone with frosty glee, exultantly he cried, “Willie Earle is dead, and I wish more like him was dead.” There was a delighted, giggling, almost coquettish response from the defendants and some of the spectators. Mr. Hurd and his father looked fortified. There was a gasp from others of different mind. Thunderously, the Judge called him to order: “You confine yourself to my ruling or I’ll stop you from arguing to the jury.” Culbertson, smiling at the defendants, almost winking at them, said, “I didn’t refer to Willie Earle as a Negro.” When the Judge bade him be careful, he continued, still flirting with his audience, “There’s a law against shooting a dog, but if a mad dog were loose in my community, I would shoot the dog and let them prosecute me.” A more disgusting incident cannot have happened in any court of law in any time.

  The attitude of Greenville toward this speech was disconcerting. Prosperous Greenville did not like it, but it likes very little that Mr. Culbertson does, and it explained that one could expect nothing better from him, because he is a liberal. If it was objected that this was precisely not the kind of speech that could be expected from a liberal, this Greenville answered that it was a horrid speech, and that liberals are horrid, an argument that cannot be pursued very far. The response of the liberal section of Greenville was not any easier to take. The liberals made no attempt to conceal the important fact that two of the defendants were close connections of a C.I.O. official. But they insisted that Mr. Culbertson is sincerely liberal, and apparently, if they rejected him, there is no local liberal of anything like his energy to take his place. To rationalize their continued acceptance of him, they had to adopt a theory that will do them no moral good at all. They admitted that it would have been awkward for his relations with the local C.I.O. if he had refused to appear for the defendants, and they claimed that he was right not to refuse, because nothing is of equal importance to the necessity of introducing the C.I.O. into the South. When they were asked why he used such squalid arguments in court, they replied that it is a lawyer’s duty to do everything he can to win his case for his clients, and that as he believed these arguments would appeal to the jury, he was obliged to use them. That is, of course, pure moonshine. In no system of jurisprudence is there a moral obligation on a lawyer who accepts the task of defending an accused murderer to go so near justifying murder as John Bolt Culbertson did in his passage about Willie Earle and the mad dog. This recalls many like accommodations that were made by lawyers in Italy and Germany during the early days of the Fascist and Nazi Parties. They relaxed their traditional principles and practice because the establishment of the Party seemed a necessity that had precedence over all others. But it is not generally understood that the C.I.O. is the kind of party that demands such sacrifices.

  If Mr. Culbertson’s conduct of the case has confused and depraved the standards of young liberal Greenville, it has done something just as unpleasant to the Negroes. The connection that links the defendants and the C.I.O. is known to every Negro in town. The uneducated Negroes have invented their own legend on the subject. Mr. Culbertson’s home, they believe, done belong to C.I.O., and C.I.O. done say it put Mr. Culbertson’s furniture right out on the sidewalk if Mr. Culbertson don’t save their folks’ good name. Then they laugh, with a roaring, jeering cynicism that is a humiliation to every white man and woman in the land.

  It was for the speech made by the fourth defense attorney, Mr. Thomas Wofford, that Greenville apologized most unhappily, though most laconically. Mr. Wofford is a person whom the town likes, or, to put it more accurately, for whom it feels an uneasy emotional concern. He is a man in his late thirties, red-haired, lightly built, and quick on his feet, intelligent, nerve-ridden, well mannered, with a look in his eyes like a kicking horse. He must have been a very attractive and hopeful boy. He has always been fortunate. His uncle and his father-in-law are famous lawyers, and he has had the brains to make the best of the opportunities these relationships have given him. He is said to have political ambitions. In the preliminary stages of the case, when the Judge was compiling a list of questions to be put to the veniremen to determine their suitability as jurors in this case, Sam Watt desired that they should be asked if they were members of any “secret organization, lodge, or association.” Mr. Wofford objected, on the grounds that such a question might be “embarrassing.”

  All the defense attorneys exaggerated their Southern accents and assumed a false ingenuousness when they addressed the jury, but none more so than Mr. Wofford. This elegantly attired and accomplished person talked as if he had but the moment before taken his hands off the plow; and he was careful to mop the sweat from his brow, because it is well known that the simple admire an orator who gives out even from the pores. He excelled his colleagues not only in this play acting but in his contempt for the jury. He assumed that they hated strangers, as the stupid do. He assumed that they would be stingy about money, as the poor often are. So he referred to the F.B.I. investigation as a “case of what I call ‘meddler’s itch,’ ” pointed out the F.B.I. agents who were sitting in court, and cried out in indignation because the State had closed its case four days before, “and here they are, staying at government expense.” He must have known quite well that the F.B.I. would only be performing its duty if it ordered its agents to stay till the end of the case, so that they could hear the attorneys’ comments on their activities. He was against the F.B.I.; he was also against the local representatives of the law. “If you’re going to enforce all the laws, why don’t you prosecute the jailer?” he asked. “It took,” he cried scornfully, “a nigger undertaker to find out there had been a lynching.” Everybody and everything was wrong, it seemed, except murderers and the idea of murder. Like Mr. Culbertson, he disregarded the Judge’s ruling that no alleged action of Willie Earle was to be mentioned as affording “justification, mitigation, or excuse” for the lynching. It was rumored in the recess preceding Mr. Wofford’s speech that he meant to flout this ruling, and he did so with evident deliberation. He said, “Mr. Watt argues, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ I wonder if Willie Earle had ever read that statement.” This was as flagrant a defense of the lynching as Mr. Culbertson’s remark “Wi
llie Earle is dead, and I wish more like him was dead” and the allusion to the mad dog. But it was much more dangerous, because it was not obviously disgusting. Mr. Culbertson was plainly seeking to please and enroll as allies people in court and outside who could not for one moment be thought of as representing the highest traditions of Greenville or the South. Mr. Wofford was careful to look and speak in such a manner that people who did not fully understand the implications of his defense might think he was upholding those traditions. When the Judge checked him and ordered the remark stricken off the records, he showed a remarkable lack of deference to the Court, but again in such a way that many people might have thought that he was defending the cause of justice and democracy. And it would be interesting to know what he was really defending. “We people get along pretty well,” he said, “until they start interfering with us in Washington and points North,” and he spoke of the Northern armies that had laid waste the South in the Civil War. He abused the “Northern agitators, radio commentators, and certain publications” for interfering in this case. He said that “they refer to us as ‘a sleepy little town.’ They say we are a backward state and poor—and we are. But this state is ours. To the historian, the South is the Old South. To the poet, it is the Sunny South. To the prophet, it is the New South. But to us, it is our South. I wish to God they’d leave us alone.” This would be an attitude that one would respect in the case of the ordinary citizen of Greenville. But in view of Mr. Wofford’s desire not to embarrass secret organizations, his hostility to all law-enforcement agencies, and his attitude toward murder, it would be interesting to know what he wanted to be left alone to do.

  It would not be fair to chronicle the speeches of the last two defense attorneys, without emphasizing that they were in no way representative of Greenville. Some hours after Mr. Wofford had spoken, a man that Greenville looks up to paused in the lobby of the principal hotel to say to me, “I would like you to know that we were very disappointed in Tom’s speech. We hoped he would do better.” A nice man was putting something nicely. Greenville was more at ease the next day, the tenth day of the trial, when Judge Martin made his charge to the jury. The courtroom was fuller than ever before. There were now heavy showers, but the heat had not broken, so the women were still in summer dresses and the men in their shirts, while the rain fell in rods past the windows. In the front row of the seats, within the bar of the court, were the Judge’s wife and three daughters, all spectacular beauties, with magnificent black eyes and silky black curls. The youngest child, who is not yet in her teens, was dressed in a pink-checked muslin frock and had a special charm. The Judge’s charge to the jury struck oddly on the ears of strangers, for by the law of South Carolina the Judge cannot comment on the evidence; he must do no more than analyze the law applying to the evidence and define the verdicts that it is possible to return against the accused persons. It is not easy to see the purpose of the law. If the intention is to prevent the common man from being hoodwinked by his superiors, there is equal reason for forbidding the prosecuting and defending attorneys from making closing speeches. For what it was, Judge Martin’s charge was masterly, but it represented a legal position very favorable to the defendants. They were charged with murder and conspiracy, and there was very little evidence except their own statements. No man had in his statement confessed to murder. Nearly all had confessed to conspiracy. But, as the Judge put it, “the State cannot establish a conspiracy by the alleged statements of the individual defendants alone.” However, the Judge also seemed at some pains to make the jury understand that if they acquitted the defendants on the charges relating to murder and found them guilty of conspiracy, the sentences passed on them could not exceed ten years.