by Radley Balko
For more than a century, coroners and the juries they convened across the country seem to have had an extraordinarily difficult time identifying members of the white mobs who murdered black people, even when the identities of the people who perpetrated such killings were well known in the community, or even when there were photographs of them carrying out the lynching—even when those photographs were published on the front pages of local newspapers.
The problem was especially egregious in the first half of the twentieth century, when lynchings were often a public spectacle, and the identities of participants weren’t just well known, they were celebrated. Lynchings were often organized—even planned—performances. Local newspapers sometimes posted the time and location. They were frequently witnessed by dozens, some by hundreds, of spectators, with the events then reported on and publicized the following day.
The killings were purposeful assertions of white supremacy, a terroristic tool to keep black people docile and subservient. The intended victim wasn’t just limited to the doomed soul at the end of the rope, but every black man, woman, and child close enough to be affected by the violence. Publicity was therefore often welcome. In some cases, vendors sold gruesome photos and postcards of lynchings, or pieces of the rope used for the hanging.
In October 1911 in Anderson County, South Carolina, a mob strung up a man named Willis Jackson on a telephone pole and shot him to death. Reporters from the local paper witnessed the entire murder. When the coroner cut Jackson’s body down the next day, the paper reported, “his fingers had been removed as souvenirs. Onlookers took home pieces of the rope that strung him up, too.” The paper presumably got the scoop on the killing because its editor, Victor B. Cheshire, was part of the mob. So was state representative Joshua W. Ashley. The paper reported that its editor “went out to see the fun, with not the least objection to being a party to help lynch the brute.” Even with the names of the lynch mob published in the local paper, the coroner’s jury concluded that Willis Jackson died “at the hands of parties unknown.”
The investigation into the October 1916 murder of Anthony Crawford in Abbeville County, South Carolina, concluded the same way. Crawford was a successful black cotton farmer who had turned a small field he inherited from his father into a 427-acre operation, making him one of the wealthiest men in the county. That didn’t sit well with his white neighbors. After a heated argument between Crawford and a white grocer, one of the grocer’s clerks struck Crawford in the head with an axe handle. A mob formed. Crawford was captured, dragged through the county’s black neighborhoods by a rope, and hung from a pine tree. White residents then used his hanging body for target practice. A local newspaper reported the incident the next day under the headline “Negro Strung Up and Shot to Pieces.” Despite dozens of witnesses, the coroner’s jury again invoked the magic phrase, rendering the crime unsolvable.
After the June 1923 lynching of two black men accused of killing Homestead, Florida, town marshal Charles Bryant, the coroner’s jury concluded that the victims “came to their deaths as the result of gunshot wounds from persons unknown.” But not only did the jury know the men in the posse, the murderers were actually called to testify. Author William Wilbanks writes in his history of law enforcement deaths in the region that the “persons unknown” conclusion was merely a way to affirm the social order. “The coroners’ juries may have felt that the killings were justified,” Wilbanks writes, “or were afraid to engage in an unpopular ‘persecution’ of fellow citizens for doing what the (white) community believed to be right (if not legal).” Wilbanks adds that the coroner’s jury in Bryant’s case also “took the Sheriff ‘off the hook,’ as he could point to the ruling as justification for not conducting his own investigation.”
These are just a few examples of hundreds. Black newspapers, newsletters, and advocacy journals are filled with similar accounts. By the 1930s and 1940s, national sentiment began to turn on racially motivated lynchings, at least outside of the South. Some sympathetic politicians, legal societies, and progressive editorial boards even began to condemn them. Lynchings declined in number, though they by no means disappeared. Instead, the institution underwent a subtle but significant transformation. Where lynchings had previously been conducted as a public spectacle, the murders now became more localized and secretive. The aim was still the same, however: to terrorize the black population into subservience.
Here, too, the coroner system was happy to help. In fact, in some ways it became easier for coroners and their juries to excuse the murders. Those who participated in lynchings were less likely to boast about their crimes in public forums. Killings took place in the woods or on private property instead of the town square. Photos of the lynchers were less likely to show up in the local paper. With participants seeking anonymity instead of notoriety, the coroners’ juries’ claims to be unable to ascertain their identities were more credible, at least on the surface.
That said, the July 1946 murders of Roger Malcolm, Dorothy Malcolm, George Dorsey, and Mae Dorsey in Monroe, Georgia, demonstrated the resilient power of a coroner’s jury to thwart the interests of justice, even in the face of national attention from reporters, federal investigators, and the president of the United States himself. At the time, the country had gone nearly a year without a reported lynching. The incident precipitating the killings had occurred two weeks earlier, when Roger Malcolm, a sharecropper, resisted his landowner’s attempt to whip him. The two got into a physical altercation, during which Malcolm stabbed his landlord with a pocketknife. Malcolm and his wife, Dorothy, fled to a farm in a neighboring county, where Dorothy’s brother, George Dorsey—a decorated veteran freshly returned from World War II—sharecropped with his wife.
On July 26, a white mob caught up with both couples, dragged them from their car, beat them, and shot all four of them to death. When the coroner and sheriff investigated the crime scene, they found that the surrounding trees had been riddled with buckshot. The women’s arms had been broken. The force of a shotgun blast had nearly removed Dorothy Malcolm’s face. The earlier altercation was well known to locals, as were the identities of the members of the mob. Yet once again, the coroner’s jury made little effort at all to identify them. The local coroner concluded, “Death at the hands of persons unknown.”
By the time federal investigators looked into the case, any physical evidence was long gone, and witnesses had been sufficiently intimidated to keep quiet. The FBI got involved, issued dozens of subpoenas, and interviewed thousands of people. Time magazine ran a story headlined, “The Best People Won’t Talk.” NBC led its national radio news broadcast with the opening: “One hundred forty million Americans were disgraced late yesterday, humiliated in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world by one of the most vicious lynchings to stain our national record.” President Harry Truman would later say of the murders, “When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.” He was right, but little was done to address it. Coroners’ juries would continue to cover up racial violence for decades to come.
Mississippi was in perhaps the worst “fix” of all. The state saw more lynchings go unpunished than any other state. Between 1882 and 1947, Mississippi led the country in lynchings, with 577. And as the black bodies were hanged, burned, and fished from Mississippi lakes, rivers, and streams, the state’s coroner system never saw a thing.
In 1931, a Poplarville mob removed Harold “Doc” Jackson from a jail, tied a rope around his neck, and left him hanging from a bridge. The coroner’s jury was unable to distinguish if Jackson’s fall from a bridge with a rope tied around his neck was accidental or coerced. In 1934, a mob of white neighbors in Lawrence County hunted down black farmer R. J. Tyrone, who they’d decided was “too prosperous” at a time when white farmers were suffering. According to press accounts, the mob then shotgunned
him to death. The county coroner ruled Tyrone’s death a suicide, and some sources still claim that the case is unsolved. The following year in DeSoto County, a black man was found in a gully with a rope around his neck, his body riddled with bullets. The county coroner called that a suicide, too.
But it wasn’t just about covering up racist violence. The same culture that used racial violence to keep blacks in their place also put little value on black lives in general. When black people killed other black people, the coroner often didn’t even bother with an inquest. It was less hassle and required fewer resources to simply decide that the death was an accident, a suicide, or from natural causes. A Jackson Clarion-Ledger crime report from 1904 captures the prevailing attitude: “Mississippi had the usual number of killings during the week just closed,” the paper reported. “Aside from the dozen or so reported in the press dispatches, several homicides occurred which the county correspondents did not deem necessary to report to the public or of sufficient importance to be chronicled in the dispatches.”
One of the more well-known examples of this indifference to black lives is the death of the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. In August 1938 Johnson, then twenty-seven, was playing with his band at a barn dance in Greenwood, Mississippi. By most accounts of his last days, Johnson, a notorious lothario, had been seeing a married woman. Her husband was apparently aware of the relationship. A few nights after the dance, Johnson grew violently ill. Within a few hours, he was on the floor, writhing and howling from excruciating pain in his abdomen. He died on August 16. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Johnson’s band mate and one of his closest friends, was with Johnson when he died. Edwards, who died in 2011 at the age of ninety-six, always maintained that Johnson died from drinking poisoned whiskey. By some accounts, the husband of the woman Johnson was seeing had poisoned the bluesman’s drink. In other versions, Johnson’s lover poisoned his drink herself after learning that he’d been seeing someone else.
The conflicting stories and ongoing mystery surrounding Johnson’s death are the product of the fact that it was never properly investigated. Though Johnson was well known among black musicians, particularly in the Delta, he wouldn’t achieve mythology status among white music lovers until decades after his death. (According to lore, Johnson and the devil once struck a deal at a crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The devil gifted Johnson with virtuosity on the guitar; in return, Johnson forfeited his soul.)
If you were a Greenwood, Mississippi, law enforcement official working in August 1938, Robert Johnson was just another black man in Mississippi. Despite the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death, there was never much of an investigation, never an autopsy. Under “cause of death,” the Leflore County coroner wrote simply: “no doctor.”
Later, an employee with the state’s Department of Vital Statistics added in a handwritten note on the back of Johnson’s death certificate that the owner of the plantation where Johnson was staying claimed that the singer had syphilis. But that too was never confirmed.
As Mississippi moved into the civil rights era, the racial violence intensified. And as the pile of bodies grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the coroner system remained a shadowy conspirator in the carnage. Under state law, the coroner had ultimate authority over the scene of a suspicious death until he or his inquest determined that a crime had been committed. The coroner was the first to examine a body while the evidence was still fresh. The coroners thus had the access and ability to undermine or bungle a prosecution from the earliest stages of the investigation. Local prosecutors usually didn’t pursue charges in such cases anyway. But as the civil rights era wore on, federal officials increasingly looked to get involved in cases where they had jurisdiction. A savvy coroner could make it very difficult for them to build a case.
To fully understand the story of Kennedy Brewer, Levon Brooks, and many other similar cases, it’s important to appreciate the pliability of Mississippi’s medicolegal system—how sheriffs, police chiefs, and prosecutors have manipulated it to achieve a particular end. The system was designed this way. Sometimes it solved crimes, but that wasn’t necessarily its chief purpose. Instead, its purpose has always been to facilitate law enforcement’s desires as reflected by the prevailing status quo. Sometimes that is justice. But at other times it’s been something quite different.
Over the first half of the twentieth century, it was about letting racial violence go unreckoned. On several occasions in the twenty-first century, it was about trying to rectify the wrongs perpetrated during the civil rights era. Here too, the system sometimes sacrificed fairness and justice in a particular case to achieve that end. By the time the system got to Brooks and Brewer, it was largely about confirming the hunches and suspicions of local police and prosecutors, regardless of whether those hunches were correct.
The common denominator in these cases is the facilitation of those in power, whether in covering up a lynching, finally bringing to trial a civil rights–era murder case, or merely convicting the man police and prosecutors were convinced committed the crime. In this sense, Mississippi’s death investigation system rarely failed. Instead, it tended to perform exactly as intended.
In 1955 Mississippi’s largest newspaper took notice of the state’s woeful death investigation system. It was in the Clarion-Ledger’s first such report; many others would follow. The article quoted W. N. Ethridge, a justice on the state’s supreme court, who remarked that crime had gone up 20 to 25 percent and, along with others, voiced concern that the state’s medicolegal system, including its coroner system, was antiquated and ill-equipped to bring killers to justice.
The evolution of the coroner system in Mississippi—or lack thereof—has largely been a microcosm of the same debates, tensions, political barriers, and alignment of forces that have taken place nationally. But in Mississippi (and in other Southern states), the shortcomings have been magnified by poverty and structural racism, the consequences of the system’s failures have been more harmful, and the barriers to reform posed by cronyism and good-ol’-boy networks have been harder to clear. Consequently, medicolegal reform in much of the South has lagged behind most of the rest of the country by decades. On many occasions over the last half century or so, newspapers, medical professionals, and advocates for various causes have tried to call attention to the deficiencies in Mississippi’s system. Each time the resulting reforms—if there were any at all—were mostly cosmetic.
So the issues outlined by the Clarion-Ledger report will sound familiar. Coroners were incompetent. State law at the time required just two qualifications for the job: candidates had to be registered to vote and “must never have denied the existence of a Supreme being.”
Like their counterparts in much of the country, Mississippi coroners and the local medical community had an uneasy, often contentious relationship. On those occasions when the coroner was able to find a physician to perform an autopsy, police and prosecutors frequently had unrealistic expectations for autopsy results, and grew frustrated when a doctor couldn’t provide the dispositive evidence to clinch a conviction. In describing an early incarnation of what today is referred to as the “CSI effect”—the unrealistic expectations some jurors have because of the way forensics is portrayed in pop culture—one forensic pathologist told the paper, “I am afraid the education of many peace officers with regard to pathologists comes from paper-bound detective books wherein the pathologists make amazing and at times absurd deductions from minimal evidence and with lack of any historical background of the case being studied. These examples, even though complimentary, are gross exaggerations of the actual practice of pathology.”
Or at least the competent practice. Not surprisingly, the state’s doctors bristled at such unrealistic expectations and felt professionally insulted when they were overruled by some funeral home director or aspiring politician exercising the power of a position that was low paid and part-time. As the tension mounted, coroners were increasingly determining cause of death without consult
ing anyone who possessed any actual medical training.
But the Clarion-Ledger investigation had little impact. The system simply served too many powerful interests. This would have been true in just about any era. But the timing of that first investigation was particularly problematic. A year earlier, the US Supreme Court had issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. That decision—and those that followed in federal courts across the South—reaffirmed and enforced the federal judiciary’s determination not only to desegregate public schools but to put an end to Jim Crow. Southern states—Mississippi in particular—responded with defiance.
As Brown struck at the heart of Jim Crow, the coroner system—flawed as it may have been in protecting public health and safety—was controlled by the white power structure. It was a critical tool for preserving the racial status quo. The central argument in the Clarion-Ledger series was that the antiquated coroner system should be replaced with one run by competent physicians—physicians who in theory would be guided by the Hippocratic oath, a professional code of ethics, and a commitment to public health, not to reelection, serving law enforcement, or preserving the social order. In 1956, that high-minded concept never stood a chance. The state had other priorities.
Just before midnight on May 7, 1955, a convertible pulled up next to Reverend George Lee as he motored down Church Street in the small Mississippi Delta town of Belzoni, in Humphreys County. Lee had just caught up on some work at the grocery store he owned, had closed up, and was heading home. The driver of the convertible pulled out a shotgun, aimed it at Lee, and sent two blasts of buckshot into Lee and his car. One swarm of pellets hit Lee in the head, shattering his jawbone and blowing off the lower portion of his face. Lee lost control of his car, which then jumped a curb and slammed into a frame house. He staggered from the wreckage, collapsed, and died before he could be taken to a hospital.
