by Radley Balko
The end of the Civil War brought liberation for the slaves under federal law—at least in name—but it also marked the beginning of a decades-long effort by state authorities to resurrect an economy built on forced labor. In 1865, newly elected Mississippi governor Benjamin G. Humphreys called a special session of the state legislature to discuss what he called the “negro problem.” His solution, quickly adopted by the state legislature, was the Black Codes, a series of draconian laws that deployed the criminal justice system to enforce de facto slavery. Instead of ensuring justice, this new criminal justice system would traduce it by creating “free” labor in the form of prison inmates.
The Black Codes infected every part of quotidian life. They criminalized black vagrancy, which they defined so broadly that it applied to nearly every poor black resident of the state at just about any time. For black people caught up in this system, a trial on the merits wasn’t worth the enmity it attracted among local law enforcement officials. Few lawyers were willing to defend a black misdemeanant, anyway. So most pleaded guilty. The punishment was generally a fine, but because most blacks were too poor to pay, frequently their only option was to hire themselves out to someone willing to pay it for them. For destitute blacks—the Black Codes’ intended victims—that invariably meant returning to the plantation.
In 1870, the Noxubee County Census listed thirty-two black people with the last name Brooks. Levon Brooks’s ancestors were no doubt among them. As far as he knows, his family has always lived in or very near the county. Brooks and his brothers and sisters were all born and raised on a large farm in eastern Noxubee, where his mother, father, and several uncles all worked for decades.
The same census listed thirty-five local black people with the last name Brewer. Kennedy Brewer’s ancestors were also likely part of that population. Brewer’s mother, now in her mid-seventies, says she and her family have been chopping cotton in or around Noxubee County for as long as she can remember. She raised fourteen children. Her son Kenny, as she calls him, was her “knee baby”—her penultimate child. When asked how old she was when she began working in the fields, she answers, matter-of-factly, “Just old enough.”
In the late 1870s, Congress convened a joint select committee to investigate reports of violence and brutality inflicted as part of the “Mississippi Plan,” an effort by the white establishment to overthrow the Reconstruction Republican government. In Noxubee County, one witness described “the whipping of men to compel them to change their mode of voting, the tearing of them away from their families at night, accompanied with insults and outrage, and followed by their murder.” There were fifteen such murders in Noxubee County alone.
From the end of Reconstruction through the Depression era, historical records suggest that Noxubee County was isolated from much of the rest of the state. The county not only suffered its fair share of violence, it was too rural and isolated for many outsiders to take notice. One of the few outside organizations to have any consistent contact within the county was the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), a Depression-era labor group founded in the Arkansas delta. A few locals had formed a branch of the union in the Black Prairie region. But they may have done so more to establish a lifeline to the outside world than to actually organize tenant farmers. Many of the members’ pleas to STFU president J. R. Butler weren’t about union matters but read like desperate cries for help. The letters, written mostly in pencil on scraps of paper and on the back of outdated calendars, chronicled tales of raw violence. One archivist of the letters later observed that they seemed to be written merely in the hope “that someone in the outside world would at least care.”
Butler quoted one such complaint verbatim in a letter to Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP: “Listen, something happened down here in Brooksville with one of our young men. This young man was courting a girl and was attacked by a mob of three white men, one of them castrated him by cutting the whole sack off.” Between 1901 and 1927, white mobs murdered at least seven black residents of Noxubee County—there were likely even more victims. The year 1927 was particularly violent. In May, a black man accused of killing a white farmer was shot two hundred times, while two other black men were burned to death in Macon. No coroner’s jury indicted their killers, so their names are lost to history.
Boswell Stevens was an influential Noxubee County farmer and landowner, a local power broker, and an ardent segregationist. In the spring of 1865 Stevens’s grandfather, a former Confederate soldier, had come to the eastern part of Noxubee County with little more than “a gray uniform and a poor horse,” and settled along its northeastern edge. After two years of hard work, he, his wife, and his father-in-law had earned enough money to buy 25 acres of their own. That 25 acres eventually grew to 1,500, and a small farm swelled to become a thriving plantation.
Stevens was born on that plantation and eventually inherited it. As owner and operator of one of the region’s largest farms, he embraced the role of civic leader and joined the local branch of the American Farm Bureau, the nonprofit advocacy group for farmers and denizens of rural America. Noxubee formed its first farm bureau in the summer of 1923 with a membership of about 225 farmers.
As his plantation grew, so did Stevens’s reputation. In 1950 he was elected president of the state bureau. It was an enormously influential position. Each year, the federal government gave tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to the American Farm Bureau’s various branches. Arch-segregationist and Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, made sure a huge chunk of that money made its way back to Mississippi. Stevens then got to distribute it. He used the money not only to support the state’s white farmers but to shore up the state’s defenses against integration.
After the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Stevens allied himself with the local Citizens’ Council and kept in close contact with the newly created pro-segregation Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The commission’s director considered Stevens an “enthusiastic” supporter of the agency’s goals. One 1959 Sovereignty Commission report noted that “white people were exceedingly hard on the Negroes” in Noxubee County, but the abuse was “necessary to keep them under control.” Citizens’ Council sources reported zero registered black voters in Noxubee and about the same amount of NAACP activity. A report the next year declared race relations in the area “in very good condition,” thanks mostly to intimidation by the Citizens’ Council. Of course for blacks, “very good condition” meant full-bore segregation, systematic violence, and no voting rights.
For decades, the Stevens family farm was one of the most renowned in eastern Mississippi. Produce from the plantation perennially collected blue ribbons at the Noxubee County fair, and the Stevens children usually placed in the fair’s child beauty pageants. Boswell Stevens eventually moved on from the farm bureau to be elected president of the National Cotton Council, a high honor that brought yet more renown on the plantation.
Today, “Bos” Stevens—Boswell Stevens’s grandson—is the postmaster in Brooksville, Mississippi. He sometimes gets lost recalling the olden days. While he’s certainly cognizant of the ugly racial oppression that underlies his memories, he speaks fondly of his upbringing. With gray hair protruding from under his Mississippi State baseball cap, he recalls the big iron bell that rang in the morning to wake everyone up. The same bell rang again at noon to announce lunch. Bos would typically scarf down his meal as quickly as possible so he and the boys his age could play an inning or two of baseball before heading back to the fields.
Many of Bos’s friends were children of the farm’s black laborers. They lived in the tenant houses lining the roads that crisscrossed the fields. Most had their own garden plot. Few had electricity. Almost none had running water. Tenants could buy meat and staples at the commissary, a log structure behind the main house.
Some of Stevens’s fondest memories are about the cotton harvest each fall. His family would park
wooden wagons at the end of the cotton rows, and the fields would be full of pickers, adults and children, from the Stevens plantation and nearby farms. Workers still picked by hand, even through the mid-1960s, long after most other farms had mechanized. Those who picked the most and the fastest won prizes. Adult winners received a ham. Children got treats. And all of it was laid over with the singing of songs—spirituals, of course, but funny ditties, too.
Stevens is still moved by the nostalgia of those days. “It was what it must have been like a hundred years before,” he says. “I mean, it was terrible too. I know that. But there was something beautiful about it.”
After his father took over management of the farm, Stevens recalls one afternoon in particular in which he had asked his dad how many people lived on the plantation. His father looked at him with a blank stare. That was a good question, his father said—and one to which he didn’t know the answer. So Bos and his father hopped in a truck, drove through the property, and began counting. They counted behind the house toward the dairy barn, and then in the other direction, toward the opposing fields. By the time they finished, they had tallied about 150 black tenants.
Had they stopped at one particular tenant house several hundred yards southeast of the main house, in a field alongside five or six other shacks of the same design, they could have peeked inside and made the acquaintance of Rich and Loretta Brooks, along with their new baby boy. Loretta had already given birth to several other children in that cabin, some at night by lantern light. All had been daughters. The new baby was their first son. They named him Levon.
Some thirty-two years later, a Noxubee County jury will wrongly convict Levon Brooks of raping and murdering a three-year-old girl. Bos Stevens will be the jury’s foreman.
Shortly after Levon Brooks was charged, a trial judge appointed Robert Prather to be his attorney. Prather had been in practice for a long time and had plenty of criminal defense experience. But there was one significant problem. Prather had represented Justin Johnson after his first attempted rape and was now representing him after his second.
Prather was in a difficult predicament. It’s impossible to know if he ever suspected Johnson for the crime (Prather has since passed away), but if he didn’t, he certainly should have. At the very least, he should have recognized Justin Johnson as a critical component of Levon Brooks’s defense. Johnson was walking, talking evidence that Earnest Eichelberger and Harry Alderson had rushed to judgment, that there were fundamental flaws in their investigation. Johnson was a known sex offender with a modus operandi nearly identical to the one used to abduct and murder Courtney Smith. His car was seen near the pond at the time Smith was killed, and he had no good explanation why. The only reason they’d dropped him as a suspect was because the investigation focused on Brooks long enough for Michael West to apply his forensic methods and seal the deal.
Prather owed a basic duty of care to both his clients, Brooks and Johnson. Central to that duty are loyalty and confidentiality that he couldn’t possibly have provided to both. If, in defending Brooks, he pointed the finger at Johnson—or at least pointed out that Johnson was a far more likely suspect—he would have betrayed his ethical obligation to Johnson. And if he didn’t suggest Johnson as an alternate suspect, he’d have betrayed his ethical obligation to Brooks.
What Prather should have done was quietly approach the trial judge early on and explain why he needed to withdraw from Brooks’s case. Instead, on the day trial began, Prather wrote a vague letter stating that he had represented another original suspect in the case, as well as two probable witnesses. (He represented Sonya Smith after prosecutors charged her with child abandonment for leaving her children at home on the night of the murder. He had also represented William Smith on an unrelated burglary charge.)
According to the trial record, Prather had his cocounsel discuss the matter with Brooks, instead. That should never have happened. It was unfair, unjust, and unethical to put the onus on Brooks. Literally minutes before Brooks’s trial was to begin, Prather broached the issue with the court. He told the judge that his prior representation of witnesses and suspects in the case had just “jumped out of the book at me over the weekend.” If that was true, he was woefully unprepared for trial. He should have known months earlier that Johnson had been not only a suspect but the strongest suspect.
The judge then asked Brooks if he had read Prather’s letter. He said he had. He asked if Brooks had discussed the matter with Prather’s cocounsel. He said he had. And he asked if Brooks had any problem with Prather continuing to represent him. He said he didn’t. And that was that.
Levon Brooks was about to be tried for murder by the judge who had previously sentenced him for aiding a burglary several years earlier. Brooks’s attorney was simultaneously representing another man who was initially a suspect for the murder for which Brooks was being tried, who was by far the more likely culprit, and who in fact did actually commit the crime. And Brooks’s fate would be determined by a jury whose foreman inherited the plantation where Brooks was born and where his family had worked as laborers.
In its February 6, 1971, edition, the student newspaper for Columbus, Mississippi’s S. D. Lee High School included an interview with eighteen-year-old Forrest “Ox” Allgood. The paper called Allgood the “spokesman” for the school’s conservative students. The young Allgood described his politics as “radical right” and feared that though conservatives like him were once a large majority, they were fast becoming a small minority. Allgood railed against student activists who were “burning buildings” and “throwing human excrement at cops.” He praised Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s infamous order to police to “Shoot to kill!” protesters and rioters after the assassination of Matin Luther King Jr.
Throughout the interview, Allgood portrayed himself as an underdog, even a rebel. He was the conservative fighting for what was right and true, resisting liberalism as it encroached from all sides. (Even, apparently, in Columbus, Mississippi.) “It’s hard to be a conservative these days,” he said. “If you are not a liberal then you are out.”
Today, Forrest Allgood is a Columbus, Mississippi, institution. He was born in the town in 1954, and save for four years of undergrad and three years of law school at Ole Miss (where he briefly played right tackle for the freshman football team), Allgood spent his entire life in Lowndes County. He even appeared as a child on Fun Time with Uncle Bunky.
Few prosecutors in Mississippi used Steven Hayne and Michael West more than Allgood. He was first elected district attorney for the counties of Lowndes, Noxubee, Clay, and Oktibbeha in 1989, or at about the same time West and Hayne began working together. Allgood used Hayne often, including in his most controversial cases. He also used West in most of those cases. And he publicly, aggressively defended both men when others began to question their credibility.
At least in appearance, Allgood doesn’t resemble the stereotypical Southern prosecutor. He looks a bit like a cross between a tent revival preacher and a roadie for the Allman Brothers. For most of his career, he’s sported wavy, surprisingly long hair that dips below his collar in the back, with a cowlick that swoops down to graze the top of his left eyebrow. His slim frame and narrow face strike a skeletal figure, usually adorned with large round glasses, often tinted. He apparently has an affinity for medieval times—his office was adorned with swords, shields, and other paraphernalia from the Middle Ages.
Allgood’s colleagues describe him as intensely private, deeply religious, and not particularly congenial. He has never been much for the Southern custom of small talk and exchange of pleasantries, and rarely interacted with other lawyers outside the courtroom. “I don’t know if he didn’t get humor, or just wasn’t interested in it,” says one defense attorney who sometimes opposed Allgood. “But I can’t ever recall him laughing.”
When Allgood speaks, he’s careful and deliberate, often leaving long pauses between his words. He rarely gestures, and his mouth doesn’t move much when he speaks. It’s
easy to see how juries might find him persuasive, or at least engaging. You keep listening because he keeps you waiting, if only for him to finish his thought. In its own odd way, his speaking style commands attention.
Allgood joined the prosecutor’s office fresh out of law school in 1978, starting as an assistant district attorney. His career tracks closely with the law-and-order movement of the past thirty or so years. His positioning himself as a champion for crime victims, for example, reflects the emergence of the victims’ rights movement over the course of his career. “My sympathy is firmly on the side of the victim. It always has been,” he has said.
Allgood’s politics never changed much from his high school days. One former police chief, who considered himself a personal friend of Allgood’s when he was in Mississippi, describes Allgood as “too conservative for the John Birch Society.” But more than his politics, it was really Allgood’s faith that drove his career in law enforcement. “Allgood has deeply held religious beliefs,” says Mississippi defense attorney André de Gruy, who has been practicing in the state since the early 1990s. “He’s a fundamentalist, and I think he often acted from there.”
For someone so focused on victims of violent crime, Allgood was also an aggressive prosecutor of nonviolent drug crimes. One of his office’s last cases involved a seventy-year-old woman given a sentence of ten years in prison for marijuana plants found on her property, even though it was her first offense and no one—including the judge—suspected the woman of distribution, or even of necessarily planting the pot. (The woman pleaded guilty.) In another case from his final few years in office, he prosecuted a woman for “depraved heart murder” because she had miscarried after allegedly consuming cocaine during her pregnancy. That in itself was a highly controversial prosecution, but there was also good evidence that the cocaine isn’t what caused the miscarriage.
