Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South

by David Beasley

  Arnall believed that poverty was the root cause of racism, pitting whites against blacks in a fight over an economic pie that was simply too small. “Poverty breeds prejudice, hatreds, discontent,” he said.26

  Arnall pushed successfully to eliminate Georgia’s $1-per-year poll tax, which prevented many poor blacks and whites from voting. But by law, blacks could still not vote in the Democratic primary. Although blacks could vote in the general election, and many chose Republican candidates, it was a futile gesture, since Georgia remained solidly Democratic. That changed in 1946 when federal courts struck down all-white primaries. In the 1946 Democratic primary for governor that summer, two hundred thousand blacks were registered to vote in Georgia. During Arnall’s four years as governor, voter registration in Georgia doubled from five hundred thousand to a million.

  Arnall was a leader who proved it was possible to transcend race in the South, even in the 1930s and 1940s.

  Despite Georgia’s tortured past, despite the poverty and racism that hovered over the state like a curse, its citizens were able to look beyond race, if that would lead to better economic times or ensure that their children would receive a decent college education. But it took leaders like Arnall to make that happen.

  Arnall also sued the large northern railroads, alleging that they conspired to charge the South higher freight rates in order to keep the South in a state of arrested development. The railroads, Georgia argued, treated the South as if it were an “undeveloped economic colony.” Only thirty-eight years old at the time, the young governor argued the case personally before the U.S. Supreme Court.27 Although Georgia eventually lost the case, Arnall was vindicated when the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered equality in railroad freight rates.

  Tattnall Prison, where six black men had been executed on December 9, 1938, presented challenges to Arnall during his four years as governor. With World War II raging, it was hard to find an adequate number of prison guards. So, early in the Arnall administration, twenty-five prisoners escaped from Tattnall in one day. An investigation revealed two liquor stills inside Tattnall, one of them in the prison cannery, and that men and women prisoners, although housed in separate buildings, were mixing, giving Tattnall a new nickname: “prison love nest.”28 It was also discovered that because of the manpower shortage, inmates were operating prison telephones, elevators, and power plants at Tattnall.

  Among the reforms after the escape was, at long last, a venereal disease clinic at Tattnall, which had been promised back in 1937.

  As Arnall prepared to leave office, Rivers made a comeback attempt, running for another term as governor, as did Eugene Talmadge, in a strange coda to both their political careers. Arnall endorsed neither of his former allies, opting instead to support a third candidate, James Carmichael, who had been general manager of the Bell bomber plant near Atlanta that produced a steady stream of B-29 airplanes during World War II.

  In the campaign, Carmichael openly accused Rivers of having formerly been a supreme lecturer for the Klan, a title that had been attributed to him in earlier press reports. The disclosure of Rivers’s former Klan ties was a deal breaker for many black voters. The Atlanta Daily World, a black newspaper, wrote, “There is not the slightest chance that Negroes will line up behind any candidate whose name is bandied about the state with that of the iniquitous Ku Klux Klan.”29 The pardon scandal also haunted Rivers, and the Atlanta Journal published a cartoon of a prison inmate with the caption reading, “We Want Rivers.” Talmadge won the 1946 race, ending Rivers’s political career, but Talmadge died before taking office, setting off a strange political battle in which three men—Eugene Talmadge’s son, Herman; Lt. Governor M. E. Thompson; and the incumbent governor, Arnall—aimed to be the state’s rightful leader. Thompson eventually won the court battle, but Herman Talmadge later continued his father’s dynasty, getting elected governor in 1948 and later going on to be a U.S. senator.

  Arnall, the reform governor, entered the national political spotlight. He was mentioned as a possible candidate for vice president on Harry Truman’s ticket in 1948. But several problems arose, including the fact that Arnall had supported Henry Wallace for vice president in 1944 instead of Truman.30 Also, Arnall’s reforms and his racial moderation angered many southern conservatives, which some feared would hurt the Truman ticket politically. Truman did, however, offer Arnall the position of solicitor general, which he declined because his wife was pregnant at the time. In 1952, Truman named Arnall director of the Office of Price Stabilization, an agency created to control inflation during the Korean War.31

  Rivers was never punished criminally for the corruption that plagued his administration. But his political future was destroyed both by the corruption and by his long-standing connections to the Klan. The Klan surely cost Rivers the possibility of a U.S. Senate seat in 1938, and there is evidence that he was at least considered for the post of U.S. Navy secretary under Roosevelt and ambassador to Mexico in the administration of Harry Truman. Had Rivers, like so many other politicians, left the Klan after it began to subside in the 1920s, his political career might have survived. But he did not. He clung to the Klan well into the late 1930s, long after it was clearly in its death throes. In the last years of his life, Rivers lived mostly in Miami, in a neighborhood called Treasure Island. He died on June 11, 1967, at age seventy-one, a rich man financially, owner of a string of radio stations, but his legacy as a politician, a potential New Deal leader, was squandered. Any legitimate reforms he tried to enact to improve the plight of the citizens of Georgia while governor were undermined by a combination of incompetence, corruption, and racism.

  Preceding Rivers in death was Tom Dickerson, the baby killer Rivers spared from the electric chair on December 9, 1938. Dickerson was seventy-eight years old when he died January 7, 1964 in a nursing home in his home town of Fitzgerald. Dickerson had been released from prison September 30, 1949 after serving more than twelve years.

  Hiram Wesley Evans, imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and longtime friend of Rivers, also lived into the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, but he died in obscurity in Atlanta in September 1966. He was eighty-five years old. He is buried in Atlanta’s Westview Cemetery. On his tombstone is the Mason’s symbol but no mention of the Klan.

  Epilogue

  George Harsh, one of two “thrill killers” who was pardoned by Rivers in late 1940, soon found himself swept up in World War II. The United States would not enter the war until late 1941. Harsh, his trust fund all but exhausted from legal fees and civil suits by the family members of the men he had murdered, feared that he would fall back into the life of a thug. So he made his way to Montreal, where he tried to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was at age twenty-nine a year too old to be a pilot or a flight crew member. But the Canadian Air Force waived the age rule when it discovered that Harsh had excellent night vision, which was necessary for night bombing, and the former chain gang inmate was soon a gunnery officer.1 Serving in the armed forces was Harsh’s way of proving “that I really belonged in this world as a full member of a society that had once expelled me. I was trying to counterbalance my entire past.”2

  Harsh’s mother, visiting her son in New York before he was shipped off to England, beamed at the sight of Harsh in an officer’s uniform, making amends somewhat for the grief he had caused her over the years. It was the last time he would see his mother alive.

  In October 1942, less than two years after he had been released from a Georgia prison camp, Harsh’s plane was shot down over Cologne, Germany, and he was soon a prisoner of war at the Nazi camp Stalag Luft III. It did not take Harsh long to readjust to prison, where he had now spent a third of his life. “Once more I fell back on the trick I had learned on the chain gang of living one day at a time,” Harsh wrote.

  He soon noticed that when the German guards were not around, one of his fellow prisoners was constantly sewing together bits and pieces of old RAF uniforms. “I am making a German Feldwebel’s uniform,” the other offi
cer told Harsh, “and in that uniform, I’m going to walk out of that gate.… I’m going to take you with me.”3

  Harsh and four other officers did in fact walk out of the camp in their fake German uniforms, only to be stopped by a Nazi officer who recognized the prisoners, laughed, then pulled his Luger and ordered them back to the camp.

  It was the first escape attempt but not the last.

  A fellow inmate named Wally Floody, a former mining engineer from Canada, told Harsh of a plan to dig three escape tunnels out of the prison. Harsh would be in charge of security to ensure that the Germans did not discover the tunneling effort.

  “But why me?” Harsh asked Floody. “There are wing commanders and squadron leaders in this camp who are more capable of doing this impossible job than me.”

  “Oh yeah?” Floody replied. “And how many of them spent 12 years in prison?”4

  On March 24, 1944, seventy-six prisoners escaped through the tunnels, but Harsh was not among them. He had been awaiting his turn when an escaping prisoner made a sound, alerting a Nazi sentry. It might have saved Harsh’s life. Only three prisoners made it back to England. The rest were captured, and fifty were executed by the Nazis. The story would later become a book called The Great Escape. Harsh would write the book’s foreword, and it would become a movie starring Steve McQueen and James Garner. Many call it one of the best World War II movies of all time.

  Meanwhile, Georgia, the state of bootleggers and bug operators, chain gangs and bitter poverty, was rapidly changing, almost as if it were making up for lost time. On January 11, 1957, a group of black leaders met in Atlanta to form the Southern Leadership Conference, later to be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC.

  A Christian minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., attended this first SCLC meeting. He had been the leader in 1955 of a successful boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked by Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat in the whites-only section of a bus. King called the boycott “the first flash of organized, sustained mass action and nonviolent revolt against the Southern way of life.”

  King became the first president of the SCLC and in 1960 moved from Montgomery back to his hometown of Atlanta, where he would also serve as co-pastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. Less than two decades after the executions of December 9, 1938, Atlanta had been transformed from the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan to the headquarters of the U.S. civil rights movement.

  In 1960, the same year King moved back to Atlanta from Montgomery, he found himself an inmate at Tattnall Prison, now called the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville. King had been arrested in a sit-in to protest a segregated lunch counter at Rich’s department store in downtown Atlanta. He did not realize that he was on probation for a charge earlier that year in nearby DeKalb County, where he had been ticketed for driving in Georgia with an Alabama license. “It was such a minor case, I didn’t pay attention to it and never knew that the lawyer had pleaded guilty,” King would later write about the DeKalb County charge.

  At three o’clock one morning, “they came and got me and took me to Reidsville,” King wrote. “On the way, they dealt with me just like I was some hardened criminal. They had me chained all the way down to my legs and they tied my legs to something in the floor so there would be no way for me to escape. And all over a traffic violation.” At Reidsville, they put King in a segregated cell block where psychotics, inmates who attacked guards, and other special cases were housed.5

  Above King on the fifth floor of the prison was the execution chamber, where the state’s electric chair was still housed.

  The time King spent at Tattnall Prison would change political history. It was the fall of 1960 and John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were locked in a tight battle for the presidency. John Kennedy’s brother Robert Kennedy called the DeKalb County judge, demanding to know why King could not be released on bond.

  Nixon never called.

  “I had known Nixon longer,” King wrote. “He had been supposedly close to me and he would call me frequently about things, seeking advice. And yet when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me.”6

  King was released a day after the Kennedy call.

  After his release from prison, King publicly thanked John Kennedy, and King’s father switched his endorsement from Nixon to Kennedy, marking a political shift as blacks increasingly supported Democrats instead of the GOP.

  George Harsh returned to Atlanta in 1971, promoting his autobiography, titled Lonesome Road.

  Atlanta was a vastly different city from the place he had left three decades earlier. Atlanta was now a booming city with new skyscrapers, an airport that would soon become the world’s busiest, a major-league baseball team called the Atlanta Braves, and an NFL football team, the Atlanta Falcons. A Catholic church still stood on the grounds of the former Ku Klux Klan headquarters.

  Ellis Arnall said racism was caused by poverty, but Georgia’s economic rebound seems to illustrate that racism may actually have caused the state’s poverty. An economic boom began when a new attitude began to prevail in the 1960s and Atlanta focused less on race, more on making money. Atlanta became known as “the City Too Busy to Hate.”

  In his memoir, George Harsh concluded that his life had largely been wasted. Yet he could see in his own experiences a lesson about the death penalty. Harsh had been sentenced to death and had been given an exact date when he was to die in the electric chair, March 15, 1929. Yet he had been allowed to live because of his station in life, his wealth, his ability to hire the best lawyers to mount endless appeals. “I am living proof,” he told the Atlanta Press Club in 1971. “You can’t hang a million dollars.”7

  George Harsh died in January 1980 at age seventy-two. A longtime smoker who struggled with alcoholism, he had moved to Toronto after suffering a stroke and lived with his old Great Escape friend Wally Floody. His fellow “thrill killer” Richard Gallogly would outlive Harsh by twenty-two years, dying in June 2002 at age ninety-two near Atlanta. His ashes were scattered over the Gulf of Mexico as requested in his will.

  Harsh’s life had, in fact, not been totally wasted. His legacy, as noted in obituaries including one in the New York Times, was the words he spoke and wrote about the death penalty’s inequality, using his own life story as an example.8

  Less than a year after Harsh’s book tour, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case called Furman v. Georgia, would echo Harsh’s sentiment and strike down the death penalty as unconstitutional, as it was then being applied. Joining in the majority opinion was Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the court, who knew firsthand the inequalities of the death penalty, having worked so closely on cases in Georgia and other states as an attorney for the NAACP.

  William Henry Furman was a twenty-six-year-old black man who killed a homeowner during a burglary in Atlanta. He had only a sixth-grade education and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. At Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, doctors concluded, “At present the patient is not psychotic, but he is not capable of cooperating with his counsel in the preparation of his defense.” A jury deliberated ninety-five minutes before convicting Furman and sentencing him to death.

  In concurring with the Supreme Court majority’s decision in the Furman case to strike down the death penalty, Marshall wrote, “The burden of capital punishment falls upon the poor, the ignorant, and the underprivileged members of society. It is the poor, and the members of minority groups who are least able to voice their complaints against capital punishment. Their impotence leaves them victims of a sanction that the wealthier, better-represented, just-as-guilty person can escape.”

  Marshall went on to point out the racial statistics. Since 1930, 3,859 people had been executed in the United States and of those 1,751 were white and 2,066 were black. Blacks accounted for only 10 percent of the nation’s population. For rape, the disparity was even greater: out of 455 people executed for rape, only 48 were white.9


  After the Furman decision, thirty-five states rewrote their death penalty laws, setting standards for who could and could not be eligible for execution, hoping to reduce the randomness of executions, which in the words of Justice Potter Stewart were as random as lightning strikes.

  Georgia changed its law to establish standards for the death penalty including cases that were “outrageously and wantonly vile, horrible and inhuman” or involving the killing of a law enforcement officer. Also, death sentences would now be automatically reviewed by the state supreme court, preventing the quick execution such as four of those on December 9, 1938, in which the defendants lacked even a single appeal. There remains to this day no automatic federal appeal of death penalty verdicts, although there are many able nonprofit groups and lawyers devoted to federal death penalty appeals.

  In July 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gregg v. Georgia, upheld the new law, and the death penalty was back. Thurgood Marshall dissented. After that ruling, Georgia and other states resumed executions with the electric chair, with Georgia building a brand-new chair and placing it in a prison near the town of Jackson. The old chair remains at Tattnall Prison, a museum piece sometimes still viewed by school groups.

  Since then, the electric chair, a device seen by the great inventor Thomas Edison and others as a way to lessen the cruelty of executions, has been increasingly viewed as barbaric. The Georgia Supreme Court in 2001 said the electric chair violated the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The court’s chief justice was a black woman, Leah Ward Sears. “The autopsy reports show that the bodies are burned and blistered with frequent skin slippage from the process, and the State’s experts concur that the brains of the condemned prisoners are destroyed in a process that cooks them at temperatures between 135 and 145 degrees Fahrenheit,” the Georgia court ruled.10