Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (70 page)

The NAACP was a symbol of this militancy. Since the days of its founding, the organization had grown more professional and aggressive. In 1920
James Weldon Johnson—lawyer, poet, journalist, songwriter, diplomat, and educator—took over as the NAACP’s executive secretary, as its chief operating officer was known. He was the first black man to hold that office. Johnson hired
Walter White, a young blond-haired blue-eyed Negro novelist as assistant secretary and sent him and others around the country to catalog incidents of injustice. The results of their investigations were printed in the
Crisis
, edited by the brilliant Du Bois.

Almost a century after they were written, the NAACP’s accounts of racial barbarity retain the power to sadden and revolt. As awful as is the image of a mob hanging a Negro from a light post, the reality is worse. The victims rarely met their deaths with a quick snap of their necks: they were tortured, mutilated, and burned alive. Often, the blacks lost their ears, fingers, or teeth, which were kept by their killers, or their killers’ children, or sold as souvenirs. Five dollars a tooth. Two bits for a link from the chain.

White was twenty-four when he joined the NAACP. Within months he was in southern Georgia, where a black man named
Sidney Johnson killed a white man who had beaten him. A mob seized two random blacks and shot them seven hundred times, then, over a period of time, killed seven more innocent African Americans.
Mary Turner, the widow of one of the dead men, threatened to swear out warrants for his killers. She was eight months pregnant, but her affront was not forgiven. The mob hung her upside down from a small oak tree, splashed her with gasoline, and set her on fire. She declined to die and was hauled back up, and her unborn child cut from her womb with “a knife, evidently one such as is used in splitting hogs,” White wrote. “The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel. Hundreds of bullets were fired into the body of the woman,
now mercifully dead.” Johnson was finally trapped in a cabin and died in a shootout. His corpse was castrated, dragged through town behind a car, tied to a tree, and burned.
⁶

The race riots were lynchings on a grander scale, accompanied by widespread killing, looting, and burning of Negro neighborhoods. Hundreds of blacks died in massacres at Elaine, Arkansas, Ocoee and Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in urban rioting in Chicago, East St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.
Ossian Sweet had witnessed both kinds of atrocities. When he was a small boy, the rape and murder of a young white woman had enflamed the white community in his Florida town, terrifying the Sweets and other black families, until a Negro teenager confessed to the crime. He was tied to a tree and burned alive. And Sweet was in Washington in 1919, studying the healing arts at Howard, when reports that a white woman had been raped by a black man triggered four days of rioting, beatings, and gunfire in the nation’s capital. He had relatives living near Ocoee, where the black section of town was torched and its inhabitants hunted down in 1920. These events and other like them were foremost in his mind on the night of September 9, as the stones came through the windows of his home.

“I was filled with a peculiar fear,” he would testify. “The kind no one could feel unless they had known the history of our race.”
⁷

J
AMES
J
OHNSON WAS
tracking the events in Detroit that summer. The city had become a stronghold of the reborn
Ku Klux Klan. Tens of thousands of the hooded bullies had marched brazenly down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington that August. In Detroit’s mayoral election in 1924 the KKK ran its own candidate, staged an outdoor meeting that drew fifty thousand people, and appeared to have won until its foes, employing the election machinery, had thousands of votes ruled invalid. A Klan-supported candidate was back in the fall of 1925, challenging Mayor
John Smith. All-white neighborhood “improvement associations” were organized, and lawyers wrote racial covenants that banned blacks from white communities. The NAACP had warned its local branch to protect “colored householders from mob violence.”

The NAACP’s lawyers were preparing to argue a segregation case before the Supreme Court that fall, and Johnson needed a compelling
controversy to call attention to the issue and help him raise money for the legal defense team. When he read about the Sweets in the New York newspapers, Johnson wired the Detroit branch asking for details. He got its request: send
Walter White.

Like Johnson, White was a remarkable man. He was fair-skinned enough to pass as white—which immeasurably aided his investigative work—but chose to live life as a Negro. He was an indefatigable networker, hosting a cultural salon that brought friends like Mencken and Lewis in contact with
Paul Robeson,
Langston Hughes, and other African American artists.
⁸
White saw the potential to raise consciousness and cash with the
Sweet case. He informed the defendants and their supporters in Detroit that the NAACP would pay for a top-notch white lawyer to represent them if they surrendered control to his organization. The Sweet brothers, whose lives were in jeopardy, jumped at the chance. “I expressed our insistence on the retaining of the very best lawyer available,” White told Johnson. “I pointed out that this cast no reflections on the colored lawyers, but that it was a question bigger than Detroit … for it was the dramatic climax of the nation-wide fight to enforce residential segregation.”

Now the NAACP needed an attorney to fulfill its promise. On October 7, Johnson sent a long telegram to Darrow in Chicago. “This issue constitutes a supreme test of the constitutional guarantees of American Negro citizens,” the NAACP director wrote. “Defense requires ablest attorney of national prestige.”

After leaving Tennessee, Darrow had traveled a bit—visiting Paul in Colorado and the Haldeman-Julius farm in Kansas. “I had determined not to get into any more cases that required hard work and brought me into conflict with the crowd,” Darrow recalled. “But I could not rest. I get tired of resting.” Now Darrow happened to be in New York for a reunion of the Scopes defense team and the journalists who covered the trial. Hearing this, Johnson grabbed White,
Arthur Springarn, the chair of the organization’s legal committee, and Springarn’s law partner,
Charles Studin, and headed for Arthur Garfield Hays’s home, where Darrow was staying.

Springarn and Studin were dark-complexioned white men, and White was a light-complexioned black man. As Darrow told them of his reluctance to take the case he turned to Springarn and assured him: “I know full well the difficulties faced by your race.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Darrow,” Springarn said. “I am not a Negro.”

“Well, you understand what I mean,” he told Studin. “I am not colored either,” Studin replied.

With a certain degree of exasperation, Darrow turned to White. “I wouldn’t make the same mistake with you,” he told the blond-haired black man.

“I smiled and told him I
was
colored,” White recalled.

Darrow chuckled. After some hawing he agreed to take the case. Hays signed on as well. Both men agreed to accept the fees the NAACP was offering: $5,000 in Darrow’s case and $3,000 for Hays. A white Detroit lawyer and three black attorneys from the city who had been representing the Sweet group in preliminary hearings were also retained.
Herbert Friedman, a friend of Darrow’s from Chicago, volunteered his services.

“It is a thrilling situation there and we have got a very hard fight on our hands,” White told a friend. “With Mr. Darrow as our chief counsel, we have got a fighting chance to win.”
⁹

T
HE
NAACP
ANNOUNCED
Darrow’s participation on October 15. “The atmosphere of the case changed when Darrow came in,”
Otis Sweet recalled. “That’s when you built up a little hope.”

The
Sweet case would win but a fraction of the publicity and attention given the Monkey Trial. But Darrow’s participation caused many in white America to consider the issues raised by the shooting. “This was no ordinary murder trial,”
David Lilienthal wrote in the
Nation
. “Back of it all was the whole sensitive problem of race relations, intensified a thousand-fold by the recent Northern migration of the Negro.”

The sturdy old saw “a man’s home is his castle” reflected the belief that an individual may use deadly force when defending himself, his family, or his home. So two questions ruled the case: Did Negroes have the same right of self-defense as white people? And if so, had the Sweet defendants been truly threatened? The trial was set for October 30, leaving Darrow and Hays little time to prepare. They were fortunate that the judge was on their side.

Judge
Frank Murphy was a long way from the U.S. Supreme Court seat he would one day occupy, and a few years away from terms as Detroit’s mayor and Michigan’s governor. By the fall of 1925, however, he had made a mark as an up-and-coming liberal leader who had won his robes
by assembling a coalition of Irish, Italian, and other ethnic voters, the swelling black electorate, Jews, and white professionals, and become presiding judge of the city’s criminal courts. It was the same kind of coalition that governors
Al Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt forged in New York, then built across the nation. “A liberal wave is just beginning to gather momentum,” Murphy told a friend. “Public opinion moves in cycles. We are on the upward swing.” When Darrow looked up at the mahogany bench in the Sweet trial, he saw a red-haired lawyer with progressive beliefs, a devout and sentimental Irish Catholic with a political debt to the black community. Where other judges saw the
Sweet case as a “graveyard,” Murphy saw an opportunity.

Not that he was reckless. Murphy could have dismissed the case, but he wanted white Detroit to believe that justice had been served and preferred “that they be acquitted by the jury,” a local NAACP official told White. But Murphy “is only awaiting the opportunity to take a definite stand in favor of the defendants,” the official wrote. “I have been advised, confidentially, that Murphy expects to run for mayor two years hence, and will use this case to win the Negro vote.”
¹⁰

I
T TOOK
D
ARROW
and Wayne County prosecutor
Robert Toms a week to choose a jury. Toms was a proud and ambitious man, tall and affable, whose decision to press the case was supported by the judges who, at preliminary hearings, allowed it to proceed. He admired Darrow and treated him with deference, in part not to rile him. At one point, Darrow complained. “Toms, you aren’t treating me fair in this case,” he said. “You’re so darned nice I can’t get going.”

Toms had Schuknecht and his policemen and a troop of residents from the neighborhood who would swear that the few white people who gathered around the Sweet house on the night of the shooting had been well behaved. Darrow had a group of frightened blacks who had lied to the police and answered even their own lawyers evasively. “On the face of it, our case was not strong,” Hays said. “Shooting from various windows indicated a concerted plan … We took their stories one by one and they didn’t wholly jibe.”

Toms found twelve men to his liking in a single day. Then it was Darrow’s turn. He had no deep-pocketed union like the AFL to pay for
research on potential jurors—he had to rely on his own skill and intuition and what gossip the local lawyers brought in. But Murphy could be counted on to rule his way on challenges for cause, and state law gave Darrow 330 peremptory challenges. So he took his time, working his way through the panels of candidates, asking about their profession, faith, subscriptions, memberships, and political leanings, and their opinions on black folks, property values, and the like.

“Every question he asks,” Murphy told a friend, “sets up a chain reaction in the mind of every man in that box. Just watch their faces. They are doing more thinking about this subject of race than they have ever done before in their lives. Darrow is trying his case now. He is preparing that jury to appraise and interpret all the evidence which will be presented later on. The prosecution knows this but they don’t know how to stop him.”

Wearing his familiar gray suit, Darrow slouched with his hands in his pockets or slowly roamed the marble-floored courtroom, with its marble wainscot and gray and ivory walls, speaking in a low voice to the talesmen. “He’s got the court—judge, clerk, attendants—all with him, most of the jurors are eager,” White wrote Johnson. “He ever so often makes some droll remark that sets the entire courtroom to laughing and instantly all tension is relieved.”
¹¹

Darrow pushed too far with one prospective juror when, after almost satisfying himself, he asked the talesman where he got his news. The
Nation
, he said, and Toms promptly had the man excused. “You have to know where to stop,” Darrow told friends that night. “One question too many and you lose a desirable juror. I should have known enough to refrain.”

In the midst of the process, Mayor Smith crushed his Klan challenger in the municipal election. It was a good omen. Darrow and Hays found three Klansmen in the jury pool and sent them packing as well. Jury selection ended on Wednesday, November 4—the day after the election—with a collection of ethnic Catholics, immigrants, and workingmen on the panel.
¹²

O
N THE FIRST
day of testimony, Toms put his key witness on the stand. Aside from any prejudice against blacks he may have harbored, Inspector Schuknecht had a motive for declaring that all was peaceful
outside 2905 Garland Avenue on the night Breiner died: he was there with specific orders to prevent what took place.