Thurgood Marshall (24 page)

When the police arrived they immediately sided with Fleming, who was bleeding badly. While the store manager was taken to the hospital, Stephenson and his mother were handcuffed and brought to the police station in the middle of the town square. News of the fight, the blood, and the arrests raced through town, and by early afternoon the black community was full of fear of a white lynch mob. In fact, by 6:00 P.M.
seventy-five white men—many drunk—had gathered on the town square, looking to get their hands on the Stephensons.

Columbia, with its 8,000 white and 3,000 black residents, had a history of racial problems. It was near Pulaski, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. And everyone in town still talked about the 1933 lynching when a mob in Columbia had brutally beaten and then hanged and burned a black teenager who had been accused, but acquitted, of raping a white girl.
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J. J. Underwood, the town’s sheriff, was a good man with no taste for mob violence. He watched the mob grow from his office window. He put several deputies in front of the police station, then called the two leading members of the black community, Sol Blair, a barbershop owner, and James Morton, an undertaker. Underwood proposed that Blair and Morton meet him at the back door of the police station and secretly drive the mother and son out of town.

Jack Lovett, who was deputized by the sheriff that night, recalled that by late afternoon the square in front of the police station was so crowded he could not walk. “It was pretty rough around here,” he said, explaining that he had just returned to Columbia after serving in the Army in the South Pacific. On that night, Lovett found the small town as dangerous as any war zone in the jungle.
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After the Stephensons, with blankets over their heads, were rushed out the back door and smuggled out of town, police blocked roads leading into Columbia in an attempt to control the still-growing mob. Meanwhile, black residents armed themselves and gathered in stores and homes along Eighth Street in the black business district, known as Mink Slide. They were worried that the white men might start shooting people or setting fires. The tense atmosphere led black residents to shoot out the streetlights and put armed men at every window.

When reports of shooting in Mink Slide reached the police, the sheriff drove a squad car out. As he entered Mink Slide at around 8:00 P.M., the black residents, thinking the police had given their cars to the crazed mob, shot at the car from windows and doorways throughout the area. Threats were also shouted. The black residents, many of whom were returning war veterans, made it clear they were ready to fight before allowing another lynching in Columbia. As he was racing away from the gunfire, the sheriff heard one black man’s voice shout, “We fought for freedom overseas and we’ll fight for it here.”
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Sheriff Underwood decided the best thing to do was to keep the
scared blacks and the angry whites apart. He set up his men to prevent the whites already in town from going into Mink Slide. His strategy worked until about 10:00 P.M., when two police cars decided to check on Mink Slide. The officers, without the chief’s permission, turned their engines off, put the car in neutral, and rolled through the darkened neighborhood. To the surprise of the police, a watchman shouted, “Here they come.” Buckshot rained onto the cars. At the sound of the gunfire, some of the mob from the town square came running, as did other policemen.

Raymond Lockridge, a black carpenter who was in Mink Slide that night, remembered that as the policemen and white members of the mob came running, they were also greeted with gunfire. There was “blood running in the gutters,” Lockridge remembered. He swore that four or five white people were killed but that the local authorities would not admit to it. “They’d say instead, ‘He took a trip out of town,’ ” Lockridge recalled.
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The
Afro-American
later reported on this supposed cover-up, writing, “Whites whose obituaries stated [they] died suddenly of heart failure may also have suffered slight cases of Mink Slide bullet poisoning.” The paper said that white members of a potential lynch mob “can’t admit even to this day that it took a beating when colored [people] decided to protect themselves and prevent one of the most dastardly crimes known to mankind.”
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That night’s shooting prompted the mayor to ask the governor to send state troopers and the National Guard to Columbia. State Safety Director Lynn Bomar, a former All-American football player, was sent to Columbia to coordinate the antiriot efforts of 500 National Guardsmen and 100 state troopers.

Early the next morning, Tuesday, the police force, troopers, and guardsmen began an assault against the poorly armed residents of Mink Slide. They chopped down the doors with axes and broke shop windows. And once inside businesses and homes, they tore apart furniture and stripped rugs from the floors. They claimed they were looking for weapons, ammunition, and hidden teams of gunmen. “The streets were soon littered with furniture hurled out of windows,” an NAACP study later reported. The greatest destruction was visited on James Morton’s funeral home, the most ornate and beautifully furnished place in the black community. The state troopers trashed everything in sight: “The hate-ridden orgy was topped off with a huge KKK scrawled in white chalk across one of the caskets.”
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The large and angry force of police and state troopers ordered blacks
out of their houses, confiscating guns and in some cases jewelry and cash before marching them to jail. That night and into the next morning, seventy black people were brought to jail and twelve were charged with murder. Police continued to make arrests through the week. A total of 101 blacks were arrested; only two whites were arrested, for drunkenness.

“We urge the white citizens of the city and county to keep calm, cool and collected,” the
Columbia Daily Herald
wrote in a Tuesday afternoon editorial. “The situation is in the hands of the state troops and state police. They will round up those responsible for last night’s attack and clean up the city … there is no use in arguing the matter. The white people of the South … will not tolerate any racial disturbances without resenting it, which means bloodshed. The Negro has not a chance of gaining supremacy over a sovereign people and the sooner the better element of the Negro race realize this, the better off the race will be.”
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The violence continued later that week while police were questioning two black suspects. The police said while they interrogated the two at the station house, one of the black men grabbed a weapon that had been confiscated from the rioters and tried to escape. Both men were shot and killed as police returned the gunfire.

But while police said they shot in self-defense, Wallace Gordon, the brother of one of the suspects, blamed the police. Gordon claimed that the guns confiscated from blacks in Columbia had no ammunition. But the deaths of William Gordon and James Johnson were later ruled by the courts to be justifiable homicides.
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Columbia’s black community, now sensing it was under siege, called the national office of the NAACP for help. Thurgood Marshall immediately understood the importance of this case. So did Walter White. They quickly phoned Maurice Weaver and asked him to help. But Weaver, who was ridiculed as a left-wing kook by many of the state’s segregationist politicians, had difficulty even getting into the jail to see any of the prisoners. With Weaver unable to help, Marshall got Z. Alexander Looby, who spoke with the West Indian accent of his native Jamaica, to rush to Columbia a day later.

Working together, Looby and Weaver obtained cooperation from Sheriff Underwood and succeeded in getting most of the black prisoners out of jail within the next two weeks. Walter White, reading the sensational press coverage of the rioting and shooting, got Attorney General Tom Clark to begin an FBI investigation. A grand jury was convened to see if federal civil rights statutes were violated.

Meanwhile, the
Nashville Banner
and other papers in the state began to report that several long-distance phone calls had been placed from Columbia on the night of the rioting. The papers speculated that Communists and black militants had been responsible for the riot.
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The state’s leading politicians were pushing reporters to write that black folks in Columbia would never have fought like that without “outside agitation.”

After centuries of bowing and scraping, there was a new attitude growing among black Americans, and it was coming from the black veterans. They had gained more self-respect while fighting in the military and now demanded respect from whites. So Marshall understood the resentment that took shape that night in Columbia as black people fought against a white lynch mob. He felt that this resentment could be used to support an emerging civil rights movement and a growing NAACP. This was the reason he decided to personally defend the twenty-five blacks charged with inciting to riot and attempted murder.

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When he arrived in Columbia on May 30, 1946, three months after that night of violence, Marshall found the town still tense. He and his defense team wanted to use that to their advantage. They attacked the allwhite power structure in Columbia as vicious and discriminatory. Marshall’s main plan was to get all the indictments thrown out because no blacks had served on the grand jury that had handed them down. Paul Bumpus, the tall, smooth-talking Maury County district attorney, responded that while it was true that blacks had not been invited to serve on juries, it was also true that many prominent whites had not served either. Marshall responded, “The fact that one or any number of white people have never been called for jury service has no bearing whatsoever on this case. Our pleas in abatement are directed at the contention that no Negroes have
ever
served on the jury and that no Negroes have been called for jury service.”
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The judge ruled that the absence of blacks on the grand jury was not sufficient reason to throw out the indictments, but he agreed to move the trial to nearby Lawrence County to avoid having Maury County’s excited racial atmosphere taint the trial.

The trial was set to start in August of 1946, but Marshall got seriously ill in late June with pneumonia. Even as he got sick, Marshall traveled to Columbia to prepare the case. But he became so ill that he had to go back
to New York, and the trial began without him. A chain-smoker and a steady drinker, Marshall never exercised. His long work days, bad diet, and constant travel had begun to wear him down. Friends started to notice that he looked weak and they missed his normally loud, boisterous laugh.

Marshall became so seriously ill that he went into Ward 2D at Harlem Hospital and special intensive-care nurses were assigned to keep constant watch over him. After visiting Marshall, Walter White wrote to the NAACP’s board to ask that they allocate $500 to pay his medical bills. “Mr. Marshall’s present condition is in a large measure due to the physical and mental strain of the Columbia, Tennessee trials, the last three days [of which] he continued going with a temperature of 103 degrees.” But by mid-July Marshall was looking better and his spirits were rising. “Give [the staff] the bad news that I’ll live,” he joked with White.
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His clients in Columbia did not forget Marshall. He later told an oral history interviewer that he got a big package while in the hospital with a note attached: “ ‘Dear Lawyer … we decided to get you something.… The wives all wanted to send you flowers. But we knew what you’d rather have.’ They sent a twenty-pound ham.”
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Marshall’s condition improved—he was soon able to walk across the room without losing his breath. But he was still too sick to go back to work. He and Buster took an extended leave—to the Virgin Islands, where Bill Hastie had been appointed governor by President Truman. “Mr. Marshall’s condition is due solely to the fact that he has worked himself almost to death without any thought of self,” White wrote the NAACP board, requesting approval for Marshall’s leave. Marshall and his wife also traveled to Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba.
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While Marshall was recuperating, the Columbia riot trial was handled by Looby, Weaver, and the high-energy Howard law professor, Leon Ransom. They gave Marshall regular telephone reports, and he offered pointers for their use. The lawyers on the scene needed more than legal advice, however. They were under pressure inside and outside the courtroom. The black lawyers, for example, had no bathroom or water fountain available to them in the entire courthouse. And the courtroom crowd was hostile. One local paper said the trial was packed with spectators who came to town to see “those niggers up there wearing coats and ties and talking back to the judge just like they were white men.” The
large group of black defendants were fenced off from the rest of the court by wooden pickets, and a reporter said that one white “oldtimer” sat nearby “spitting tobacco on each picket.”
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Weaver, the lone white defense lawyer, was a special target for abuse by police and prosecutors. At one point in the middle of the trial, the district attorney asked him to come outside for a fistfight. The burly state safety director, Lynn Bomar, became infuriated with Weaver during one round of cross-examination. Bomar had a yardstick in his hand to point out landmarks on a map of the city. “For a split second newsmen and spectators held their breath while Bomar reddened and had to restrain an obvious desire to crack the young lawyer with the yardstick,” one paper reported.
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In court the judge repeatedly ruled against the defense lawyers. Vincent Tubbs, a reporter for the
Baltimore Afro
who covered the trial, wrote: “During the past week no less than four major infractions of decency and due processes of law have been enacted in the dirty little county courthouse here.” One prosecutor referred to a black witness for the defense as “a nigger woman” before the judge told him to stop. The lead prosecutor called Ransom a “son-of-a-bitch” and later threatened to “wrap a chair around his God-Damn head.”
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