The Grace of Silence (15 page)

The black veterans posed a significant threat to the white power structure represented by Bull Connor—not only because of their numbers, but also because of their new willingness
to challenge the Jim Crow system. The veterans and their service to country tugged at the heart of southerners worried that harsh segregation and Klan-led violence were tarnishing Alabama’s reputation in the United States as well as abroad. White servicemen who’d traveled throughout Europe and the Pacific during the war had been dismayed to find that people an ocean away had come to view Alabama as a cauldron of racial hatred.

Meanwhile, the city’s business community had its own set of worries. The defense contracts that had kept Birmingham’s factories buzzing were one by one coming to an end. Attracting new business and new investors would prove difficult if groups like SNYC or the NAACP were successful in turning Birmingham into the principal battleground in the veterans’ fight for voting rights.

To protect white power and preserve the southern way of life, Bull Connor’s Birmingham Police Department reportedly tried to blunt the registration campaign by waging a private war against returning veterans. In the first two months of 1946, as many as half a dozen black veterans were reportedly killed by police officers from Birmingham and the surrounding communities.
⁵

Though many have tried to unearth official evidence of police involvement in the killings, it has proved difficult, but the journalist–turned–civil rights activist Anne Braden has evoked the mood among police officers at the time in her memoir
The Wall Between
. In 1946, Braden was working as a newspaper reporter in Birmingham, covering the courthouse. There, she discovered “two kinds of justice, one for whites and one for Negroes.” She explains, “If a Negro killed a white man, that was a capital crime. If a white man killed a Negro, there were usually extenuating circumstances.”

Braden said she began to look the other way when she entered the courthouse on her way to work, so as not to see the
phrase
EQUAL AND EXACT JUSTICE
carved in stone atop the building’s door, which made a mockery of the proceedings inside. One particularly unsettling incident in the sheriff’s office, she recalled, “almost tipped the scales of my sanity”:

Braden said she looked at the deputy and saw his eyes “twinkling not because he was joking but because he was talking of a conspiracy that pleased him, and of which he was a part, and which he evidently expected would please me too.” She left without comment, terror-stricken.
⁶

The civil rights activist Modjeska Simkins described an encounter with police chief Bull Connor that same year. After Connor and his force broke up a biannual meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Simkins and other SNYC leaders went to Connor’s office on a Saturday to protest the way they had been treated. “As we went in, I guess that about thirteen white men were coming out,” Simkins recalled. “This is 1946. And we went in there to see old Bull and he gave us no satisfaction. He said, ‘You see those folks that just walked out of here? That’s a leader from the Klan and they assured me that they would give me all the help I need.’ ”
⁷

Perhaps this was why Jim Baggett had tried to lower my
expectations when I’d started looking into my father’s brush with the Birmingham police. Though the killing of a half dozen black veterans in and around Birmingham by law enforcement had been widely reported over the years, the victims’ names had rarely appeared in news stories or police reports. In fact, throughout the forties, blacks were rarely mentioned in white-owned newspapers, except when they committed crimes or there was extraordinary news to report about the black social or business elite. There was, however, a stark exception the week my father was shot.

Belvin and Woodrow Norris had their confrontation with the police on February 7, during the same six-week period when the six black veterans were allegedly murdered. After one night in jail they were released on Friday, February 8. And since their father, Belvin senior, always came home with a newspaper tucked under his arm, whether he was returning from work or from the shopping district, his two sons would have seen the headline in the
Birmingham News
when they picked up the evening paper on Saturday, February 9:
EX-MARINE IS SLAIN, MOTORMAN INJURED IN STREETCAR ROW
. The subhead explained, “Finding of justifiable homicide ruled in shooting of Negro by Police Chief.”

A recently discharged black marine named Timothy Hood had reportedly moved the “segregation sign” separating the white and “colored” sections of a streetcar. When the motorman told him to stop, the ex-marine refused, and the two began to fight. As policemen arrived, the ex-marine fled and was later apprehended. While Timothy Hood sat in the back of the police car, he was shot in the head by the police chief of Brighton, a small city just outside Birmingham. Chief G. B. Fant would later explain that he lived near where the incident occurred and had responded because he’d heard a ruckus outside his home. Fant said he shot Hood because the ex-marine
had made a sudden motion. Less than twenty-four hours later, Timothy Hood’s death was ruled a justifiable killing.

The shooting of Timothy Hood only instances an epidemic of violence against black veterans in 1946 across the United States. Grisly news throughout the country dramatized the rough embrace of black soldiers after the war. That same February, a twenty-one-year-old navy veteran was flogged by a group of nine men near the Atlanta municipal airport.
⁸
Racial violence was not confined to the South, either. There was, for example, a triple shooting in Freeport, Long Island. Four Ferguson brothers were out on the town for a reunion. Richard Ferguson was an army veteran. Charles Ferguson, after returning from overseas duty, had just reenlisted. Joseph Ferguson was in the navy, serving as a ship’s cook, third class. The fourth brother, Alonzo, was a civilian. When they were refused service at a coffee shop, they protested but left without incident. The coffee shop manager called the police to complain and warn about “misbehaving negroes”; shortly after that, the brothers were arrested by a white patrolman named Joseph Romeika.

According to eyewitnesses and court testimony, the four were lined up against a brick wall. When two of the brothers questioned their treatment, they were kicked in the groin. Two of the brothers, Charles and Alonzo Ferguson, were shot and killed by Romeika. Joseph Ferguson, the ship’s cook, was shot in the shoulder. Though the rookie police officer claimed self-defense, his story was later dismissed by the U.S Navy, after it was determined that the victims had been unarmed when they were shot.

While New York governor Thomas Dewey was pressured to name a special prosecutor, black civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph kept bearing down on President Truman to show leadership by banning segregation in the armed forces. “I found Negroes not wanting to shoulder a gun for democracy
abroad unless they get democracy at home,” he told the
New York Times
on March 23, 1948. He asked the NAACP’s legal committee to submit several amendments for incorporation into H.R. 4278, a pending bill advocating universal military training (UMT). Specifically, the amendments called for (1) prohibition of segregation and racial discrimination in all UMT programs; (2) a ban of discrimination and all racial segregation “in interstate travel for trainees in the UMT uniforms or any other military uniform”; (3) “making attacks on, or lynching of, a trainee in UMT uniform or a person in any other military uniform a federal offense”; (4) “banning the poll tax in federal elections for any trainee otherwise eligible to vote.”
⁹

An arm of the American Veterans Committee passed a resolution calling for a federal law to help protect black veterans: “Whereas, some 60 Negro soldiers were murdered in this country at the hands of irate fellow Americans … and, whereas the Department of Justice has not sought prosecution in a single case, moreover, the attorney general has declared himself helpless to proceed in such prosecutions: Be it resolved that the National Planning Committee of the American Veterans Committee recognizes the need of a federal law making an assault upon a man or a woman in uniform a federal offense.” The resolution gained little support, and violence against black veterans continued for the rest of the year.
¹⁰

In March, newspapers across the country carried stories about a race riot in Columbia, Tennessee, provoked by a fight between a black navy veteran and a white salesclerk. Ten people, including four white police officers, were wounded in the outbreak, and two black men were killed in a shooting inside the jail later that week.

In June, an army veteran named Etoy Fletcher was seized by four men, dragged into the woods, and beaten severely after he tried to register to vote in Brandon, Mississippi. After Fletcher filed a complaint with the police, Mississippi senator Theodore
Bilbo, in a broadcast campaign speech, called on every “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls.”
¹¹

In July, two black men, one of them a World War II veteran, were lined up near a secluded bridge in Monroe, Georgia, along with their wives, and shot dead by a large group of white men. The
New York Times
described the shooting as a massacre. The local coroner said that at least sixty bullets had been fired into the bodies of the two men and their wives. The women were sisters and had allegedly been killed because one had recognized a member of the mob.
¹²

Among these incidents, one in particular stands out because its savage brutality sent shock waves across the country and eventually had an impact on President Truman’s assessment of race issues in the military. The incident occurred less than a week after my father was shot. On the night of February 13, 1946, a black veteran, still wearing his uniform, was blinded by a South Carolina policeman hours after being discharged from the army. Isaac Woodard was twenty-seven years old and had just served fifteen months in the South Pacific. On February 12 he was discharged from Camp Gordon, in Georgia, and boarded a Greyhound bus to meet his wife and family in Winnsboro, South Carolina, where he was born. After the bus crossed over from Georgia into South Carolina, Woodard told bus driver A. C. Blackwell that he needed more time during a scheduled restroom stop. This request annoyed Blackwell, who claimed that he took particular offense at Woodard’s saying he needed to “take a piss.”

Later, Blackwell would explain that he told the veteran to sit down and be quiet, a command Woodard ignored. “God damn it,” Woodard allegedly responded. “Talk to me like I’m talking to you. I’m a man just like you.” The bus driver called ahead for police assistance, and two officers, Chief Lynwood Shull and Elliot Long, were waiting for Woodard when the Greyhound
pulled into the sleepy hamlet of Batesburg, at the intersection of Granite and Railroad. When Woodard disembarked, they allegedly took him by the arm and led him to an alley around the corner from the bus stop.
¹³

Woodard described what happened next in an affidavit:

The “billy” was of course a billy club—a nightstick loaded with lead pellets.

The testimony of others involved in the Batesburg incident differs from Woodard’s. The bus driver said Woodard had been drinking and had offended his fellow passengers with his profanity, a charge Woodard and several others on the bus denied.
¹⁵
And though Woodard testified that he was struck in the eyes time and again by the nightstick, Chief Shull, who at first denied the charge, admitted to having administered a “single blow.” “I’m sorry I hit him in the eye and blinded him,” Shull told the jury at his trial that November. Shull said
he’d had to act fast and did not have time “to pick a place to hit” Woodard. “I had no wish to blind anyone,” Shull said. “I had no intention of hitting him in the eye, but I had to [hit] him in self defense because he was advancing on me.” Shull also allowed that he might unwittingly have stuck a finger in Woodard’s eye.

The full extent of Woodard’s injuries was made public in December 1946 when a prisoner awaiting execution tried to bequeath his eyes to the blinded soldier. “I have a good pair of eyes which I want Isaac Woodard to have,” wrote William H. Copeland from his jail cell.
¹⁶
At the behest of the NAACP, a team of prominent physicians examined Woodard for more than three hours to determine if a transplant was possible. Dr. Henry Gowens, who led the team, issued the findings that were reported in the
Pittsburgh Courier
. Woodard’s eyeballs were pulverized, the report said, leaving only the tiniest piece of cornea in each eye, and no reaction in either. The nerve head of each had been destroyed; there was no light perception.