THE SHADES MOUNTAIN RAPE AND MURDERS THE SHADES MOUNTAIN RAPE AND MURDERSWe always need someone to blame. We cannot bear our anguish if we know that it springs from our own hearts.
—Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
A few weeks after the Camp Hill Massacre, a dragnet was underway in Birmingham to find the black suspect in the rape and murders of two white society women. On the Sunday evening of August 4, 1931, Mountain Brook police officer Charles Nollner had responded to a frantic call from a young woman reporting a shooting in a picnic area on Shades Mountain. Nineteen-year-old Nell Williams stated that she, her sister Augusta, who was twenty-three, and their friend Jennie Wood, twenty-seven, were driving back to Mountain Brook after seeing a movie in Birmingham. As they entered the Leeds Highway, a black man allegedly jumped on the running board of Jennie’s car and ordered her at gunpoint to turn into a side road that led to a secluded area. He robbed them and then, holding them at gunpoint, he lectured the three women for two hours on “the mistreatment of negroes and other communistic ideas.”1
Subsequently, Nell explained: “When the Negro started getting fresh with my sister, I tried to grab his gun.” During the struggle, he shot all of them, ripped the keys out of the ignition, shot out one of the front tires, and fled. Augusta, who had a stomach wound and Jennie, shot in the neck, were seriously injured, but Nell, who’d been shot in the left arm, was able to drive back to the highway to get help. It is unclear how she managed to do that since the assailant had taken Jennie’s car keys. Nevertheless, all three were admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital at about 8:00 p.m. Augusta died within hours and Jennie within days, leaving Nell Williams the only eyewitness.
Nell described the rapist as “a stout light-skinned well-educated black man from the North, about thirty-five years old.” However, before Jennie Wood died, she’d described him to her father, Wade Wood Sr., as a “soot black man” with several gold teeth. These discrepancies, the lack of any physical evidence of rape, and Nell’s shifting recollections stalled the investigation. After an unproductive search of the woods, the police fanned out into Birmingham.
For the next six weeks the city teetered on the edge of a race riot. Black men were randomly arrested and beaten in futile attempts to obtain a confession. White vigilantes burned black businesses. Hardware stores reported an increase in the sale of guns and ammunition, and Mayor Jimmie Jones imposed a ten o’clock curfew. The Southern Worker called it a “reign of terror.”
Nell’s mystifying account of her attacker’s two-hour lecture on “communistic ideas” linked the Reds to the crime and fed hysteria about communists manipulating blacks into a race war. Camp Hill was still very much on everyone’s mind. An August 6 Birmingham News editorial titled “On What Hateful Bread does Communism Feed?” declared that “if this [murder and rape of white women] is the aim of the [Communist] propaganda . . . then Southerners and all Americans who understand the inequalities of the races . . . must by every possible means lance out of the social body these infamous and unnatural teachings.”2
Maintaining that the Birmingham Reds were likely harboring the black rapist, Mountain Brook deputy sheriff R. E. Smith issued warrants for the arrest of all known communist organizers. Smith believed that at least two men were involved. Someone must have picked the rapist up afterward.
Angelo Herndon, back from a near-lynching in Wilcox County, was among those arrested. He was subsequently taken from his jail cell in handcuffs at sunset, dragged down a flight of stairs, thrown into a car, and driven into the woods. When the car stopped, three officers pulled him out.
“We don’t care anything about your Communist Party,” one told him, “we want to know who shot Nell Williams and the other girls.”3 When Herndon said he didn’t know, they beat him with rubber hoses.
“If you didn’t do it you know who did,” another growled. “If you don’t tell us you won’t leave here alive.” When Herndon did not respond, they beat him again and continued to demand the names of the white communists he ran with. They took turns flogging him until he couldn’t walk. The ranking officer taunted that if he complained no one would believe him.4
When they finally dragged him back to the jail, Nell Williams was there looking at four black men in a holding cell. Herndon was thrown in with them. Although he heard someone tell her to “say yes,” she shook her head.5
On August 15, the Southern Worker published Lowell Wakefield’s telegram to Police Chief Fred McDuff:
We hold you responsible for the safety of all those arrested in connection with the Williams shooting. We demand the immediate cessation of the reign of terror against Negroes in Birmingham and the immediate withdrawal of the lynch posses. We demand the right of the Birmingham workers to defend themselves against lynch mobs and against the shooting up of Negro neighborhoods.
We warn you against any attempt to smash the Communist Party or other working-class organizations by framing militant workers, using the Williams shooting as an excuse. This is the same as the terror in the Scottsboro and Camp Hill cases against which there has been world-wide protest.6
A furious McDuff redoubled his efforts. Things got even worse after the Negro Businessmen’s League offered a $3,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer. Herndon later wrote that “many negroes in Birmingham can still recall with rising anger the price in bruises, in mauling and in mental anguish as arrests increased in the pursuit of that reward.”7 Herndon was charged with vagrancy. After Wakefield got him released, he jumped bail and Harry Jackson sent him to Atlanta to organize unemployed workers there.
On September 23, six weeks after the Shades Mountain attack, Nell Williams was driving through Birmingham with her mother and her boyfriend, Edward “Buck” Streit, when she thought she recognized her attacker. She screamed, “there!” and pointed him out. As Buck called to him, the man walked toward their car. Buck jumped out, drew his gun, and forced him into the back seat. He told Nell to find a phone and call the police. She ran into the nearest store while he held the gaunt, dark, skinny, sickly, barely literate Willie Peterson at gunpoint.
Peterson was a thirty-seven-year-old World War I veteran, a former coal miner who hadn’t worked in two years because he suffered from tuberculosis. Although he did not fit Nell Williams’s description of her attacker in any way (including being able to wax poetic about communist theory), she insisted that he was the man. She’d recognized him, she told the police, by his gray felt hat.8
After Peterson’s arrest, witnesses came forward to place him in his own home on the Sunday afternoon when the rape was committed. Nevertheless, he was sent to Kilby Prison’s hospital ward.
Nell’s father, Clark Williams, a prominent Birmingham attorney, desperately wanted to keep the matter out of court. He could not abide his daughter being subjected to questions about what she’d been doing in that secluded stretch of woods off the Leeds Highway.
Apparently, his wife, Helen, agreed, since she’d participated in kidnapping Peterson. Whether that idea was hers, Nell’s, Buck’s, or Attorney Williams himself makes little difference. In Alabama, a white woman who cried rape could expect white men to close ranks around her.
Nell’s brother Dent, also a lawyer, joined their father in meeting with Richard Fries, Peterson’s legal counsel, to discuss a settlement. Using a conference room at the Birmingham City Jail, Sheriff James Hawkins brought Peterson up from Kilby Prison so that Nell could make a positive identification. Despite the intense pressure put on him to confess, Peterson insisted that he was innocent. In the end, a grand jury would have to decide whether or not he went to trial.
On October 2, Nell made a third positive identification of Peterson, this time in a courtroom before the grand jury. After Peterson entered a plea of not guilty, her brother Dent leaned over as if to speak with her, then stood up and fired five shots, hitting Peterson three times—twice in the chest. Both Dent and his father had been searched for weapons as they entered the courtroom, but Nell had not. Neither Sheriff James Hawkins nor Police Chief Fred McDuff seemed able to prevent the attempted murder. Assistant Solicitor Jim Long rushed over to the stricken Peterson, told him that he was dying, and urged him to confess, but Peterson shook his head. “I didn’t do it,” he said before he was rushed to Hillman Hospital.9
While he was in the hospital, the grand jury went ahead and indicted Peterson for robbery, for the murders of Augusta Williams and Jennie Wood, and for the attempted murder of Nell Williams. No mention of the rape charge was made. The trial was tentatively scheduled for December 15. That same day, October 2, 1931, Dent Williams, was arrested for assault with intent to kill Willie Peterson.
The Southern Worker speculated as to why the state seemed so determined to pursue this case.
“There is a double reason why the boss class of Birmingham wants to legally murder Peterson on the framed-up charge of having killed two society women on the night of August 4,” James Allen wrote. “One of them is because the bosses want to cover up the fact that the killing was the result of a petting party. The exposure would cause a scandal that would shake up the rotten structure of the ‘best society’ of Birmingham. The other reason is that the Peterson case has been and will continue to be useful as a means of continuing the terror against the negro workers of Birmingham.”10
A black Pittsburgh (PA) Courier reporter on assignment in Birmingham was more specific. He’d driven to the exclusive Mountain Brook community to interview the housemaids, nannies, cooks, chauffeurs, and yardmen who staffed the local Tudor mansions. They maintained that the police were ignoring persistent rumors that “an outraged white woman had traced her erring husband up the same road that the young ladies had traveled.”11 She apparently surprised them that Sunday afternoon.
It was true that the police found “a lot of cigarette butts” at the scene, but they refused to disclose any information about the fingerprints they’d allegedly lifted off the enamel paint on Jennie’s blue LaSalle. The Williams and Wood families, the Courier reporter noted, “seemed determined to protect the young white women from any impairment of their social standing.”12
The Mountain Brook domestics told this reporter (whose story ran without a byline to protect his identity) that they’d been warned to “cast no dispersions [sic] on the virtue and veracity of the young white women involved.” They would lose their jobs if they were caught spreading the rumor.13
Had a wronged wife shot all of them, he wondered, or just the women? Was there an injured man out there with untreated bullet wounds, or perhaps another dead body? Had more than one man been with the young women that afternoon? If so, who were they and where were they now? If the story was true, an angry white woman was getting away with the two murders and the attempted murder that Peterson was on trial for.
“Dent Williams,” the Courier reporter explained, “knew when he shot the Negro picked out by his sister that in death Peterson could not further deny guilt and that his sister, vindicated and revenged, would have no more questions asked.”14 That had been the family’s goal from the beginning—to stop speculation.
Angelo Herndon, like James Allen, was convinced that the Wood-Williams murder cover-up was also an attempt to end interracial organizing in the mines. Looking back on the situation, Herndon wrote in 1937: “There was frame-up in the air for weeks before the Peterson case started. The miners were organizing against wage cuts; the white and Negro workers were beginning to get together and demanding relief and jobs and the human rights that had been taken from them. If the bosses could engineer a frame-up against some Negro, a lot of white workers would begin to think about that instead of about bread and jobs.”15
Henrietta Peterson wanted the ILD to represent her husband, who had survived the murder attempt. She believed that they could do for him what they’d done for the Scottsboro teens. At the district 17 office, they’d explained to her that a legal team would be provided for Willie and a national publicity campaign would be organized. They promised to pursue a not-guilty verdict and would not settle for life in prison. All Willie’s legal fees would be taken care of. Henrietta was referred to Albert Rosenthal of Rosenthal and Rosenthal, who agreed to take the case.
But Dr. Charles McPherson, secretary of the Birmingham NAACP, who was horrified that his organization might once again be shut out of a case with national consequences, paid a visit to Henrietta Peterson on October 24. Advising her to keep away from the Reds, he offered the services of J. T. Roach and J. R. Johnson, two respectable white Birmingham attorneys. McPherson warned her that if the ILD campaigned as they had in the Scottsboro case, whites would make sure that Willie went to the electric chair. The Reds, he said, were plotting to overthrow the government and the newspapers were already identifying Willie as one of them. McPherson reminded her that Rosenthal was a Jew—didn’t she know that powerful whites hated Jews? If she made enough whites angry, one might try to kidnap Willie and lynch him. “It’s sure as death,” he said, “if you put your husband in the hands of the ILD lawyers the jury, the judge and the solicitor won’t even listen to them.”16
A desperate Henrietta Peterson sat in her living room and cried. She didn’t know what to do. She was only twenty-four years old and had never been outside Birmingham. McPherson was a famous black surgeon who headed up the NAACP. Maybe he did know best. Ultimately, she gave him permission to organize a citizens’ committee and to raise the $3,000 fee for Johnson and Roach.
In a letter to Walter White, Charles McPherson reported that Peterson had “the sympathy of many high class and intelligent white people.”17 Rumors, he said, were flying all over the city about just what those young women had been doing up on the mountain that Sunday. The Williams family’s credibility was badly damaged. A few weeks later McPherson told White that Nell Williams had reportedly made several suicide attempts.
Willie Peterson’s trial began on December 7, 1931, with Judge J. Russell McElroy presiding. Defense attorneys Johnson and Roche expressed confidence that Peterson would not be convicted. They anticipated an acquittal or a mistrial. “Johnson believes a white person did it,” McPherson told Walter White.18
Clark and Helen Williams, Nell’s parents, and her boyfriend Buck Streit all testified for the prosecution. Peterson, alive against all odds but still ill, was unable to attend the trial to look Nell Williams in the face when she testified under oath that he was the man who’d shot her and killed Augusta and Jennie. J. T. Roach argued that Peterson fit neither Nell Williams’s nor Jennie Wood’s description of their attacker. While Peterson was unavailable to demonstrate this to the jury, Roach quoted a journalist who’d recently described him as “a wiry little Negro who resembled Mahatma Gandhi.” The defense also provided photos and Roach asked the jury to consider how Peterson, suffering from tuberculosis, managed to attack three young, healthy women.
Peterson had a second-grade education; how could he have lectured for two hours on “communistic ideas”? Roach even got Nell’s mother to admit that Peterson had approached their car without fear when Buck Streit called him over. Would a murderer have taken such a chance? Roach asked. Would he have remained so calm?
J. R. Johnson subsequently called twenty-eight witnesses black and white, to establish that Peterson was at home on the afternoon the crime was committed, that he did not fit any of the conflicting descriptions of the assailant, and to substantiate that he was too weak to have either committed the crime or to have fought off the young women.
Johnson also hired, and the NAACP paid for, the services of private investigator H. W. Fuller. He’d learned that the prosecution was planning to call a black man identified as Henry Wilson, who would testify that Peterson had visited his Tuscaloosa barber shop shortly after the murders and bragged about shooting the girls.
Thankfully, one of Fuller’s black investigators had interviewed a Tuscaloosa housemaid who told him that Henry Wilson was actually Tom Sheppard, and he wasn’t a barber. Word was that he’d gotten ten dollars to lie. Fuller kept digging until he discovered that J. P. Robinson, a Tuscaloosa police officer, had recommended Sheppard to two unidentified white women who were desperate for help. They offered him $25 to testify against Willie Peterson, who’d never been to Tuscaloosa. Sheppard was initially paid $10 and promised the balance after Peterson was convicted. He could earn another $25 if he found someone who would swear that he’d overheard Peterson brag about the crime. Detective Fuller found that man, who agreed to testify against Sheppard. The story reeked of conspiracy and collusion, giving credence to the rumors about Nell Williams being frantic to cover her actions the night of August 4.
Johnson and Roach were prepared to cross-examine “Henry Wilson” and blow the case wide open. But Wilson was never called by the prosecution. Either someone got cold feet, or they’d discovered that the defense knew what they were up to.
On December 10, Johnson and Roach met in Judge McElroy’s chambers to request permission to call “Henry Wilson” [Sheppard] themselves and ask if he’d been hired to provide testimony. The judge denied the request, and the trial moved to closing arguments.
The jury deliberated for forty hours—an extraordinarily long time for such a case. In the end, they were deadlocked, and Judge McElroy declared a mistrial. Incredibly, Willie Peterson, a black man accused of attacking a white woman and identified by her under oath, had not been convicted by a white southern jury. Despite the state’s intention to retry the case, the defense maintained that it had already made history.
One month later, on January 18, 1932, Peterson’s second trial began. Judge Harrington P. Heflin, brother of former Alabama senator “Cotton Tom” Heflin, presided. The defense remained confident. Rumors circulated that they had solved the mystery of what had happened on Shades Mountain.
But the subsequent appointment of Roderick Beddow as special prosecutor stunned Walter White. Beddow was also representing Dent Williams, and White knew him well. In 1931 he’d retained him to defend the Scottsboro teens because Ford, Beddow, and Ray was considered the best criminal law firm in Birmingham. At that time, White had been willing to overlook the fact that Roderick Beddow had opined that “some lynchers might be justified in taking the law into their own hands.”19 White was focused on Beddow’s batting average in the courtroom. In the end, it hadn’t mattered. The Scottsboro teens didn’t trust Beddow and didn’t want him. They’d opted to stay with the Reds. Now White wrote to ask Beddow how it was possible for him to both represent Williams and to prosecute Peterson.
Beddow replied: “You know Walter how I feel about prosecutions. I am loathed to prosecute anyone. I had rather be on the other side. However, this was one of those crimes that should be punished. If the guilty party were to escape where the evidence is strong, cogent, and convincing, depicting a depravity of mind almost unparalleled in the annals of crime history in this country, this would have, in my judgement, brought about misunderstanding between the white and colored races that only time could bridge.”20
What evidence? All he had was the gray felt hat that Nell said she’d recognized, the fact that Peterson lived in Birmingham, and what he mystifyingly described as “[Peterson’s] height, weight and peculiar appearance.”21 White shook his head.
And there was more. Beddow had reinstated the rape charge initially brought against Peterson but never introduced in the first trial. He knew that a rape accusation would make another acquittal unlikely. A black man charged with raping a white woman was a condemned man. When Henrietta Peterson found this out, she went back to the ILD and begged for their help. They’d been conducting mass publicity campaigns and demonstrations to free Willie since the first trial, despite the fact that she had gone with the NAACP.
Johnson and Roach were unable to get “Henry Wilson” on the stand for the second trial, which closed the door to revealing Nell and Helen Williams’s bribe. Johnson was livid, but the more conservative Roach was relieved. He’d feared that outing Wilson might backfire. It would be the testimony of a career criminal and a rogue police officer against the word of two respectable white society women.
The prosecution had nothing new to offer except the rape charge. The defense reiterated that Willie Peterson was physically incapable of raping anyone or fighting off two healthy young women.
In the end, however, despite McPherson’s faith in the “changing sentiment of whites,” and despite the best efforts of his two “respectable” white attorneys, Willie Peterson was convicted of first-degree murder on January 29, 1932. This time the jury deliberated for only twenty minutes. Judge Heflin sentenced him to die in the electric chair on August 25, 1932.22
J. R. Johnson immediately filed a motion for a new trial, which Judge Heflin denied. The Alabama State Supreme Court was his next stop.
The NAACP hired John Altman, general counsel of the Alabama Federation of Labor, to handle Peterson’s appeal. Altman was assisted by his associate Walter Smith and chose not to include either J. R. Johnson or J. T. Roach on the team.
On April 17, 1932, Altman addressed the Alabama Supreme Court, citing prejudicial statements made to the jury by Judge Heflin. Before deliberations began, the judge had allegedly told the panel “it ought to take you but a few minutes to reach a verdict in this case.” J. T. Roach had moved for a mistrial at the time, but Judge Heflin denied the motion.
Juror Horace Dugger told the empaneled jury that he believed Peterson was guilty and that he was glad he’d been chosen so that he could “stick him.”
Altman argued that Peterson’s conviction came down to Nell William’s testimony, and she’d repeatedly perjured herself.23 He noted that no physical evidence was submitted and that the fingerprints lifted by the police at the scene were never produced at trial. Fingerprints, Altman said, would have quickly either damned or exonerated his client, since Nell Williams testified that her attacker had gotten inside the car. Finally, the rape charge against Peterson, originally dropped for lack of evidence, had been reintroduced, only because exonerating a black man accused of raping a white woman, regardless of the lack of evidence, was virtually impossible in Alabama in 1932.
On June 22, 1933, one year after Altman submitted his appeal, the Alabama Supreme Court refused to reverse the lower court’s ruling.
A furious Oscar W. Adams Sr., editor of the Birmingham Reporter and a longtime NAACP member, wrote that all the parties involved “knew that the young woman had identified the wrong man. And yet they had gone ahead. Rather than humiliate Miss Williams by contradicting her story, the State of Alabama was willing to convict an innocent man. The ‘honor’ of one white woman was more important than the life’s blood of a black man.”24
The ILD subsequently launched a national publicity campaign to support Willie Peterson and to appeal to the governor for clemency. They criticized the NAACP for mishandling the case and clearly hoped to take over the appeal.
On August 13, 1933, one week after the Alabama Supreme Court announced its decision, Nell Williams married Louie Reese Jr., the son of wealthy Birmingham real estate developer, Louie Reese Sr., in a traditional society wedding.
Willie Peterson had one option left—an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Between the time of the application to the Alabama Supreme Court and the notice of the justices’ decision, John Altman had suffered a stroke, and he was angry when the NAACP insisted on hiring Charles Hamilton Houston, the black dean of Howard University Law School, to assist him. Altman resisted until Charles McPherson agreed that he could remain the lead attorney. Houston was notified of this deal in writing. The white attorney was not comfortable working collaboratively with a black attorney. Ironically, Houston was a personal friend of the ILD’s William Patterson, who would have welcomed him on any legal team. The situation was critical.
Houston arrived in Birmingham in late August and met with Police Chief Fred McDuff and Sheriff James Hawkins on August 29. Both told him that they’d never believed there was enough evidence to convict Peterson, and they were willing to submit written statements to that effect. Even Jennie Wood’s father was not satisfied that the right man had been convicted.25
Houston interviewed Willie Peterson in the Birmingham City Jail, his wife Henrietta, and his former attorneys J. R. Johnson and J. T. Roach. He spoke with Assistant Solicitor Jim Long, who’d been present when Dent Williams shot Peterson. Despite representing the prosecution, Long admitted to being impressed by the fact that Peterson refused to confess his guilt even when Long assured him that he was dying. Long offered that a Christian terrified of burning in hell would never have done that.
Finally, Birmingham detectives Virgil Sanders and Luther Holmes spoke about the inconsistencies that had troubled them throughout the case. Jennie Wood described her attacker as having gold teeth. Peterson had none. Nell Williams was unable to explain how although the attacker took her car keys she drove down the mountain to get help. And finally, the detectives were never able to locate anyone who recalled hearing shots or screams from the Leeds Highway, which ran very close to the woods.
No one who Houston interviewed, with the exception of Special Prosecutor Roderick Beddow, believed that Peterson was guilty, and only two white Birmingham clergymen had trouble believing that Nell Williams would lie.
Johnson and Roach were never able to introduce the persistent rumors running through the black and white communities as circumstantial evidence to offer another possible motive for the crime. Houston understood that it would have been suicidal for the Mountain Brook maids to testify to what they’d heard and seen, and he also knew that all the “better families” had closed ranks. If any of them knew the white man or men who’d been on the mountain that day, they weren’t going to tell anyone. The police would never find any record of treatment for gunshot wounds at any hospital emergency room or doctors’ offices—even if they cared to look, which they did not. Apparently, the man or men had survived. No one was reported missing.
Frustrated, Houston constructed a detailed timeline that he hoped might help uncover any other overlooked motives. He found one. Houston concluded that Willie Peterson had to be convicted to save Dent Williams—not to exonerate Nell Williams.
Augusta Williams and Jennie Wood were murdered on August 4, 1931. Peterson was arrested on September 23 and Dent shot him on October 2. Due to growing skepticism in the white community about the black man’s guilt, public sentiment began to turn against Dent. He and Roderick Beddow knew that if Peterson was exonerated, Dent would be tried for the attempted murder of an innocent man. Revenge was one thing, cold-blooded killing another.26
On October 9, both Peterson and Williams were indicted. Peterson’s trial began on December 7 and ended with a deadlocked jury. Once a mistrial was declared, Beddow requested postponement of Dent’s trial.
Peterson was retried on January 18, 1932, with Roderick Beddow reintroducing the rape charge. Dent was acquitted one month later. After all, he was a grieving brother who’d attempted to kill the black man who’d murdered one of his sisters, shot the other, and raped their best friend.27 In July 1933, a disheartened Houston wrote that “when Dent Williams is acquitted, and Willie Peterson is sentenced to be electrocuted, Alabama clamps the LID on the Negro’s hopes for Southern Justice.”28
Houston prepared a full report and delivered it to Charles McPherson on September 2, 1933. It was included in the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court but was never considered. In January 1934, the justices refused to review the case. Willie Peterson’s execution was set for February 16, 1934.
Loss of two appeals was a major setback for the NAACP. Houston believed that the organization’s “leadership of the Negroes in the South” would inevitably pass to the ILD. It did not make him happy to hear that his friend William Patterson was publicly charging “the respectable NAACP leadership” with betraying Peterson by “muffling the sensational evidence.”29 Was that fair? How would “Pat” have managed it? Could he have gotten Willie Peterson exonerated if he and Houston had worked together? It was all moot.
Patterson often quipped to Houston that his clients could be guilty for all he cared. “I’m concerned with rights,” he liked to say, “and when the ILD wins a case rights are automatically extended across the board, and not only for Negroes.”30
After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her husband’s appeal, Henrietta Peterson became involved in the ILD’s nationwide protests and demonstrations. She would do anything to keep Willie alive. With less than a month before his execution date, the ILD campaigned hard to generate indignation over the death sentence. As in the Scottsboro case, the governor’s office was flooded with letters, petitions, resolutions, and telegrams from all over the nation.31
At the same time, and against Altman’s wishes, Houston recruited a committee of Robert Moton, superintendent of Tuskegee, representatives from Birmingham’s Interracial Commission, its Citizens’ Committee, and the Alabama Commission on Interracial Cooperation to petition the governor for a stay of execution. They were successful. By the time the committee arrived at his office, a weary Governor Miller was ready to grant it and be done with them. What they didn’t know was that he’d received a handwritten letter from Sheriff James Hawkins, who’d been assigned to take Peterson back to Kilby Prison: “I don’t believe Willie Peterson is the Negro who committed this offense, and this belief is shared by Chief Fred McDuff, who is even more familiar with the facts than I am. . . . The young women who suffered outrages at the hands of some Negro are members of our best families and my closest friends. It is embarrassing to me to do or say anything that would displease them, but I am not willing to go through life feeling that my silence might have allowed an innocent person, although a Negro, to die.”32
The governor granted the stay from February 16 to March 30, 1934.33 When the NAACP subsequently petitioned for a clemency hearing, Governor Miller scheduled one for March 6. This was John Altman’s last hope of saving Peterson’s life, and he was not taking any chances.34 He told Houston, Charles McPherson, and Walter White that he didn’t want any blacks attending the hearing, which might make the panel feel coerced. It was unfair, it was disgraceful, he said he knew that, and if it mattered to them, he personally agreed, but a man’s life was at stake. Houston, White, and McPherson reluctantly followed his humiliating instructions.
When William Patterson heard about it, he was furious. Clemency was unacceptable to him, to the ILD, to Mrs. Peterson, and to the black people of the state and the nation. Peterson was innocent and should be set free. On March 6, as the clemency hearing began, the ILD demonstrated in front of the governor’s office. They demanded Peterson’s unconditional release. Henrietta Peterson was with them when they tried to force their way into the hearing room to address the board.35 All were ushered out. Mrs. Peterson was completely distraught.
Charles Nollner of the Mountain Brook Police Department, the first officer to interview the mortally wounded Jennie Wood, told the board that she’d said the man who shot her had several gold lower front teeth. Peterson, who had no gold teeth, could not have been that man. “I don’t think he was given a square deal,” Nollner said.36
Another deputy testified that black witnesses who could have placed Peterson in Birmingham at the time of the murder refused to testify at his second trial because they’d been threatened with having their homes torched.
Sheriff James Hawkins, as promised, testified that he’d always believed Peterson was innocent.37 Birmingham Police Chief Fred McDuff, however, withdrew his statement to Houston concerning Peterson’s innocence. His change of heart was extremely damaging, and John Altman was furious. But Hawkins was retiring, and since McDuff intended to declare himself a candidate for sheriff in the upcoming 1935 election, any testimony supporting Peterson would hurt his chances.38 McDuff won that election and served as Jefferson County sheriff until 1939. He died in 1943.
E. S. Cade, who’d served on the grand jury, believed that Peterson never would have been indicted had the jurors been able to see him in person and observe his physical condition. Finally, Lewis Mullinicks, a juror on the second panel, testified that while he believed Peterson was innocent, the other jurors warned him that if he voted for acquittal he would never get home. Charles Hamilton Houston also submitted his report to the clemency board.
After everyone was heard, Clark and Nell Williams, her husband Louie Reese, and Wade Wood Jr. (who was likely Jennie’s brother, since her father had already expressed his doubts about Peterson being the man who attacked his daughter), requested that the clemency board allow Peterson’s execution to stand.39 They prevailed.
Charles Hamilton Houston took his delegation back to the governor’s office to deliver the clemency board hearing testimony as well as his own report and a copy of the police flyer that had circulated after the crime offering a $3,300 reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer described as having “gold inlay work on his lower teeth.”40 On March 20, 1934, ten days before the stay expired, Governor Miller commuted Peterson’s death sentence to life in prison. Peterson died there in 1940 at the age of forty-six.
Willie Peterson, a deacon in his church and a World War I veteran, had enjoyed the respect of his community and the love of his young wife. Neighbors and friends recalled him as a hardworking miner and a vigorous young man before the mine dust made him sick. But to a rich family on the other side of Shades Mountain, Peterson had simply provided a convenient solution to an inconvenient problem.