BIG SANDY A Murder and Two Lynchings BIG SANDY A Murder and Two LynchingsPoverty is the worst form of violence.
—attributed to Mahatma Gandhi
The day after Judge James Horton ordered Haywood Patterson’s new trial, three young black men from Tuscaloosa County were charged with the rape and murder of Vaudine Maddox, a twenty-year-old white sharecropper’s daughter.
The girl’s desperately poor family had recently moved to Big Sandy Creek, a black community twelve miles south of Tuscaloosa, and were illegally subletting a two-room shack. Vaudine’s father used it to distill and sell moonshine.1 She had been caring for her brothers and sisters since their mother’s death nine years earlier. Her twenty-five-year-old cousin, Leland Fowler, also lived with the family.2
Vaudine Maddox left home on Monday morning June 12, 1933, to go to her job, caring for an elderly couple. Forty-eight hours later her sisters found her body in a ravine half a mile away. Their father had assumed she’d been staying with a friend. W. T. Maddox explained that he and his daughter had “some dispute” over a young male visitor who’d “called for her at their home.”3 Maddox believed that his daughter was staying away because she was still angry with him.
The crime scene was gruesome. The girl’s skull was crushed, and it looked as if her body had been dragged from the road into the ravine. A bloodied stick and two bloody rocks were found near her body. Decomposition made it difficult for Coroner S. T. Hardin to determine if she’d been raped.4
The police theorized that Vaudine knew her murderer because she’d set down, rather than thrown down, the bucket she was carrying. That indicated that her attacker had not surprised her. The Tuscaloosa News explained that “some of the evidence would indicate a typical attack case involving a negro but for the fact that it appears the Maddox girl either stood or sat on a log and talked with someone at a point near the trail leading down to the ravine.” The implication was, of course, that a white woman would never sit on a log with a black man.5
Rumors circulated that Maddox had been raped—and there were several theories about who’d done it. It was well known, for example, that white women in and around Big Sandy Creek were charging black men for sex. Speculation grew about Vaudine’s possible involvement. Several of Big Sandy’s black residents told Walter Chivers (who’d come with Arthur Raper to investigate) that she’d been seeing an older white man by the name of Powell. Some conjectured that Powell may have discovered Vaudine entertaining black clients and killed her. Evidently this scenario did not impress the police, since they arrested a black teenager on June 16.
Eighteen-year-old Dan Pippen lived in Big Sandy with his parents, worked with his father, and sang in his church choir. A white man, who the Baltimore Afro-American reported owed Pippen money for work he’d done, told the police that he’d seen the young man near the Maddox home on Monday morning “carrying a rock and looking angry.”6
Pippen admitted to knowing Maddox but said that he’d been draining a swamp with his father on the day she was murdered. The police, however, pressured to quickly solve what was looking more and more like a case the Reds might get interested in, chose to concentrate on what they had—a solid lead. They apparently never tried to find “Powell,” the older man who Vaudine was allegedly seeing, or to identify the young man who’d provoked the quarrel between her and her father. There’s no record of their interviewing Leland Fowler the twenty-six-year-old cousin who lived with the Maddoxes either.
On June 18, fifteen-year-old A. T. Hardin, a friend of Dan Pippen, was also arrested. Hardin, who’d never been in trouble before, was so frightened that he told the police he’d seen Pippen murder the white woman. The following day he recanted and swore that he’d only heard her scream. A few hours later he said he hadn’t seen or heard anything at all.
In fact, it was not unusual for police to rely on fear to get young black men to produce statements they thought the authorities wanted to hear in order to ensure their own release; fear of police was particularly high among blacks, for obvious reasons. It happened when the Scottsboro teens were grilled by police officers who were also under pressure to quickly solve a sensational crime. At their first trials, Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson testified that they’d witnessed all the other boys rape the two white women in the freight car, but that they had not taken part. Later Norris explained: “we was scared and I don’t know what I said. The prison guards told us if we didn’t confess they’d kill us—give us to the mob outside.”7 At just fifteen years old, A. T. Hardin was likely terrified of what might happen to him in custody.
Two days after Hardin’s arrest, a white mob surrounded the Tuscaloosa jail to demand that Pippen and Hardin be released to them. Circuit Judge Henry Foster, Tuscaloosa’s former mayor, ordered Sheriff Shamblin to take the two to the Birmingham Jail for their safety. Willie Peterson was there awaiting trial for a rape, two murders, and a shooting he swore he had not committed.
Then, on June 23, Tuscaloosa County police arrested twenty-eight-year-old Elmore “Honey” Clark, who had a reputation in the white community as a “mean nigger.” He’d been cast as the ringleader of the attack on Maddox despite the fact that he had one shriveled, virtually useless arm. Several witnesses swore that he was with them on a fishing trip the day that she was murdered.8
The following day, Harden and Pippen returned from Birmingham to join Clark for a grand jury hearing. Judge Henry Foster presided. Hardin, nearly hysterical, swore that the police had pressured him to confess. Revising his story several times, he finally testified that Pippen and Clark had murdered Vaudine Maddox.
Clark’s shriveled arm made it unlikely that he’d attacked Maddox, and Pippen’s father and his boss, Will Jemison testified that Dan had worked with them all day. Amazingly, Judge Foster ordered Dan Pippen Sr. and Jemison, both black, arrested for interfering with the investigation, and they were removed from the courtroom.
The prosecution alleged that Clark had planned the crime and that he and Pippen killed Maddox while Hardin served as lookout. Arthur Raper reported, “The mutual charges and alleged confessions on the part of the suspects themselves constituted the case against them. On these their guilt was assumed and the three were indicted.”9
Three trials were scheduled beginning with Dan Pippen’s on August 1, 1933. The Pippen and Clark families hired white attorneys Charles La France and Jack McGuire to defend their sons. The Hardins chose J. Monroe Ward. There were also rumors that Pippen’s mother, Lucinda, was talking with the Reds.
As Judge Foster was unfamiliar with La France, McGuire, and Ward, and since a bunch of Red lawyers had recently gotten a Scottsboro guilty verdict overturned because of “inadequate counsel,” on July 29 he assigned to the case three attorneys who he did know. They were John D. McQueen, past president of the Alabama Bar Association; Fleetwood Rice, a former circuit court judge; and Reuben H. Wright, a prominent Tuscaloosa attorney. He charged them with assisting (and essentially keeping an eye on) the other three. McQueen tried to refuse, but the judge was firm.10 In the end, there were six attorneys for the defense (not counting any potential help from the ILD).11
The summer of 1933 was reportedly Tuscaloosa’s hottest on record. On August 1, as Dan Pippen’s jury was being sworn in, attorney Frank Irwin of Birmingham (a member of the Scottsboro defense team) and his colleagues Allan Taub and Irving Schwab (who’d represented the Kentucky coal miners and the Camp Hill sharecroppers) entered the courtroom. They were apparently anticipated, since nearly four hundred people, including reporters and a cadre of national guardsmen, were waiting inside. In the August 1933 issue of the New Masses, Taub gives an account of what followed.12
Frank Irwin, the most militant of the three, produced a retainer agreement signed by Lucinda Pippen, and stated that he and the other ILD attorneys had been refused admission to the jail to consult with their client. Irwin demanded, therefore, that Judge Foster end the proceedings and grant a continuance.
Without missing a beat, Allan Taub observed that “this procedure bears a remarkable resemblance to another hearing on April 6, 1931 in Scottsboro in the case of nine Negro boys accused of rape.”13 He cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that denial of counsel amounted to denial of due process. Because they hadn’t been able to speak with their client, Taub explained, they were not prepared to proceed with a defense. He seconded Irwin’s request for a continuance. Tuscaloosa’s worse nightmare was beginning.
Finally, Irving Schwab asked that the record reflect the unusually crowded courtroom and the presence of armed national guardsmen. At that point, Judge Foster asked Pippin which attorney he wanted to represent him. The frightened young man, whose face was badly bruised, said he wanted LaFrance and McGrath. His terrified mother insisted that she had not requested help from the Red attorneys and that she did not want them defending her son.14
Irwin commented that Pippen had obviously been beaten and likely forced to renounce the ILD. At that point defense attorneys La Frank and Maguire produced their own retainer agreements allegedly signed by Lucinda Pippen.
Judge Foster, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck, examined all the documents and ruled that the ILD attorneys had no jurisdiction in the case. He denied them permission to interview Pippen, dismissed the jury, and rescheduled Pippen’s trial for August 22.
As he was about to leave the bench, a court officer handed him a telegram. The judge read it, threw it down, clenched his fists, and shouted, “God damn the son of a bitch that sent this! I’ll make him answer for it. I’ll go to Birmingham—I’ll go to New York—I’ll kill the son of a bitch!”15 There was a long silence before the courtroom began to buzz.
The wire, sent by ILD national secretary William Patterson, informed the judge that “two hundred thousand members and affiliates of the International Labor Defense demand you withdraw troops in the trial of Pippen, Clark and Harden, withdraw the local lynch lawyers and permit defense by ILD attorneys retained by the families of the defendants. Will expose your illegal maneuvers nationally as counterpoint to Scottsboro.”16
“Son of a bitch! I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” the judge howled. One of the court officers allegedly responded, “you don’t have to do it, Judge. We’ll do it for you.”17
Word of the ILD’s attempted hijacking spread quickly, and a crowd began to gather outside the courthouse. University of Alabama professor Clarence Elmore Cason described it as the kind that “had often gathered in front of those very same steps on other hot August days to hear Senator Tom Heflin elucidate his theories of white control. They were of the opinion that something ought to be done about those three little Jewish lawyers being paid to spread ideas of social equality among the Alabama Negroes.”18
Attorney John McQueen encouraged Judge Foster to provide protection for the Reds. If harm came to them, he reasoned, Tuscaloosa would pay. Foster, who’d finally regained his composure, asked the attorneys if they wanted an escort. Irwin responded, “Judge, you know this county better that we do.” Foster arranged for national guardsmen to take them (in disguise) to the railroad station and put them on the 4:30 to Birmingham.
Patterson’s telegram was subsequently printed in the Tuscaloosa News, and rumors that the Birmingham Reds were returning to take over the Maddox case circulated throughout the city. Irwin, Taub, and Schwab had raised to a situation of national consequence a local murder trial that might have been newsworthy for a few days at most. To the horror of white Tuscaloosa, all the wire services had picked it up.
Tuscaloosa’s unemployment rate was high and still rising. By 1930 many of the farms outside the city were on the auction block for back taxes. As in Birmingham, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, unemployed miners, mill and foundry workers, and displaced croppers flocked to the city looking for work. There wasn’t any. By the time construction of Tuscaloosa’s veterans’ hospital was completed, so many municipal workers had been laid off that no one was left to attach the pipes to the waterworks. Municipal foremen had to hire day laborers to dig the trenches. Workers who still had homes received water bill credits as payment, and the homeless got a small daily stipend.19
Red organizers from Birmingham were recruiting unemployed workers in Tuscaloosa and encouraging blacks and whites to march to city hall to demand financial relief. White Tuscaloosa grew increasingly angry and fearful. All Negro gatherings—whether in churches, lodge halls, or social clubs—became suspect, and the city council passed an ordinance making it illegal for blacks to congregate after sunset.
The police doubled down on Jim Crow statute enforcements, and white residents organized a Citizens’ Protective League to ferret out communists. The league rewarded spies and encouraged them to infiltrate Red cells whenever possible.20 League members conducted night raids, wore masks and hoods reminiscent of the Klan, and illegally searched black homes for communist literature. The league’s popularity soared after the ILD attorneys attempted to grab the Maddox case.
The only bona fide communist the organization uncovered was Louis Harper, the black Tuscaloosa schoolteacher who’d encouraged the Pippen, Harden, and Clark families to hire ILD attorneys. He boarded a train to Birmingham just fifteen minutes before a posse came looking for him.21
League officials held the Reds responsible for every trouble the South was suffering—including what they contended was a new rash of blacks raping white women. This was the kind of thing communists were “known to encourage.” They’d been found agitating down in Big Sandy Creek—encouraging croppers to demand a share of the federal land furlough money.22 Harden, Pippen, and Clark were all croppers, and the ILD was trying to link their arrests to what they called “the planters’ reign of terror.” Tuscaloosa was fearful of becoming the next Scottsboro. The Citizens’ Protective League vowed that would never happen.
On August 10, Tuscaloosa County sheriff R. L. Shamblin allegedly received an anonymous tip that a mob was planning to storm his jail and take his prisoners. He informed Judge Foster, who deliberated for two days about whether or not to move Harden, Pippen, and Clark to Birmingham. Finally, he ordered the transfer. Foster would later deny giving that order.23 Sheriff Shamblin, who Arthur Raper described as “elderly and inefficient,” apparently took his time making the arrangements and openly discussed them at the police station as residents walked in and out all day.24 The prisoners finally left Tuscaloosa at 9:30 p.m.
Ten officers were assigned the escort duty. Hardin, Pippen, and Clark, handcuffed together, rode in a van with Sheriff Shamblin and three deputies: Murray Pate, Harley Holeman, and W. I. Huff. Four officers followed in a second vehicle. When they completed twenty miles without incident, the sheriff ordered the second car back to Tuscaloosa.
The prisoners’ van reached Woodstock, Alabama (thirty-five miles south of Birmingham) at midnight. There, they were either ambushed by a dozen armed masked men, as reported, or they turned their prisoners over to a mob, as suspected. Any need for trials ended right there. Harden and Pippen were shot to death, but Elmore Clark, who lay trapped beneath them, played dead and survived.
After the killers left, Clark freed himself and walked for nearly twenty-four hours before he risked stopping at a farmhouse near Vance, Alabama. A black woman took him in and sent a neighbor to Tuscaloosa to get Dr. B. B. Mitchell, a black physician. After Mitchell treated Clark, he called the police. Clark was taken to the Montgomery County Jail, where he repeatedly swore that he could not identify his attackers.25
A terrified Clark confirmed Deputy Pate’s account—that the mob had overtaken them, disarmed the officers, taken the prisoners, and shot them. The police inexplicably offered no resistance to the kidnappers, nor had they pursued them. No shots were fired. Clark swore that pursuit had not been possible.
But other theories began to circulate about how the prisoners had died and who might be responsible. Some said that the lynchers were Citizens’ Protection League vigilantes. Judge Foster lent credibility to that when he remarked that “Tuscaloosa County was willing to see the Negroes tried and was willing to give them a fair trial, but some were not willing to have us go through another Scottsboro case.”26
The ILD maintained that there was no mob, that the police had shot the prisoners themselves on orders from Sheriff Shamblin. Deputy Sheriff Murray Pate had been selected for escort duty despite his recent boast of killing “eleven niggers in the line of duty.” The day after Harden and Pippen were murdered, the Tuscaloosa News reported that Pate and Deputy Holeman killed Jack Pruitt, a black Tuscaloosa resident, after he resisted arrest for disturbing the peace.27
An editorial in that same edition held the ILD attorneys responsible for the prisoners’ deaths because they’d “spread their poisoned Communistic propaganda among our contented Negro population.”28
Governor Benjamin Meek Miller ordered an inquest, and a grand jury was impaneled on August 14, with Judge Foster presiding. Attorney General Thomas Knight Jr. (who would be elected lieutenant governor three months later) conducted the investigation.
In an open letter addressed to the grand jury, Frank Irwin, who’d disrupted the Pippen grand jury proceedings, demanded that indictments for first-degree murder be brought against Sheriff Shamblin, the deputies who’d escorted the prisoners, and Judge Foster himself. Irwin wrote: “The International Labor Defense accuses Deputy Sheriffs Murray Pate, Harley Holeman and W. I. Huff, all of Tuscaloosa, of shooting with their own hands, murdering and lynching Dan Pippen Jr. and A. T. Harden, Negro boys on the night of August 12, 1933 while these boys were in their custody.” Irwin further charged that Foster and Shamblin “directed the lynching plot and should be treated as accomplices.”29
He challenged the officers’ sworn statements that they’d left Tuscaloosa at 9:30 p.m. and were ambushed around midnight twenty-three miles south of Birmingham. The entire forty-mile trip, he argued, should not have exceeded ninety minutes. He contended that “they made a circuitous route in order to find a quiet spot out of the way in order to murder the prisoners.”30
Irwin pointed out that no autopsy had been ordered, crime scene evidence was reportedly destroyed, and that Pippen and Harden had been hurriedly buried the following day.31
The grand jury met four times between August 15 and October 2, 1933. Elmore Clark was called as the first witness. As he was brought into the court room a shot ran out and he dove to floor. He was unharmed. The bullet grazed Attorney General Knight’s ankle, and the incident was explained as a court officer’s gun unexpectedly discharging—an accident. Still Clark could not stop shaking. As the only eyewitness, he fully expected to be shot.32
Still under indictment for the murder of Vaudine Maddox, Clark swore that he could not identify any of the men who’d shot him. He repeated that the lynchers “had their guns on Mr. Pate” and while “Mr. Pate” did not want to turn the prisoners over, “Mr. Pate” had no choice.33 Of the three officers who’d escorted him, Pate was by far the most vicious, and Clark was terrified of him. On the stand and under oath, Elmore Clark couldn’t say enough good things about him. Perhaps most astoundingly, the testimony of a black witness was received by this all-white, all-male grand jury as entirely credible.
The jurors were informed that all the crime scene evidence had been taken by “souvenir hunters,” and after hearing testimony from the coroner and the Bibb County sheriff who’d discovered the bodies, they recessed for two weeks to await a ballistics report.34
The September 5 session opened with testimony from Sheriff Shamblin, the police officers, and the volunteers who’d searched for Clark. The ballistics report indicated that Harden and Pippen were killed with .38 caliber bullets. Knight noted that the police carried only .44 caliber weapons. Apparently, no attempt was made to determine if any of the police owned a .38 caliber gun. Deputies Pate, Holeman, and Huff did not testify.
On October 2, the grand jury returned a “no true bill”—no indictments. The foreman explained that the evidence was insufficient. They did, however, express full faith and confidence in Sheriff Shamblin. On October 3 the Tuscaloosa News concluded that Pippen and Harden were “not victims of the mob, but rather victims of the ILD’s invasiveness.”
No one was ever charged with the murders of Harden and Pippen or the attempted murder of Elmore Clark, and no one was ever convicted of the murder of Vaudine Maddox. Clark was released from jail on May 23, 1934, and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation assisted him in relocating from Alabama.
Life in Alabama went on. The 1933 cotton harvest was more successful than the previous year’s, which was very bad news indeed. Intensive cultivation of the acreage that had not been furloughed, combined with the planters’ use of new and more powerful equipment (which many could afford because of their federal subsidy payments) had increased cotton production. Land furlough had not solved the surplus problem. Still, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration chose to reduce acreage by another 40 percent in 1934—a total of fifteen million additional acres.35 Inevitably, more croppers and tenants would be displaced.
At the same time, croppers were continuing to demand their fair share of the federal land furlough payments and refusing to sign the government checks that were jointly issued to them and the planters. Because both signatures were required, the planters could not cash them either. Angry and frustrated, they blamed “the nigger union, the uppity niggers and the nigger-loving Reds” for all this defiance. Raids on cropper cabins increased. In Chambers County, a group of planters bribed Paul Powell, a black cropper, to join the union and make a list of all the members. Sheriff Frank Wood swore that he would kill anyone whose name was on it. When the croppers discovered what Powell was up to, they beat him so badly that he nearly died.36