13  Images  THE LYNCHING OF DENNIS CROSS

Cruelty requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

—George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

On Thursday afternoon, September 7, 1933, six weeks after the murders of A. T. Hardin and Dan Pippen and the attempted murder of Elmore Clark, Alice Johnson walked into Tuscaloosa’s Emergency Relief Office and reported that a Negro man had attacked her. Johnson, eighteen years old and white, was a familiar face at the center and famous for her vivid imagination. A staffer took her report and referred her to the police, who took another report.

Four days later, Alice’s husband asked the police if they had any suspects in his wife’s attack. He was told that no arrests had been made. On September 12, Alice returned to the relief office and passed Dennis Cross in the hall. He was a forty-nine-year-old semi-paralyzed black man who she may have recognized from one of her earlier visits. Johnson told the staffer who’d taken her report that Cross was her attacker. She maintained that he’d approached her on the street and lunged at her. When she resisted, he ripped her dress and ran. Cross was arrested.1

One look at Dennis Cross would convince anyone that he could never have run anywhere for any reason. He needed his brother’s help to get dressed every morning. Nonetheless, on Alice Johnson’s word he was arrested, jailed, and later released on $300 bond. That was unusual. A black man accused of attacking a white woman was never eligible for bail. Cross’s boss, A. J. Hinton, a white man who owned Hinton’s Hardware, had provided the bond.

At 2 a.m. Sunday, September 24, six white men came to the Cross home and identified themselves as officers of the court. They told Dennis’s brother that additional bail was required, and they had to take Dennis into custody. They assured him that he could settle the matter in the morning.

It took three men to lift Cross out of his bed and carry him to the car. They brought him to the scene of the alleged assault and shot him dead. Early Sunday morning a local black undertaker was called and informed that “there’s a dead nigger down the road, you’d better come pick him up.”2

The Accuser

Alice Johnson, who had grown up as poor as Vaudine Maddox had, was as resourceful as Victoria Price. Her mother had died when she was a child, and a county social worker described the home of her father, J. L. Pannal, as “filthy and demoralized.” When Alice was fourteen, she ran away to Jacksonville, Florida, with a forty-year-old man. When he deserted her in Gadsden, Alabama, she had to find her own way back home. The following year she ran to Florida with another man. At sixteen, she fled to Tallahassee alone and returned with a husband.

Between the Florida trips, Alice frequented Tuscaloosa’s hobo camps and neighbors often complained to her father about her erratic behavior. She wanted more out of life and was not shy about demanding it from the staff at the Emergency Relief Office.3 On the morning of September 7, however, she’d tried a new approach.

Alice went to visit a “society lady” who’d once been kind to her. Between racking sobs, she told the woman that she’d been accosted by a black man who’d torn her dress when she tried to get away. Alice’s worn, thin, and dirty dress was indeed ripped. The lady, as Alice anticipated, offered to buy her another one and asked if she’d reported the attack. When Alice said she hadn’t, the woman encouraged her to do so.

In Arthur Raper’s report of the Cross murder for the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, he’d asked incredulously, “Had [Alice Johnson] trumped up the charge to get a dress?” and, “Did she accuse Cross because she had to identify someone?” After two years of investigating mob murders and lynchings, including the Emelle, Scottsboro, and Big Sandy cases, the heartlessness of Cross’s death left Raper deeply shaken.

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In the Scottsboro case, two destitute white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, lied nine innocent black men into death sentences that morphed into long prison terms. All to avoid arrest themselves. Although Bates eventually recanted, Price never dropped the rape charges.

In the Shades Mountain murders, Nell Williams, a white debutante, lied an innocent, sick black man into a life sentence for a crime she knew he did not commit in order to protect three sullied reputations. Dennis Cross had the bad luck to cross the path of a desperately poor white woman who lied him into the hands of vigilantes—for a new dress.

An obsession with interracial sex—specifically, white fear of black men seducing or raping white women—was the common denominator in all these cases. Despite their class differences, all these women were confident that they would be believed. White women who accused black men were always believed. When they identified Willie Peterson, Dennis Cross, Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson, Eugene Williams, and Andy and Roy Wright as their attackers, knowing full well that all were innocent—and in the cases of Willie Peterson, Willie Robeson, Olin Montgomery, and Dennis Cross that they were physically incapable of committing the crimes—Victoria Price, Ruby Bates, Nell Williams, and Alice Johnson’s accusations were acknowledged and acted on by white law enforcement and the white judicial system.

As Sheriff Shamblin, who’d botched the Maddox investigation, began his inquiries into the Cross murder, the white Birmingham Age Herald’s columnist John Temple Graves II called it “one of the most shameful affairs with which Alabama has ever had to deal.”4

The subsequent grand jury session was unproductive. On October 14, foreman Ben Eddins announced a no true bill—no indictments. “We have used every means at our command to ascertain the parties guilty of the Cross lynching but we have been unable to secure enough evidence on which to base an indictment at this time.” The panel recommended, however, that the case be continued.5

The National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners

Two weeks after the Cross grand jury disbanded, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP; journalists who had organized the hearings in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931) dispatched a delegation to Tuscaloosa to investigate the deaths of Dan Pippen, A. T. Harden, Dennis Cross, and Jack Pruitt, the twenty-four-year-old black man killed by Officer Murray Pate one day after Harden and Pippen’s executions.6

On November 2, 1933, the NCDPP delegation arrived in Tuscaloosa. They included four southerners: Virginians Bruce Crawford, publisher of Crawford’s Review, and Howard Kester; Georgians Grace Lumpkin, the novelist; and Professor C. Vann Woodward, of Georgia Tech. The Yanks were Hollis Ransdell of the ACLU, Jessica Henderson of NCDPP’s Boston chapter, and NCDPP national director Alfred Hirsch. All were white. On November 10, Hirsh wrote a brief describing their reception. “The Ku Klux Klan, masked and in full regalia and a full hundred strong” had greeted them. When they requested access to transcripts of all the grand jury hearings, Attorney General Knight, who’d prosecuted both Haywood Patterson and Dan Pippin, told them “I refuse that request. Moreover, if any person permits you to see those records or gives you any information concerning the records it will be my duty to prosecute him.” Hirsch had alerted the national press earlier that day, “It is our aim to surround our findings on these lynchings with the broadest and most searching of publicity. We want to bring these crimes before the Court of World Opinion so clearly and sharply that extra-legal lynchings—which are becoming a recognized short cut to terrorization as the fight for Negro legal rights grows—may become impossible.”7 Tuscaloosa’s nightmare had returned.

The committee subsequently learned that Dan Pippen Sr. and his boss, Willie Jamison, had disappeared. Arrested during the Pippen trial for interfering with the prosecution after Pippen Sr. attempted to substantiate his son’s whereabouts at the time of the murder, rumors had spread through the black community that they’d been “done away with.” Judge Henry Foster, scoffing at that, insisted that they’d left town “for their own safety.”8

The delegation also learned of a possible motive for Dennis Cross’s murder, one involving his boss, A. J. Hinton, the white man who’d posted bail. The minimal $300 bail had puzzled many people at the time. Why was it so low? Why had a black man accused of molesting a white woman been granted bond in the first place?

The investigators determined that Cross was one of three Hinton Hardware employees—all black—who’d witnessed the boss kill another black employee who he suspected of having an affair with his wife. Hinton had charged the other two with stealing from his inventory, and both were serving long prison terms. Cross was the last man who could connect him to the murder.

Some committee members conjectured that Hinton had used Alice Johnson’s accusations to motivate the Citizens’ Protective League to take care of Cross. Whether Johnson had randomly picked Cross as her attacker or if Hinton had influenced her in any way was not known, but complicity between Hinton, law enforcement, and the judicial system likely explained the low bail and Cross’s release. The men who went to his home in the middle of the night posing as court officers told his brother that there’d been a problem with the bail bond.

In his final report, the NCDPP’s Arthur Hirsch attested that “lynching is now being used, deliberately, to ‘teach’ negroes that outsider organizations must not be permitted to defend them in court, though they are on trial for their lives. It is no longer a question of individual defendants. Nor is it a question of the crime of which the individual happens to be accused. It is, for the lynchers, a question of covering institutions, just as they are, against implicit challenge even in the courts of law.”9

The NCDPP’s visit did not result in any arrests, indictments, or convictions, but it did produce a substantial increase in the membership roles of the Citizens’ Protective League.

The Plight of Tuscaloosa

In December 1933, Arthur Raper submitted his report on the Tuscaloosa murders to the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching. The commission published it as “The Plight of Tuscaloosa: Mob Murders, Community Hysteria, Official Incompetence—A Case Study of Conditions in Tuscaloosa County Alabama”; it addressed both the Maddox and Cross cases. The black Pittsburgh (PA) Courier hailed it as an “unofficial grand jury” report.10

Raper had documented the rise of the Citizens’ Protective League, called out specific county officials for dereliction of duty, and criticized law enforcement and the judicial system for failure to locate and punish the lynchers. Although critical of the district 17 Reds for “adding to the hysteria,” Raper considered them scapegoats.

“There is a good deal of agitation among the whites over rumors of communist propaganda which is unjustified by the facts,” he wrote. “The emphasis on alleged activities of the communists persists largely because it affords the community a means of diverting attention from its own neglect and failure.”11

Raper concluded that in the Maddox case “the residents of Tuscaloosa [had] lynched two black men, not because of any particular crime, but to send a message that New York lawyers were not to interfere with Southern issues of race.”12

“If the community were really afraid of Communism,” he explained, “its best defense would lie in extending the Negroes full protection under the law. . . . Tuscaloosa could hardly have placed itself in a worse light than it did by insisting that the Negroes’ defense be left in local hands and then permitting them to be lynched and the lynchers to go unpunished.”13

Raper strongly recommended that Sheriff Shamblin be prosecuted, and he appealed to Governor Miller and to the Alabama Supreme Court to “impeach the offenders who failed in their duties.”14 Nothing happened.

After Alabama authorities refused to prosecute either the sheriff or his deputies, Charles Hamilton Houston and two of his associates submitted a brief on behalf of the NAACP to Attorney General Homer Cummings at the U.S. Justice Department. They demonstrated that the federal government had the power under existing law to intervene and to prosecute the Tuscaloosa law enforcement officers who had allowed the lynchings. They cited section 53, chapter 3, title 18 of the U.S. Code. The sheriff and his deputies had willfully subjected Pippen and Harden to deprivation of rights protected by the Constitution. Houston never received a response.15