The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (13 page)

News of the arrest spread over the weekend.
Their outlook brightened when local NAACP attorneys
Raymond J. Valentine and
Robert H. Cooley came to see them on Sunday evening. On Tuesday morning, 250 blacks and whites packed the courtroom. The prosecution charged Murray and Mac with disorderly conduct, creating a public disturbance, and violating a state statute that mandated racially segregated seating on public buses. The judge fined them five dollars plus court costs. Their attorneys gave notice that they would appeal. The retrial was set for April.

· · ·

THE NAACP INVITED MURRAY
and Mac to Washington, D.C., to prepare for the appeal with an elite circle of civil rights attorneys at
Howard
University School of Law. Known as the “Capstone of Negro Education,” Howard was chartered in 1867. Named in honor of General
Oliver O. Howard, the first commissioner of the
Freedmen’s Bureau, the school was the training ground for the association’s legal brain trust. Valentine and Cooley participated in the discussion, as did NAACP counsel
Thurgood Marshall, with whom
Murray had previously consulted on her UNC application.
William H. Hastie, the first black federal judge, now dean of Howard’s law school;
Leon A. Ransom, a professor of criminal law, also from Howard; and attorneys
Oliver W. Hill of Richmond and Henry Lincoln
Johnson Jr. of Washington, D.C., also joined the group.

Ransom played the “
devil’s advocate,” arguing the case for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Hastie kept quiet much of the time; yet when he spoke, he went to “
the core of an issue.” Both men held doctor of juridical science degrees from Harvard. Their brilliance and the debate mesmerized Murray.

Notwithstanding this formidable legal team, they lost the appeal when the prosecution dropped the violation of segregation charge to avert a constitutional challenge. Murray wanted desperately to appeal the disorderly conduct and creating a disturbance charges, but the NAACP declined again to take the case forward.
She suspected that a story published in the May 18, 1940, issue of
Opportunity
had influenced the association’s decision. That story,
“
Color Trouble,” was an account of a bus incident in Petersburg involving two black passengers who told the police they were from New York City. The author was
Harold Garfinkel, a white UNC graduate student who had been a passenger. The basic facts of his story resembled Mac’s and Murray’s case as they had presented it in their statement. However, Garfinkel’s main characters were a feisty young woman named Alice and her companion, a “
slight,” light-skinned “young man” who said his name was Oliver Fleming.

Garfinkel’s story was well received, and it must have heightened misgivings about Murray’s desirability as a plaintiff among NAACP officials, who, like Murray, regularly read
Opportunity
. Given the similarities between the story and Murray’s case, NAACP leaders probably assumed that Alice was Adelene and Oliver was Pauli.

Murray dismissed the story as pure fiction, but she feared that it raised speculations about her sexuality. That it had the same title and theme as one of her
poems was a coincidence that added another layer to her aggravation. Written two years earlier, Murray’s “Color Trouble” spoke of acting defiant in the face of prejudice, as she and Mac had done in Petersburg.

Murray and Mac were so frustrated that they refused to pay their fine and went back to jail. This time prison authorities gave them clean bedding, disinfected the cell, and allowed them to keep most of their personal items. Their stay was short-lived. In a few days, officials at the
Workers Defense League paid their fines, and they were released.

· · ·

WHEN ELEANOR ROOSEVELT RECEIVED
the telegram from Mildred about the arrest, she immediately contacted Virginia’s governor,
James H. Price. The first lady’s message went straight to the point: “
Pauli Murray and traveling companion became ill on bus at
Petersburg, moved up one seat—now in jail—no funds.” After ER heard from the governor, she had Tommy contact Mildred. “
Mrs. Roosevelt asks me to write you and say that she had an investigation made after receiving your telegram about your sister,” Tommy wrote. “She asked the Governor of Virginia about it, which was all she could do, and he says that Miss Murray was unwise not to comply with the law. As long as these laws exist, it does no one much good to violate them.”

Murray certainly appreciated the first lady’s concern, but Governor Price’s response offended her. Murray doubted if he or ER had any idea about “
what it meant to be a Negro.” That one should obey
segregation because it was the law was an argument Murray could not accept.

Twenty-three-year-old death-row inmate Odell Waller was close in age to Pauli Murray’s brothers and cousins, circa 1941. “They are very dear to my heart,” she told Odell, and “I know how I would feel if they were in your shoes.”
(Department of Corrections, Commonwealth of Virginia)

9

“Where Were We to Turn for Help?”

I
n August 1940, Pauli Murray attended a meeting of the
Workers Defense League that would draw her into another battle with the Commonwealth of Virginia. She consented to serve on the administration committee out of appreciation for the moral and financial assistance the WDL had given her and Mac during the Petersburg bus ordeal.
One of the cases brought to the committee was that of Odell Waller, a twenty-three-year-old African American
sharecropper from Gretna, Virginia.

Waller had shot his landlord and employer,
Oscar Davis, a forty-six-
year-old white tenant farmer, on July 15,
1940, during an argument over the wheat crop they’d raised and owned together. Davis had reduced the tobacco crop he and
Waller planted by 95 percent, in accordance with the federal crop allotment
program authorized by the
Agricultural Adjustment Act, but Davis did not pay Waller his share of the subsidy, as government regulations stipulated. Waller and his family depended on the crops they grew on Davis’s land. To help out, Waller took a construction job in Maryland, leaving his foster mother, Annie; his wife, Mollie; and his cousin, Robert, to harvest the crops they shared with Davis. While Waller was away, Davis evicted Annie and Mollie from the shanty they occupied on his property and seized the entire wheat crop. When Waller returned, he went to demand his share of the wheat from Davis. They argued. There was a shooting. Two days later, Davis died in Lynchburg Memorial Hospital. Waller, who had fled to Ohio, awaited extradition.

Because there was no money for legal fees and the details of the case were sketchy, the committee set the matter aside until more information was available. Murray, a newcomer, listened to the discussion but said nothing. Three months later, word came that Waller had been sent back to Virginia, convicted of first-degree murder by an all-white
jury, and sentenced to die in the
electric chair on December 27. With barely a month and a half to raise $350 and file an appeal, the WDL decided to handle Waller’s case. The committee’s next decision was to send an emissary to
Richmond to raise funds, conduct a field investigation, and generate local support. This strategy seemed sound to Murray—until someone recommended that she go.

The
Petersburg bus incident was still fresh in Murray’s mind, and the notion of returning to Virginia horrified her. Furthermore, she felt ill-prepared for the job. She begged the group to send a veteran with more knowledge and experience—someone like
A. Philip Randolph, president of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly black
labor union. But all the senior members of the committee, including Randolph, had prior commitments. Murray, the only one free to go, could not refuse. If she did not do whatever she could and the Virginia authorities executed Waller, she would never forgive herself.

On November 6, the morning after
Franklin Roosevelt was reelected for an unprecedented third term, Murray set out for Richmond, taking her seat at the helm of a two-year campaign to save Waller’s life. That journey officially launched her career as a civil rights activist. To avoid the difficulties of her last trip to the commonwealth, Murray borrowed a friend’s car. Gene Phillips, a white woman and former relief worker
sympathetic to the case, volunteered to go with her. Together, they had a total of thirty-five dollars. Their car, a “
ramshackle 1931 convertible coupe,” had a temperamental motor, a tattered canvas top, and broken windshield wipers. The absence of a heater and the bone-chilling weather foretold the hostile reception they would face as an interracial team from the North.

Murray began her investigation in the office of
Thomas Hartley Stone,
Waller’s counsel. Stone’s account and court records told a story of two men—one black, the other white—who lost their land and were forced into subsistence farming. Oscar
Davis, a tenant farmer, was by virtue of his race marginally better off than Odell Waller. Davis eked out a living with the support of the crop subsidy program. Waller, a black sharecropper, had no control over the conditions of his employment.

Murray quickly found that the prosecution and the defense clashed on every fact in the case except that Odell Waller had shot Oscar Davis. First, there was conflicting testimony on the circumstances of the shooting. Witnesses for the prosecution testified that Waller threatened to kill Davis, that Waller shot Davis without provocation, and that Davis was unarmed. Waller, on the other hand, denied that he had threatened or meant to kill Davis. Waller said that when he went to claim his portion of the wheat, Davis cursed him, and they argued. When Davis reached toward his pocket as if he had a weapon, Waller fired his gun in self-defense—not in cold blood, as prosecution witnesses claimed.

Second, Davis and Waller had been at odds before the shooting. Davis had refused to pay Waller’s mother, Annie, for caring for his sick wife, and Annie had stopped working the tobacco crop. Davis retaliated, seizing all the wheat, evicting Annie and Mollie, and castrating the Wallers’ dog while Odell was out of the state. Davis’s actions were consistent with his reputation in the black community, where he was known as a man who regularly carried a gun, habitually mistreated blacks, and at times fought violently with his own sons. Local whites described Davis as a kind and honorable man.

Third, there was the questionable credibility of the prosecution’s only eyewitness,
Henry Davis. Henry, a seventeen-year-old black employee of Oscar Davis’s, said he saw Waller shoot Davis for no apparent reason. Henry would not talk to the defense until the trial. Yet he spoke to the prosecution several times, raising speculation that he had been coached.

Fourth, there was the inflammatory testimony of Oscar Davis’s
sons, Frank and Edgar. At the trial, they reported that their father’s last words were “
Odell shot me without any cause.” Neither son had recounted
Oscar’s dying statement when questioned at the preliminary hearing. Neither had seen the shooting. Nevertheless, the prosecution used their testimony to bolster the claim that Waller was a cold-blooded killer.

The fifth issue was Waller’s
constitutional right to a
jury of his peers. An all-white jury of men, all of whom had paid the state’s $1.50
poll tax for the last three years, had convicted Waller. In Virginia and seven other southern states, payment of this tax was a prerequisite for voting and eligibility for jury service. The poll tax effectively excluded approximately 90 percent of the adult blacks and whites from the pool of potential jurors in
Pittsylvania County, where Davis and Waller lived. Although
Stone filed a motion to quash the indictment on the grounds that the jury excluded people who had not paid the poll tax, he did not have the time or the resources to gather tangible proof of each juror’s or Waller’s poll-tax status before the trial. It was a critical flaw in the defense case.

Finally, there was the question of judicial temperament.
The sixty-six-year-old white presiding judge,
James Turner Clement, denied a
change-of-venue request, even though there was testimony that lynch mobs were forming in the vicinity. His dismissive attitude toward the defense, and his remark that “
a man charged with a criminal offense has no right to await the action of the Grand Jury,” made in the presence of jurors, seemed to suspend the presumption of innocence.

Murray’s interviews uncovered other issues that exacerbated Waller’s case.
His counsel’s background was an impediment. Thomas Stone had been hired to handle the preliminary hearing and trial by the
Revolutionary
Workers League, a Chicago-based group formerly affiliated with the
Communist Party USA. The RWL saw Waller’s case as an opportunity to earn favorable press by highlighting the injustice of the American judicial system, as the CPUSA had done with its support of the
Scottsboro case, in which nine black boys were falsely accused of gang-raping two white women. Stone’s ties to the RWL and his confrontational style caused blacks, liberals, socialists, and labor unionists to shy away from the campaign.