The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (17 page)

The defense seized upon the fact that the story told at the hearing by Henry Davis, the black farmworker who lived in the house with Oscar Davis’s family, bore little resemblance to the testimony he gave at the original trial. What Henry now claimed was that Oscar Davis had agreed without argument to give Waller his
wheat sometime later, and that when Oscar turned his back to go into his house for breakfast, Odell shot him. After the first two shots, Henry said, he ran to the back of the house, entered the kitchen, and walked through the front door just as Odell stepped over Oscar and shot him twice more in the back. That hospital records indicated that Oscar had been shot in the right arm and near the right side of the head, instead of the left arm and the left side of the head as Henry testified, made his story even more incredible.

Late the next day, Darden released a statement to the press. His conclusion was that Oscar Davis had been unarmed and that Odell Waller shot him without cause or provocation. Dismissing the charge that the poll tax and the background of the jury created a bias against the defense, the governor declared that Waller had “
a fair and impartial trial, by an impartial jury” and his conviction rested on “evidence adduced by members of his own race, which upon its face bears the impress of truth.”

Although Darden insisted that the volume of mail and media attention had no impact on his decision, he contended that the Waller campaign had distorted the facts and hoodwinked the public.
Murray would always believe that pressure from powerful constituents, angered by the unflattering spotlight on the state, made it difficult for the governor to hear Waller’s appeal without prejudice.

· · ·

AFTER DARDEN
’
S DECISION
,
Randolph asked Murray to organize a delegation to go to the White House to persuade President Roosevelt to establish a commission of inquiry. In addition to Randolph,
Bethune,
and Murray, the group and the organizations they represented included Frank
Crosswaith, Harlem Labor Center, New York City Housing Authority;
Albert Hamilton, Workers Defense League;
Anna Arnold Hedgeman, New York Area Office of Civil Defense; Reverend
William Lloyd Imes, St. James Presbyterian Church;
Layle Lane, American Federation of Teachers;
Ralph Matthews, the
Afro-American;
Ted Poston, Negro News Desk, Office of War Information;
Leon Ransom, Howard University School of Law;
Frank D. Reeves,
NAACP Washington Bureau; and Channing
Tobias, National Council, YMCA. Murray, the youngest member of the delegation, represented the
NAACP Student Conference, for which she served as chair.

Unable to see the president, whose whereabouts were privileged information during
wartime, the group went first to the
Justice Department, then to the office of the vice president. No cabinet-level official would grant them a respectable audience. Murray was particularly offended by an aide in the office of one influential senator who “
displayed contempt for the delegation by picking up Mrs. Bethune’s cane (she suffered from arthritis) and twirling it like a drum major’s baton as he talked.”
Once the rumor spread that the group was planning to picket the White House,
Elmer Davis, the director of the War Information Office, met with them and warned that picketing the Executive Mansion would undermine the war effort.

After hours of futile pursuit, the delegation turned to ER.
She, too, had been trying to reach the president by telephone, and her requests to speak with him became more insistent as the hour of Waller’s execution drew close. FDR’s personal adviser
Harry Hopkins had the unenviable task of informing the first lady that the president was unavailable. Caught in the crossfire between FDR and ER, Hopkins observed that her persistence so provoked her husband that he finally took the phone.

The president, having avoided his wife’s calls all day, told her he would not “
interfere again,” and he “urged very strongly that she say nothing about it.” As a matter of fact, he “
thought the Governor was acting entirely within his
constitutional rights and, in addition to that, doubted very much if the merits of the case warranted the Governor’s reaching any other decision.”

At ten that night, ER called Randolph, who was waiting with the delegation at NAACP headquarters. Murray was among those listening on one of “
the five telephone extensions in the office” when the first lady said, her voice trembling, “
Mr. Randolph, I have done everything I can possibly do. I have interrupted the President twice. He is in an important
conference with Mr. Hopkins and will be displeased with me if I interrupt him again. He has said that this is a matter of law and not of the heart. It is in Governor Darden’s jurisdiction and the President has no legal power to intervene. I am sorry,
Mr. Randolph, I can’t do any more.”

The finality of Franklin Roosevelt’s decision stung the delegation. Some delegates burst into tears.
Albert Hamilton, the only white member, “
went to the washroom and vomited.” Murray and a few members kept trying to reach Darden, but to no avail.

Layle Lane, vice president of the American Federation of Teachers (left, holding hat), and Morris Milgram, national secretary, Workers Defense League (right, holding document) at Odell Waller’s funeral, Gretna, Virginia, July 5, 1942. The Waller case would inspire Milgram to pioneer the development of private, integrated housing with support from Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, and other liberal activists.
(Workers Defense League Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

13

“The President Has Let the Negro Down”

O
dell Waller had been on death row for 630 days
by the time the
Chicago Defender
reported that he was “
alternating between periods of violent rage and moody glaring at black, impersonal walls.” Prison authorities erected a “
screen wire” to contain the objects he threw from his cell. By the time Governor
Darden’s commutation hearing was over and
Annie Waller came to see her son for the last time, Odell had spent himself and was at peace. He told her “
he didn’t mind going.” When she burst into tears, he said, “
Mama, don’t cry.… I know you have done everything you could for me.”

Odell thanked, hugged, and kissed his mother twice, before he
“said
goodbye.” Then he sat down with pencil and paper to write his story, as Pauli Murray had suggested.

…This is Odell Waller speaking. I accidentally fell and some good people tried to help me. Others did everything they could against me so the Governor and the courts don’t know the true facts. First I will say don’t work for a man too poor to pay you. He will steal and take from you. In my case I worked hard from sun up until sun down trying to make a living for my family and it ended up to mean death for me.… I wasn’t thinking of shooting Mr. Davis.… Davis flew hot and began to curse about the wheat. Naturally I got angry.… Davis thrust his hand in his pocket…to draw a gun. If he didn’t have one he was bluffing, he frightened me. I pulled a gun and begin shooting not intending to kill him. I was frightened.…

When Waller finished his ten-page narrative, he gave it to his attorney and asked him to release it to the press.
At 8:35 a.m. on July 2, 1942, nearly twenty-one months after his conviction, Odell Waller calmly walked to the
electric chair without assistance.
He was the 156th black man put to death in Virginia. Only twenty-three white men had been electrocuted.

· · ·

MURRAY WAS HAUNTED
by visions of Waller’s death-row cell and the execution chamber. She did not sleep the night before or for several days after his death. She vented her anguish in the extended essay
“
He Has Not Died in Vain” and a stanza of
“Dark Testament,” her most ambitious
poem:

Put it all down in a time capsule
,

Bury it deep in the soil of Virginia
,

Bury slave-song with the Constitution
,

Bury it in that vineyard of planters

And poll-taxes, sharecroppers and presidents
.

For the same red earth is fed

By the white bones of Tom Jefferson

And the white bones of Odell Waller
.

In coffin and outhouse all men are equal
.

Murray also sent a missive to the person who had been a beacon throughout the campaign. “
With all the heartache of those who were convinced from the start Odell Waller was no murderer, I send you his
dying statement,” she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt. “Your compassion during those two trying hours on Wednesday night and the magnificent effort you put forth in behalf of our delegation made us know you were bearing our burden with us and softened the steel which entered our souls. All the members of the delegation feel the same way. You are a splendid American.”

On Sunday, July 5, twenty-five hundred mourners came “
by foot, car, mule cart and truck” to
Fairview Baptist Church, where Odell was a member. Two hundred crammed inside the old white building. The remainder stood outside in the blistering heat. “
Simple flowers from the gardens of friends decorated” the open casket. “
Thank God for
Odell Waller,” said Reverend
J. R. Redd of Danville. “He died for the thing we’re supposed to be fighting for…
democracy.” Odell’s minister, Reverend Robert
Gilbert, said it was fitting that the campaign to save Waller’s life had drawn people together. The discrimination he suffered meant “
we’re all in the death row.”

The only white person Waller’s family allowed to participate in the service was
Morris Milgram. Milgram was a socialist and the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He had grown up in New York City, fighting for labor and minority rights. No WDL staffer, except Murray, was closer to the Waller family than Milgram, who’d ridden to Virginia on a train in the dirty, un-air-conditioned
Jim Crow section with the African American activist
Layle Lane. When it was Milgram’s turn to speak, no words came.
He wept silently for several minutes before he finally spoke of how the campaign had “awakened” the nation to the problems of poor sharecroppers. He also “
stressed the importance” of
Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance.

After the service, Waller’s casket was taken outside, so those standing in the churchyard could view his body. He was laid to rest in the “
red earth of the little cemetery” near his church and the graves of other family members.

· · ·

OVERWHELMED WITH GRIEF
, Murray did not attend the funeral in Virginia.
She, Randolph, and
Finerty went to a memorial service at
St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem. Murray welled up as she read sections of Waller’s statement. His observations, despite the poor grammar, rang true: “
You take big people as the president, governors, judges, their children will never have to suffer. They has plenty money. Born in a mansion nothing to never worry about, I am glad some people are that
lucky. The penitentiary all over the United States are full of people who was poor tried to work and have something.”

Two weeks after
Waller’s execution, white mobs
lynched two twenty-five-year-old black men:
Jessie Smith, an army private, in Flagstaff, Arizona, and
Willie Vinson, a dishwasher, in Texarkana, Texas.
In Rome, Georgia, the police beat and jailed the internationally renowned black concert singer
Roland
Hayes and his wife, Helen.
Randolph, convinced there was a connection between these racially motivated assaults and the Waller case, asked
Murray to draft an open letter to President Roosevelt. That letter, Waller’s final testament, and stories about the case appeared in African American newspapers across the country.

Although several members of the delegation that
went to Washington, D.C., signed the July 16 letter, its sentiment and argument were quintessentially Murray’s.
“Waller’s
death,” she wrote, “is a ‘stab in the back’ to a group of people who are asked to defend their country, but which the leaders of the country apparently do not intend to defend. By his failure to put the White House on record publicly in this case, the President has let the Negro down. In failing us the cause of Hitlerism at home has been aided.”

Murray was inconsolable. Her anger at FDR ran deep. “
You know as well as we do that Waller was doomed from the start,” she asserted. “You know that he was the victim of a vicious economic and political system perpetuated by the
poll tax and racial oppression.… You know that an impoverished and underprivileged Negro in Southern courts is handicapped in the matter of obtaining competent counsel who will raise and prove the complex technical questions in a manner required by our astute
Supreme Court.” Of the president’s refusal to call for a commission of inquiry, she said, “We
view your silence as a tacit political alliance with Southern reactionaries which may maintain the
Democratic Party, but does not help democracy.”