Thurgood Marshall (21 page)

Initially two white men were arrested and confessed to the murders. But when it was learned that both men were inmates who had been allowed to leave the nearby state prison for unsupervised visits to bars and whorehouses, newspapers began to criticize the governor and prison warden.

To quiet the public outcry, Governor Leon Chase Phillips sent an aide, Vernon Cheatwood, to Hugo with orders to clean up the mess. Cheatwood was a big, threatening man with stubby fingers and a vicious, sneering smile that showed bad teeth. He carried a gun and brass knuckles under his coat. When he got to town he ordered the release of the two white prisoners even though they had confessed. Cheatwood let them go on the promise they would leave the state and he even arranged to get them into Texas. The governor’s office then announced that a search would begin for the real culprit.

A few days later Cheatwood and local police arrested W. D. Lyons. The black sharecropper admitted he had been hunting rabbits near the slain couple’s farmhouse but denied that he had anything to do with the murders. The police and the governor’s aide called Lyons a liar. Over two days the governor’s man beat him repeatedly with a small hardwood nightstick. The handle was wrapped with leather for a tight-fisted grip. Cheatwood told the locals he had made it himself and called it his “niggerbeater.”

When they were not beating Lyons, they denied him sleep and food. All the while they demanded that he confess to the crime. Lyons still maintained that he did not do it. Cheatwood and Hugo police then devised a new plan. Well after midnight, with Lyons babbling and disoriented, Cheatwood walked into the cell. A cringing Lyons expected to be beaten again, but Cheatwood had other plans. He pulled out a large, stinking black pan filled with the charred bones of the murder victims and threw them in Lyons’s lap. “There’s the bones of the baby you burned up,” he barked.
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Still suffering from his beating, frightened of another attack, and superstitious about human bones, Lyons cracked. He tried to crawl away, but Cheatwood held him, pushing his face toward the pan of bones. Lyons desperately begged Cheatwood to stop. Only a confession would end his misery. A few minutes later Lyons gave police the confession they wanted.

But the police were not satisfied and took Lyons to the nearby state penitentiary, where they showed him the electric chair and got him to sign a second confession, in which he swore he had not been beaten and admitted to killing the Rogers family.

The
Black Dispatch
editor, Dunjee, son of a slave, was incensed by the crooked politics and the governor’s calculated appeal to racism. His little paper, some weeks only six or eight pages, played the story in big, angry headlines. And out of his own pocket Dunjee immediately hired a white lawyer from the Oklahoma ACLU, Stanley Beldon, to represent Lyons.

When Beldon reached Hugo a few days later, several of the town’s leading white residents pulled him aside in a restaurant to say they did not believe Lyons had committed the crime. The biggest surprise came when another group of whites told him that the murdered woman’s father was sure Lyons was innocent and was willing to testify. But the white community’s attitude did not make much difference.

After the police announced that Lyons had confessed to the crime, they kept him in jail as the county attorney and the sheriff stalled the trial until after local elections to prevent the scandal from hurting their chances for reelection. Beldon could not break through the stalling tactic, and Lyons was left in jail as outrage over the case grew cold.

Fed up with Beldon’s inability to force a trial, Dunjee, also a member of the NAACP’s national board, wrote to Walter White. He wanted Marshall to come to Oklahoma and wave the NAACP’s name around to make the
Lyons
case a national issue. White and Marshall agreed the case was good material, both to create a cause for the NAACP and to take a stand against forced confession, a tactic often used against black suspects.

Now the pressure was on Marshall. Not only did he have to pay attention to the case but he had to stir up publicity, raise money, and, far from home, maneuver through state politics with the governor wishing him the worst.

Marshall spent three days riding a train to Oklahoma City, then got on a bus for the six-hour trip to Hugo, arriving Sunday, January 26, 1941. As soon as he arrived, a group of black men pushed him into the backseat of a car and quickly hid him away in the small black community. They feared that someone might kill him, so they moved him from place to place every few hours and always had armed guards watching outside. Although white people in Hugo were supportive, the black community did
not know what the governor might do to keep his cover-up in place, including having an accident take Marshall out of the picture.

Marshall did not have much time to investigate the case or to worry about threats to his life. Just before his arrival it was announced that the trial was set to start in a few days. The morning after he arrived, the trial began. The courthouse, with its segregated seating, was “jammed,” with “at least a thousand white and Negro people.” Marshall wrote to Walter White: “Jury is lousy. State investigator and county prosecutor busy around town stirring up prejudice, etc. No chance of winning here. Will keep record straight for appeal.”
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He was convinced the governor had the judge in his pocket and had fixed the trial.

By the second day in court the judge, J. R. Childers, who smoked a large cigar while sitting on the bench, announced to the crowd in his courtroom that it was “a gala day” for the town of Hugo. He was more interested in the large crowd and newspaper reporters than in the case. Marshall felt lost in a political show trial, where his powers of argument and knowledge of the law counted for nothing. The judge’s behavior struck him as bizarre, and Marshall wrote him off as a small-time clown in the governor’s parade. “Can you imagine a Negro on trial for his life being considered a gala day?” Marshall wrote to White.

But the judge was right to say that people in Hugo were entertained by the trial. The crowd around the courthouse grew as the trial continued. Marshall later explained in letters back home that he became the star attraction as “word went around that a nigger lawyer from New York was on the case—first time they have seen such an animal.” Students from local white schools were even allowed to miss class to watch the trial.
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Marshall and Beldon sat with Lyons, who stuttered with nervousness the few times they got him to say anything. Marshall’s first move in court was to let the judge know that the NAACP had recently won a ruling from the Supreme Court
(Canty v. Alabama
in March 1940) that outlawed forced confessions. In that case, which had been tried by Charles Houston with Marshall’s help, the conviction of a black man accused of murder in Alabama had been overturned when the high court ruled that he was beaten and forced to confess.

Norman Horton, the county prosecutor, then called Lyons to take the stand. The trembling defendant testified that Horton had witnessed the police beating him. Horton, however, denied seeing the brutal whipping. But the usually silent Lyons stiffened. Looking Horton in the eye,
he said: “Oh, yes, you were there.” Horton’s face went white, and pointing a finger he said to Lyons, “Why, I stopped them from whipping you.” The courtroom audience, completely caught up in the drama, erupted in loud shouting as the judge banged his gavel, trying to restore order.
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Once the roar subsided, Marshall had the court take note that Horton had conceded Lyons was beaten by the police. Next Marshall questioned Vernon Cheatwood and got him to admit that he threw the murder victims’ bones on Lyons. “Did you put a pan of bones in his lap?” Marshall asked. “Yes,” said Cheatwood coolly. “I thought it would refresh his mind.”
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Marshall began to pepper the governor’s man with questions about a wooden and leather weapon, dubbed his “niggerbeater,” to get a confession. Cheatwood, becoming flustered, denied he had such a weapon, but Marshall called a white hotel clerk to the stand who testified that Cheatwood had bragged about how he had used it to beat Lyons for six or seven hours. As the trial unfolded the sympathy for Lyons among local whites grew stronger. White residents secretly helped Marshall find a picture, taken by the police, of Cheatwood and a Hugo policeman standing next to a bloody and beaten Lyons. “Many white people stopped us in the halls and on the streets to tell us they enjoyed the way the case was going and they didn’t believe Lyons was guilty,” Marshall later wrote to White. “Ninety percent of the white people by this time were with Lyons.”
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Cheatwood and the white policemen were not quite so pleased, however. “[Police] became angry at the idea of a Negro pushing them into tight corners and making their lies so obvious,” Marshall wrote to White. “Boy, did I like that and did the Negroes in the courtroom like that.”
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In fact, the
Black Dispatch
reported that after Marshall finished questioning Cheatwood about his “niggerbeater,” Cheatwood left the stand “shaking as though suffering from palsy.”
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After the police admitted to beating Lyons, Judge Childers threw out the first confession. But he did allow the second confession. The only additional evidence the prosecutors had against Lyons was that he admitted to having been hunting rabbits near the murdered family’s home. Glen Rogers, the son of the murdered couple, testified that while hiding he had not seen the assailant’s face. All he caught sight of was a “black hand.”
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The case went to an all-white, all-male jury after five days of testimony. With only five and a half hours of deliberation, the jury found
Lyons guilty. To everyone’s surprise, however, instead of the death penalty they sentenced him to life in prison.

Marshall sent a letter to Walter White summing up the trial in which he said: “You know that life for such a crime as that—three people killed, shot with a shotgun and cut up with an axe and then burned—shows clearly that the jury believed him innocent. I think we are in perfect position to appeal.” Marshall also urged White to use the Lyons case to benefit the NAACP. “We have been needing a good criminal case and we have it.” He added, “The beatings plus the use of the bones of dead people will raise money.”
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The NAACP got an unexpected publicity bonanza from the
Lyons
case when E. O. Colclasure, the father of the murdered woman, went public with his belief that Lyons was framed. The white man even joined the NAACP.

Part of the NAACP publicity drive about the Lyons trial included an educational pamphlet. In it Marshall wrote that police in the South regularly arrested blacks “without warrants, [held] them incommunicado without formal charges or bail, beat ‘confessions’ out of them.”
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The case made the front pages of black newspapers nationwide as startling proof of the corruption of the white legal system. Marshall and Lyons were pictured side by side in
The Crisis
, with Marshall portrayed as the hero who had saved Lyons from the death penalty. A year later, in 1942, when Marshall came back to Oklahoma to handle the appeal, he was hailed by Dunjee and the black community as a savior. Dunjee told Marshall he expected that the appeal might be successful because the state judges in Oklahoma City were better trained and not under the governor’s thumb. But despite Dunjee’s high hopes, the appeals court also ruled that Lyons’s second confession was valid.

Marshall was now convinced there was a political cover-up that spread from Hugo to Oklahoma City. An assistant attorney general for the state who befriended Marshall told him there was no way Lyons was going to get out, because “an awful big political power was against letting him out.” Lyons, meanwhile, remained in jail until the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a heartbreaking setback for Marshall, the nation’s high court sustained the Oklahoma verdict in 1944, concluding Lyons was properly convicted on a valid confession.

Marshall could not believe he had lost. His ego and reputation as the lawyer who worked miracles were deeply invested in the case. More important,
he believed that only political pressure from the governor’s office had prevented him from winning the case before the appeals court. He was upset, confused, and deeply hurt by the 6-3 defeat at the high court. It was his first loss in a Supreme Court case. In a rare show of public anger against any court, Marshall told reporters that the high court’s ruling gave police a license to beat a confession out of a prisoner and “then procure another before the effects of the coercion can fairly be said to have completely worn off.”
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While Marshall was working on the
Lyons
case, Walter White asked him to handle another sensational criminal case, this time in Connecticut. These cases caught the attention of the papers and stirred rapid increases in black and white membership in the association. And Marshall liked them—they provided a welcome relief from the complex theoretical arguments on how to break down the laws of segregation. There was nothing abstract or dry about murder, brutal police, or, in the Connecticut case, an interracial sexual relationship that went wildly out of control.

The case involved a white Connecticut heiress who charged that her black butler had raped her. The trial began in Greenwich in January 1941. Eleanor Strubing, age thirty-one, a former fashion model, claimed that Joseph Spell, her live-in butler and chauffeur, kidnapped her, raped her four times, and then threw her off a reservoir bridge.

At the trial, Spell said he had not raped Strubing but was caught up in a one-night stand that went bad. Spell testified that he knocked on Strubing’s bedroom door one day to ask if he could borrow money. She told him to come in, and he found her dressed only in a skimpy, silky robe.

Spell, represented by Marshall and a Connecticut attorney, Samuel Friedman, told the court that he was excited by the sight of Strubing in her bedclothes and propositioned her: “I told her that I would like to be with her.” He said she agreed if he promised to keep their dalliance a secret. But she was afraid of being discovered in the bedroom. Spell suggested that they go down to the garage and have sex in the car. In his deposition Spell said: “Just as I got the head of my penis in her she said that she was still afraid that something might happen. We stopped and I had a discharge in my pocket handkerchief. I suggested we go for a drive. She said that would be all right.”
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