Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson

Joyner Chris Joyner

Description

The story of Clarence Henderson, a Black sharecropper convicted and sentenced to death three times for a murder he didn't commitThe Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn't commit, and the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England radical who was sent to the South by the Communist Party to recruit African Americans to the cause while offering them a chance at increased freedom. And it's the story of Thurgood Marshall's NAACP and their battle against not only entrenched racism but a Communist Party-despite facing nearly as much prejudice as those they were trying to help-intent on winning the hearts and minds of Black voters. The bitter battle between the two groups played out as the sides sparred over who would take the lead on Henderson's defense, a period in which he spent years in prison away from a daughter he had never seen. Through it all, The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is a portrait of a community, and a country, at a crossroads, trying to choose between the path it knows is right and the path of least resistance. The case pitted powerful forces-often those steering legal and journalistic institutions-attempting to use racism and Red-Scare tactics against a populace that by and large believed the case against Henderson was suspect at best. But ultimately, it's a hopeful story about how even when things look dark, some small measure of justice can be achieved against all the odds, and actual progress is possible. It's the rare book that is a timely read, yet still manages to shed an informative light on America's past and future, as well as its present.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique
• USA
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 11 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647003876
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2022 Chris Joyner
Cover 2022 Abrams
Photographs on endpapers, clockwise from top left :
The .38 Special police revolver the state claimed fired the shots that killed Buddy Stevens. (Photograph by the author)
Fulton County Crime Lab director Dr. Herman Jones (right) oversees the collection of tire track evidence at a crime scene prior to the Stevens murder. ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution )
Dan Duke, at the time a prosecutor for the Fulton County Solicitor s Office, angrily shakes a barbed Ku Klux Klan whip in the face of Governor Eugene Talmadge during a 1941 clemency hearing the governor held for Klan members convicted in the beating death of a man the prior year. ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution )
Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill was known as the conscience of the South for his moderate views on race, but he also was an ardent anti-Communist and used his daily column to harass Communists and their fellow travelers. ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution )
The historic Carroll County Courthouse in Carrollton, Georgia. The trials of Clarence Henderson were conducted in its massive courtroom. (Photograph by the author)
A prosecution exhibit used to compare the bullet extracted from Stevens s leg with test bullets fired from the .38 revolver. (Photograph by the author)
Communist Party organizer Homer B. Chase (left) with a deputy sheriff in Cartersville, Georgia. Chase was jailed in June 1949 when he refused to post a $5,000 peace bond for allegedly threatening a would-be Communist recruit. ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution )
Carl Buddy Stevens s grave marker in the city cemetery in Carrollton, Georgia. (Photograph by the author)
Sheriff B. B. Bunt Kilgore (right) in a photo taken soon after the murder of Buddy Stevens. The handling of investigation by state and local police became a sore issue in the case. ( Times-Georgian )
Carrollton Presbyterian Church, where Buddy Stevens picked up Nan Turner for a date on October 31, 1948. (Photograph by the author)
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934987
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5636-8
eISBN: 978-1-64700-387-6
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For my father
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter 1: Murder and Chaos
Chapter 2: Carrollton
Chapter 3: A Desperate Manhunt
Chapter 4: A Very Dark Negro
Chapter 5: The First Trial
Chapter 6: Let Me Go Home
Chapter 7: Subversive Elements
Chapter 8: The Commies Come to Town
Chapter 9: His Fight Is Our Fight
Chapter 10: The NAACP Takes Charge
Chapter 11: A New Trial Ordered
Chapter 12: Dan Duke
Chapter 13: The Second Trial
Chapter 14: Ballistics, Nan, and a Verdict
Chapter 15: New Evidence, New Trial
Chapter 16: The Third Trial
Chapter 17: Cornett v. Jones
Chapter 18: God and the NAACP
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index of Searchable Terms
PREFACE
The story of the death of Buddy Stevens and the trials of Clarence Henderson has been part of my life for almost my entire career as a journalist. In fact, this story got its hooks in me before I even knew I had a career.
In the fall of 1998, I had been working in newspapers for two years, starting as a general assignment reporter for the Times-Georgian , a small daily in Carrollton, a college town about sixty miles west of Atlanta, and working my way up to features editor. That I had risen so quickly should give an impression about the size of the paper rather than the size of my ambition. I had walked through the doors of the Times-Georgian in 1996 never having written a single newspaper article. My high school had no paper, and I never considered writing for either my undergraduate or graduate school papers. Interviewing for a vacant position in the cozy newsroom, I brought my master s thesis in history as my writing sample, a clueless move that elicited raised eyebrows and grins from the paper s editors.
Likely I would not have gotten the job were it not for the recommendation of a friend from my days at the University of West Georgia, a four-year state college that defines much of life in Carrollton. Fortunately, the editors thought enough of the recommendation (and my willingness to work for the near-poverty wage they offered) to offer me the job and later the promotion.
That happy circumstance was why I was in the position-acting on a tip from my father-to pull down the very first bound volume of the Carroll County Georgian , from 1948. Carefully turning the yellowed pages, I found the edition for Thursday, November 4, and the headline: One Suspect Held, No New Clues as Stevens Murderer Is Sought. My father, Van Joyner Jr., had attended what was then called West Georgia College in 1944 and knew Carl Buddy Stevens Jr. in passing. Buddy was a Carrollton boy, a townie about the same age as my father, and when he was gunned down on a dark, rainy night in 1948, word spread among my father s classmates. Dad remembered the murder, but not a lot else. By the time of the murder and the mad search for Buddy s killer, Dad had already served in the Navy, graduated from the University of Georgia, and was back in Atlanta, newly married to my mother. But the death was big news at the time, he recalled.
You should look into that, Dad advised. I don t think they ever figured out who killed him.
From the start, I was engrossed-first by the murder mystery, then by the dramatic legal battles that followed. I progressed from photocopying a few broadsheet pages to spending many memorable hours tracking the twists and turns of the Stevens case in the university library with microfilmed rolls of the Georgian and its competition, the Times-Free Press . I ve always been the talker in the newsroom-the reporter who would hang up the phone and turn to his colleague to say, Hey, you won t believe this! Fortunately, my friends at the Times-Georgian were patient and encouraging as I prattled on about my latest find. So was Stanley Parkman, the statesmanlike former publisher, who spent a few hours every week tucked away in a back office, working on his weekly column. Parkman sold the Times-Georgian and the other newspapers in his West Georgia chain years earlier to a Kentucky-based chain, but he stayed on as a columnist and publisher emeritus.
The more I dug into back issues of the Georgian and the Times-Free Press , the more I became convinced the story of Buddy Stevens s murder said something about post-World War II America. From race relations to fear of Communism to the ambition and paranoia of the postwar generation, it all played out in miniature in Carrollton. And Carrollton s version of the fractured postwar American psyche was just as high stakes as anywhere else-life and death in the case of Buddy and the man accused of killing him. And the deeper I got, the more I realized how strong the themes of the episode still echoed in the news of the day.
When I finally decided to seek out the court records associated with the case, I walked into the Carroll County Superior Court Clerk s office anticipating a struggle. Finding half-century-old county records is a scattershot proposition. Fires, burst pipes, and plain negligence can quickly turn a good story into a dead end.
I m looking for some court records, I recall telling the clerk behind the counter. Pretty old court records.
Which case? she asked.
It was a boy, shot to death in 1948, I said. Carl Stevens Jr. He went by Buddy.
Without moving from her station, the clerk reached below the counter and lifted a heavy wooden box. It was the old box that used to hold slips with potential jurors names on them. Before computers, a bailiff would draw names to decide who would be summoned for jury duty. The clerk reached inside the box, pulled out a sheaf of about seventy legal-sized pages, and slid them over.
Over the years, enough people asked for the records that they never got filed away. Some of those people, like me, claimed to be researching a book on the case, she told me. I was elated and immediately agreed to pay for copies of everything-an extravagance on my salary at the time.
It turned out that what I got was not a court transcript, but a legal brief prepared for the appeal of the verdict of the first trial. It read like a transcript might if you omitted the lawyers questions and instead rewrote them into the answers of witnesses. Even so, it gave a vivid picture of the trial and the personalities involved. I faithfully took the pages and assembled them and my newspaper research into binders, organized by date and subject matter. I had binders for the murder and manhunt, the trials, communism, race relations, and the various lawyers, officials, politicians, and scoundrels who I believed were central to the story. Once I had the information meticulously organized, I put them on a shelf. And later into a box, moving them from apartment to apartment to rental house to purchased home. The binders traveled hundreds of miles, across the Southeast, as I pursued a newspaper career.
Yet no matter where I was, the story followed me. Over drinks with reporters in a favorite bar, invariably I would bring up the book. One day I would write it, I said. But it wasn t until my career brought me back to home to work at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the day finally arrived. I think it was probably when I listened to the first season