I never heard of Jeffrey Lord before yesterday, but he’s a badly confused individual with appallingly poor judgment and taste. It all started for Lord when he decided that Shirley Sherrod lied when she said a relative of hers had been lynched in the 1940s. In fact, said Lord, he wasn’t lynched because no noose was used. Instead, her relative was beaten to death with a blackjack and three policemen’s fists, which they used on him for a full fifteen minutes.
Angus Johnson has a great write-up of the crime and the civil rights case it aroused that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Here he describes the death of Bobby Hall.
Robert Hall was arrested at his home late one night on charges that he had stolen a tire. (There are indications that the warrant against him was flawed, or even concocted after the fact.) A sheriff and two deputies handcuffed him and took him into town in a patrol car.
When the group arrived at the courthouse square, Hall was removed from the vehicle. The officers would later claim that he tried to escape or that he grabbed a gun. These claims are disputed. What is not disputed is that after Hall had been knocked to the ground and incapacitated, the three continued to beat him with their fists and a blackjack for at least fifteen minutes, perhaps half an hour, continuing well after he had been rendered unconscious. When they tired of assaulting him, they dragged him by his feet to the jail. At some point they called an ambulance. Robert Hall was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly after his arrival.
This was Georgia in the 1940s. The three murderers were white police officers. Hall was a black man. No indictments were filed. No grand jury was convened. There is no evidence that any state prosecutor so much as contemplated bringing charges against the three.
And so the feds stepped in.
Murder is not, in most cases, a federal crime, and anti-lynching legislation had by that time been hopelessly stalled in Congress for decades. But a Reconstruction-era civil rights law — Section 20 of the US criminal code — made it a crime for anyone acting “under color of any law” to deprive any inhabitant of the United States “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
This law carried a maximum jail sentence of just one year. It had been on the books for more than eighty years, but had been rarely applied. Prosecutors now argued, though, that in murdering Robert Hall, Sheriff Claude Screws and his two confederates had deprived Hall of the right to a fair trial for the crime he was alleged to have committed. They indicted the three in federal court, and won convictions.
Lord didn’t limit himself to calling Shirley Sherrod a liar, he also accused the Democrats of being unreconstructed racists who merely traded their hate of the black man for hate of the white man. One of his more original arguments in favor of this fantasy is that the Supreme Court threw out the convictions of these three Georgian police officers and that (FDR-appointee) Hugo Black swung the majority in the case. This argument wouldn’t make sense even if it were true, but it’s not. As Johnson explains, there were only three Justices (Owen Roberts, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson) who ruled that the Section 20 rule used to bring the federal prosecutions was unconstitutional. The reason the policemen’s convictions were vacated was on a technical issue.
The jury, they found, should have been instructed on the law’s requirement that the defendants’ deprivation of Hall’s rights had been “willful,” and it had not been. They believed, they made it clear, that Screws and his co-defendants were guilty of a “shocking and revolting” crime, a crime for which the federal government had every right to prosecute them, but that prosecution had been mishandled, and they were entitled to a new trial.
It was this finding that split 5-4 in favor of the racist cops, but the principle that the Feds could bring civil rights cases against unpunished murderers in the Jim Crow South was established and used successfully the next year. It should be remembered that everyone in this story, with the possible exception of the victim, were Democrats. The whole state of Georgia was controlled by Democrats who refused to prosecute the Democratic sheriff and his Democratic deputies. It was FDR’s Democratic Department of Justice that brought the civil rights case. And the case was heard in 1945, by a Court dominated (7-2) by FDR appointees. Of the three Justices who thought the Federal Government was powerless to punish lynchings, two were appointed by Roosevelt.
The case was reheard and the three cops were acquitted. Go figure.
The truth is that, at the time, the Democratic Party was very divided on racial issues. But the Democratic Party was also very large. It had room in it for both the most vicious racists imaginable and the bigger half of the Jim Crow-abolitionist movement. It’s not important what the Democratic Party was in 1945. What’s important is what the Democratic Party became over the next twenty years. Finally, it’s important what the Republican Party became over the next forty-five years after that. They are now a party that can only grudgingly condemn Lord’s view that it ain’t lynching if they beat you to death.
