Textile Trial

On the bench of the Gaston County (N. C.) Superior Court last week sat a tall, clean-cut, smooth-faced man of 41. He was Judge Morris Victor Barnhill, the State's youngest judge, sent into the county by Governor Oliver Max Gardner to try an extraordinary case. Before him were 13 men, three women. Laughing, smiling, they looked more like college boys and girls than the Communistic strike leaders they were. They were charged with murder and conspiracy.

Nearby stood a man with iron-grey hair and a flower in his buttonhole, Solicitor John G. Carpenter, whose legal duty was to send as many of the defendants as possible to the electric chair. Outside the railing sat some 200 spectators, mostly mill workers in their shirt sleeves, women with babes-in-arms, students from the University of North Carolina. The thermometer stood at 90DEG. Informal was court procedure. Said Judge Barnhill: "We're not much on ceremony in North Carolina but we do manage to get dignity."

By many the case before Judge Barnhill was compared in importance to that of Sacco & Vanzetti. The details were different but in each was the same underlying clash of political, social and economic beliefs.

The trial grew out of a prolonged strike, led by Communist organizations, in textile mills about Gastonia (TIME, June 17). Long had bad blood brewed between strikers and police. Strikers, ejected from company homes, pitched a tent colony on the outskirts of town. On the night of June 7 Chief of Police Orville F. Aderholt had gone to this colony where a disturbance threatened. In the dark a fight started. Chief Aderholt was killed, three other peace officers wounded. Fifty persons were arrested. The 16 defendants before Judge Barnhill were those charged with the murder.

For weeks through Gastonia, dominated by large cotton mill interests, had swirled passion and prejudice against the strikers. So bitter was this feeling that defense counsel asked Judge Barnhill to move the case elsewhere. As a sample of local sentiment, they offered an editorial in a Gastonia paper: "The blood of our beloved chief cries out to high heaven for vengeance. The shooting was part of a deep-laid scheme of Russian Anarchists. Gaston County has already been too lenient with these despicable curs and snakes from the dives of Passaic, Hoboken and New York."

Remarked the nearby Greensboro News : "Gaston County is desperately near the mood to try a dozen or more malcontents for murder and condemn them for what they think of God, marriage and the nigger."

Defense counsel, arguing for a change, complained that they had been abused on the streets of Gastonia, that defense witnesses had been threatened with violence if by their testimony they attempted to aid these "Godless Communists and Russian interlopers."

Solicitor Carpenter for the State attempted to show that a fair trial could be had in Gastonia.

What should Judge Barnhill decide? If ever a judge had cause to let his personal feelings influence his decision, it was Judge Barnhill at that moment, for he had just been handed a cartoon from the New York Daily Worker, Communist sheet, depicting him as a fat ogre dripping gore. Judicious, big-minded, he smiled tolerantly at this libel on his integrity by friends of the defense--and 20 minutes later granted the defense's request for a change of venue. Fortunate were the defendants that somebody was not punished for contempt of court. The case was moved to Charlotte in Mecklenburg County where before Judge Barnhill it will be called Aug. 26. The defendants breathed easier while their lawyers joined hands, danced about, shouted: "We have won the first encounter and the enemy is ours !"