Price of Progress

Black little Robert Barnes and big brown Woodrow Wilson Shropshire say they were sent to solitary confinement in a North Carolina chain-gang "dark house" last January because they warmed their feet at a roadside fire after a guard told them not to. The guard's story is that the two Negro convicts--Barnes received stolen goods; Shropshire had driven while drunk--were put in solitary because they refused to work. The Negroes say that they were manacled upright ten hours a day for nine days, that a little wood stove was lit each morning but soon went out, that at night they slept without fire, with only scraps of blankets for covers. The chain-gang bosses say the Negroes had plenty of heat, plenty of covers. The Negroes say their feet froze because it was wintry co!d. The chain-gang bosses say the Negroes stopped circulation in their feet when they padded their leg irons with rags and strings.

In March the two Negroes' feet were puffy, greyish-purplish clumps of gangrenous flesh and they both would now have been stone dead if a Raleigh surgeon had not amputated their four limbs halfway to the knees. In the Charlotte court house last week these stumps were Exhibits A, B, C and D in the State's case of criminal cruelty against Captain H. C. Little of the convict camp, three of his guards and Dr. C. S. McLaughlin, camp physician.

It was a lively trial. Defense counsel protested that since the State Legislature had voted the boys each a set of false legs along with lifetime sinecures in the State Highway Commission, the boys should have appeared in court on their new underpinnings instead of on short crutches (see cut). Shropshire explained that they had not learned to use the new legs yet. Barnes seldom said anything except: "I disremember." Prosecutor John Carpenter also livened things up by appearing every day in a gayer ensemble than the day before, while Judge Wilson ("Coot") Warlick maintained a running fire of admonition from the bench: "Keep your shirts on. . . . Somebody will pay."

Since North Carolina public opinion is thoroughly aroused against the Negroes' keepers and the whole reeking chain-gang system, consensus was that Robert Barnes's and Woodrow Wilson Shropshire's lost legs would be the price of a new and more merciful penological system in the State.

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