Assault at 50 Feet

Around Caswell County, N.C., Mack Ingram, 44, was known as a "good" Negro. He had raised nine children, saved enough to buy his own mule and tools, and even a ramshackle jalopy. He was proud that he rented his land instead of sharecropping.

One day last month Ingram stopped at the farm of Aubrey Boswell, a white neighbor. He wanted to borrow a trailer to haul his hay. Ingram saw one of the Boswell children walking toward the tobacco barn carrying a hoe. He walked across the road, he said, and through a field knee-high in corn, looking for Boswell. When he got closer and saw only "three boys," he turned back. He went on down the road and borrowed a trailer from someone else. Later that afternoon, two deputy sheriffs arrested him. One of the "boys," they said, was 17-year-old Willa Jean Boswell, dressed in dungarees and terrapin shell hat. Farmer Ingram was charged with "assault . . . with intent to commit rape" against her.

Last week in the county courthouse, Recorder (roughly comparable to justice of the peace) Ralph Vernon heard Willa Jean's story. "As I got off the road, he came up the highway and he kept watching me," said Willa Jean. "And I ran through those woods because I was afraid . . . and I kept going, walking fast, and he kept coming on, and I got a pretty good ways ahead of him and he stopped and stood and watched me." Then, said Willa Jean, "I looked back and didn't see him any more and I stopped there and was hoeing the ground, and as I was hoeing I asked my two brothers who that was and they told me, and I told them what happened and they went running to tell Daddy." Willa Jean said she burst into tears.

The defense had only one point to make: What did he do? Said Willa Jean: "He kept watching me." Just how close did Ingram get to her? Willa Jean wasn't sure; "within 25 to 50 feet," she thought.

Prosecutor W. Banks Horton argued that Ingram must have been trying to head her off, that young womanhood must be protected from "niggers." But Recorder Vernon, who is a farmer with no formal legal training, could plainly see that there was no ground for a charge of intended rape. If there were, the case would have to go before a superior court--and a jury. Instead, he found Ingram guilty of "assault on a female," and sentenced him to the maximum: two years of hard labor on the roads.

The verdict didn't even make the local papers. But outsiders got wind of it; Caswell County was deluged with inquiries, one even from the U.S. State Department. The Daily Worker seized on it. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, after first making sure that the Communists' legal beagles didn't get in on the case, decided to help Ingram in his appeal.

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