Mr. Smitherman Goes to Washington

In Washington, all bars and most restaurants close at midnight on Sunday. It was well after midnight on Sunday, April 4, when Joseph T. Smitherman, 35, the race-baiting mayor of Selma, Ala., and his home-town friend, Attorney Joe T. Pilcher Jr., 35, decided they were hungry and thirsty.

The mayor was in Washington for a television interview, the first time he had ever been north of North Carolina, and he was uncertain about where to go at that time of the night. He and Pilcher left their room in the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel, went out onto the street and soon ran into a Negro named James ("Race Horse") Edwards, a con man with a 14-page police record, much of it for the Murphy game.*

Waiting& Waiting. Race Horse quickly convinced the Selma pair that he knew of an after-hours spot suitable to their needs and took them in a taxi to the Anchor, a respectable-looking apartment building a mile away. In the building, Edwards told them, was "a club where Congressmen go," and he would need some cash for membership dues. Mayor Smitherman gave him some money, and Race Horse left the two Southerners after promising to return with the membership cards.

They waited and waited. Finally Smitherman and Pilcher decided that Race Horse probably did not intend to return. They also realized they were minus $107.

A few hours later Race Horse was arrested, after he bragged at a crap game that he had conned the mayor of Selma. He was charged with grand larceny by trick. Police contacted Smitherman and Pilcher, and they allowed as how they were missing some money.

"Gosh, No." Reporters heard of the episode, and at a police-station conference the pair gave their recollections. "We just wanted a drink of whisky," said Pilcher. Smitherman said he just wanted some food. The official police report said they had sought "some entertainment." When newsmen asked if the subject of women ever came up during their discussions with Race Horse, Pilcher said, "Not women, definitely not women. Women were never mentioned." The mayor gasped, "Gosh, no." Smitherman said he had given Race Horse $7--$3 for the membership, $2 for the cab, $2 for a tip--and that Edwards had picked Pilcher's pocket of the other $100.

Safely back in Selma, the mayor thought he saw some irony in the affair. In an interview printed in the Selma Times-Journal, he said: "Fate plays some strange tricks. All of Selma, in fact the entire nation, has been flimflammed by the so-called civil rights movement for more than ten weeks. Then I went to Washington to televise the real truth of the Selma story and we got taken by a glib-tongued Negro con man."

*"The Murphy game" is underworld argot for a slick maneuver in which a victim puts his cash in an envelope and gives it to the con man, who makes a fast sleight-of-hand switch and hands back an identical envelope stuffed with newspaper strips. It was named after an Irishman who was arrested many times for perpetrating such tricks.

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