Turn in a Dark Road

It had become axiomatic that Southern white men do not convict other Southern white men for racist murders. To fanatic white supremacists, the growing list of acquittals and mistrials signaled open season; they went on the hunt with bullets and dynamite. In at least 34 killings since 1960, only one such murderer was punished. Last week in Alabama, all-white juries convicted four white defendants in two notorious cases in which a stranger in a car had been killed on a dark, lonely road.

The more surprising of the verdicts--and the more hopeful for the survival of the local jury system--came in Anniston. After nine hours of deliberation, the jurors found Hubert Damon Strange, 23, guilty of second-degree murder and gave him a ten-year prison sentence. Two alleged accomplices, Johnny Ira DeFries, 25, and Lewis Blevins, 26, are still to be tried. The case was prosecuted by local authorities, with some help from the FBI.

One Mistake. Strange, a gas-station attendant with an arrest record for assault and weapons offenses, was accused of being the trigger man in the July 15 murder of Willie Brewster, 38, a Negro. Brewster belonged to no civil rights organizations, walked no picket lines, enjoyed a reputation as a hardworking family man who wasn't even "uppity." His mistake was to be caught driving home from work with three friends an hour after the Anniston courthouse had been the scene of a hate rally by the National States Rights Party. Party leaders had openly preached violence "to get the nigger out of the white man's streets." The shotgun blast that killed Brewster came, of course, from behind.

Nonetheless, Calhoun County Solicitor Clarence Williams had no open-and-shut case for the prosecution. He had no eyewitness. He had no murder weapon in court. His case rested primarily on the testimony of Jimmie Glenn Knight, 28, a smalltime hoodlum who by his own admission had turned in his buddies to collect a reward of $20,000 raised by Calhoun County citizens and $1,000 contributed by Governor George Wallace. A month had passed before Knight, in jail on burglary and grand larceny charges, decided to testify for the prosecution.

"Got Us a Nigger." Knight swore in court that Strange, DeFries and Blevins drove from the shooting to the home of Strange's brother-in-law, William Rozier. "They said, 'We got us a nigger.' " Then, said Knight, he drove Blevins and Strange back to the spot on Route 202 where Willie Brewster still lay. "Blevins said, 'Damon put a punkin ball [a large deer shot] into them niggers.' I said, 'How many did he get?' Damon Strange said, 'I got at least one, I'm pretty sure, because the car was swerving off the road.' "

Defense Attorney J. B. Stoner, a longtime vendor of racial and religious hate who had been a leading tub-thumper in the July 15 rally, produced witnesses who called Knight a liar and swore that Strange had spent a peaceful evening drinking beer at the Rozier house. Prosecutor Williams was quietly eloquent in his summation, "We need men," he told the jury, "who are not afraid to stand up and say, based on the testimony, we believe this man is guilty and are not afraid to say so." The jurors started off eight-to-four for acquittal on a first-degree murder charge, but after seven hours reported that they were deadlocked. Judge Robert M. Parker, 35, trying his first murder case, sent them back. Said he: "Twelve men have got to decide this case some time." Two hours later, they brought in their second-degree verdict.

Klansmen's Case. Next morning in Montgomery, Federal District Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. had virtually the same words for another deadlocked jury. "Some time this case must be decided," he said. "Another jury would be chosen in the same manner and from the same type of people as you twelve men. There is no reason to assume that another twelve men would be more competent to decide than you are."

Whereupon the jury, which had already pondered the case for 24 hours, retired for three more hours and found three white Alabama Klansmen guilty of federal conspiracy charges in the death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, the white mother of five from Detroit, who was shot to death after the Selma-Montgomery civil rights march last spring.

Significant Difference. The prosecution's case was much stronger than in the Anniston trial. It was the already-familiar story told in damning detail by Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant planted in the Ku Klux Klan, who testified that he rode with the killers when they gunned down Mrs. Liuzzo. Despite his first-hand testimony, juries in two state trials had failed to convict Collie LeRoy Wilkins, 22, on murder charges. The significant difference in federal court last week was that Wilkins and two fellow Klansmen, Eugene Thomas, 42, and William Orville Eaton, 41, were prosecuted under an 1870 federal statute that makes it a crime to conspire to deprive a citizen of his constitutional rights. Judge Johnson gave the trio the maximum sentence of ten years.

Federal judges in Georgia and Mississippi had refused to allow conspiracy prosecutions to go forward in murder cases unresolved by local authorities. Thus, if Johnson's reasoning in allowing the Justice Department to prosecute is upheld--the Supreme Court is still considering the general principle--it will mean great strides ahead for Southern justice.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.