Something More than Sympathy

For stealing a cheap knife and some cookies from a supermarket in 1965, a young Mississippi Negro named Arthur Roberts was sentenced to 90 days. The sentence was harsh enough, but it led to even more severe consequences.

Though Arthur, the son of a Baptist preacher, was only 15, he was thrown in with adult convicts at the Leflore County prison farm. There a Negro "trusty" named Columbus Williams, who was serving time for assault and battery with intent to kill, was entrusted with a 12-gauge shotgun to guard other prisoners. One day Williams led a chain gang into the countryside to repair a bridge. During a lunch break, he ordered a prisoner to fetch him a rag to clean his shoes. The man refused, and Williams turned to Arthur, who also refused. "It's my lunch time," he said. With that, Williams fired his shotgun from a distance of not more than 20 feet. The pellets tore into Arthur's face, skull and body, leaving him blind in both eyes and partly paralyzed on one side.

Moral Sense. As a Negro convict in Mississippi, Arthur could look forward to little more than sympathy, and not much of that. But the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, composed mostly of young attorneys from the North, brought a damage suit in the U.S. District Court in Greenwood. They did not bother to serve a summons on Williams, who by then was out of prison and living in Chicago. Instead, they served ten white officials, including Leflore County Sheriff John Arterbury, superintendent of the prison farm at the time of the shooting.

Arterbury pointed out that it was common in the South for prison wardens to economize by assigning prisoners to guard other inmates; he claimed that the shooting was an accident. But Arthur's lawyers argued that Williams' record made him unfit to be trusted with firearms. Since the defense did not ask for a jury, the decision was up to Federal Judge William Keady. Late last month Keady ordered Arterbury to pay $85,000 in damages to Arthur. "The moral sense of all reasonable men," said the judge, "would be shocked by the punishment visited upon the plaintiff, yet a minor, as a direct result of inattentive and careless prison administration."

The Lawyers' Committee found no other case in which a Negro was awarded damages from a white law officer in Mississippi. "It's not going to bring back my sight," said Arthur, who now hopes to go into the grocery business, "but it will help." In any case, he may have to wait some time to collect, since Arterbury plans an appeal.

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