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  • Klansmen, Communists, and Civil Liberties in Dallas, 1931
  • Dick J. Reavis (bio)

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Texas Communists Charles J. Coder and Lewis Hurst. Dallas Times-Herald, March 16, 1931.

[End Page 254]

About 8:20 p.m. on the night of Wednesday, March 4, 1931, three Dallas men—an attorney and two Communist clients—were kidnapped at gunpoint as they emerged from the Dallas jail, located in the city hall. Even though their abductors, fourteen men in four cars, wore neither robes nor hoods, they were presumed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. The controversies that ensued over the next few weeks provide a good example of how racism in the Jim Crow era helped blind many white Dallasites to gross violations of civil liberties. The abduction was far from a perfect crime. Because it was staged on the steps of the jail and coincided with the unannounced release of the Reds, police complicity was suspected. And in taking attorney George Clifton Edwards the kidnappers snatched a man whose disappearance was bound to be noteworthy.

Edwards, then in his mid-fifties, was as much a pillar of his community as any man of his opinions could have been. Most civic leaders knew his background because they read about him in newspapers two or three times a year. He had grown up in Dallas, the son of a prominent attorney, earned a master’s degree from Harvard, studied for the Episcopal ministry, then changed his mind and dedicated himself to teaching. He founded a night school for textile workers in South Dallas, taught Latin and algebra in the public schools, served as both a football coach and a debate coach, and became the principal of Oak Cliff High School. In 1906 he had been the gubernatorial candidate of the Socialist Party, and a year later he was elected to the commission that wrote the Dallas city charter.1 [End Page 255]

After that, Edwards became a lawyer. He made his debut as a criminal-courts barrister in a trial that went badly awry on March 3, 1910. Edwards had been appointed to defend Allen Brooks, an elderly and demented African American who a week earlier had been accused of raping a three-year-old white girl. As Edwards was interviewing his client in a vacant jury room on the second floor of the county courthouse, some 500 men from a crowd outside stormed past sheriff’s officers, broke into the jury room, put a rope around the defendant’s neck, and pushed him out of a window. Brooks landed on his head, eyewitnesses reported, “with a thud that could be heard above the shouting of the mob.” The crowd then dragged him several blocks to a telephone pole near the Elks’ Arch, which stood on Akard Street, where someone hoisted his corpse for all to behold.2 In later reminiscences about the affair, Edwards observed that “the Court House is directly across the street from the Sheriff’s office, and the ‘Elks’ Arch’ less than a block from the then Dallas Police headquarters. The sheriff’s office and the police could not have been unaware of the whole business but not one officer did one thing.” His conclusion no doubt colored his handling of the 1931 abduction.3

Not without misgivings, Edwards had undertaken the defense of the two Reds only days before. “I am not a Communist. I regard the Communists as a misguided and ignorant and almost foolish set of doctrinaires,” he said at the time.4 His clients were not natives of Dallas or men of any distinction. Although both, like him, were white, they were newcomers who in a month’s time had become infamous as troublemakers.

We cannot be sure who they were. In those days, before most Americans drove cars, before the Social Security system, and before the national security state, people could assume identities almost as easily as they could adopt dogs. By the thousands, immigrants had assumed Anglicized names—and sometimes, entirely new names—and members of the Communist Party, especially those who were on the organization’s payrolls in the South, frequently adopted...

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