Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America

Third Loop: A Motel Swimming Pool - Birmingham, November 29, 1979

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-001 A CHALLENGE Tuscaloosa, August–October 1933 A matter of profound humiliation. Despite speculation that the three Tuscaloosa deputies not only had prior knowledge of the mob but actively took part in the murders, they were not convicted of any wrongdoing. Deputy R. M. Pate, in particular, had a reputation for being “quick on the trigger, where Negroes [were] involved,” a reputation he upheld just days later by killing twenty-fouryear -old Jack Pruitt, a black man who supposedly made threats to a white farmer before running toward the officer with a club. While author Clarence Cason doesn’t refer to Pruitt by name, he makes note of the black man shot “within a few hundred yards of the fourth tee of the Tuscaloosa Country Club.” Pate was rumored to have killed about a dozen blacks at the time of the lynchings, and those who knew him suspected he was fully aware of the unfortunate events that befell the men he was entrusted to protect. Meanwhile, the mob was found as innocent as the deputies. In a Tuscaloosa News editorial printed the day following the lynching , one writer noted that Pippen and Harden weren’t victims of the mob, but rather, of the International Labor Defense’s intrusiveness. "
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 “There was a threat of grave disorder in Tuscaloosa over this case and it all is the fault of the International Labor Defense,” agreed Judge Foster in the Birmingham Post. “If they had stayed out of this case I am confident there would have been no lynchings.” Another editorial claimed that Northern carpetbaggers had disrupted the tenuous balance struck between Southern whites and blacks years before, a silent code of conduct in which alleged rape and murder were recognized as offenses punishable by death whenever the mob saw fit. “May God forgive the carpet baggers of today who returned this foul thing [lynching] to our midst—human hearts cannot,” one letter writer asserted. “Dan Pippen and A. T. Harden, two young Negroes accused of the murder of a white girl, lie dead.” Another editorial placed the blame on the I.L.D. even more pointedly . “[T]he maggoty beaks of the belled buzzards of the International Labor Defense League are stained with the blood of the three Negro boys whose torn bodies this morning lay in newly-turned graves! The International Labor Defense League has at last accomplished what it has long sought. It has made martyrs of three Alabama defendants in a criminal case—dead martyr to a mock Cause.” The writer went on to claim that neither Harden nor Pippen nor Clark wanted anything more than a fair trial, “[b]ut the boys’ pleas failed to stop the belled buzzards. They continued to circle over Alabama and Tuscaloosa.” While the writer admitted the city’s own implication in the murders , he went on to decry the “belled buzzards” who continued leaving “vermin in their path across the state” and worse still, “blood on the Great Seal of Alabama.” After acknowledging his own “closeness” to Tuscaloosa made it difficult to offer a “completely detached analysis,” Clarence Cason admitted that he, too, believed that, “none of the lynchings would have 

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-001 taken place had it not been for the resentment directly created by the three Communist lawyers who deliberately irritated a disturbed situation by their offensive presence.” The citizens of Tuscaloosa concurred. Citizens refused to blame either the deputies or the mob, and instead , managed to shift the blame entirely on what they perceived as a Northern, Communist threat. It was easier to blame outsiders than their neighbors, regardless of skin color. When taken together, these editorials point to the true cause of the violence: Tuscaloosa citizens lynched two black men, not because of any particular crime, but to send a message that New York lawyers were not to interfere with Southern issues of race. However, the unintended consequence of sending such a message was that they were also informing the country that lawlessness had overtaken the town. A special grand jury was called to investigate the violence, and while the judge wholeheartedly condemned the mob’s actions, the surprise came during Honey Clark’s testimony. Perhaps all too aware of the consequences of his statement, Clark offered as little blame as possible, refusing to point fingers and, instead, defended the deputies, claiming that the mob had swiftly overtaken them through no fault of their own. “[The mob] had the...