Race, Rape, and Injustice: Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era

2. Into the Southern Cauldron

Chapter 2 Into the Southern Cauldron We were drawn from different reaches of the country. Three of us came from UCLA—Phil Brown, Tim Brayton, and myself. Henning Eikenberg, a German student who had graduated from the University of Heidelberg in 1964, came from New Haven, where he had just received a master’s degree from Yale Law School. Charles “Chuck” Farnsworth and Karen Davis came from Stanford, Evan Frullman from Boston University, John “Chip” Gray from Harvard, Layton Olson from Boalt Hall (the law school at the University of California in Berkeley), and Douglas Hedin from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had studied under Anthony Amsterdam. These are some of names I was able to recognize first after peering back in time through the scope of yellowed newspaper articles, microfilmed briefs, and the recesses of my memory. But there were twenty-eight of us and some I never met: though we did the same work, we did it in different places.1 We were all similarly motivated. Just three months earlier, students from across the country had descended on Selma, Alabama, to join in the great march to promote voting rights for African Americans. It all started on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when six hundred civil rights workers left Selma on U.S. Route 60. Arriving at the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, they were billy-clubbed and gassed by uniformed southern lawmen and forced back to Selma. Later, Martin Luther King Jr. sought, and was granted, a federal court order protecting the marchers as they made another effort to cross the bridge and march to Montgomery. By March 21 the group had grown to thirty-two hundred. They walked by day and slept in the fields at night. Four days 16 Into the Southern Cauldron later they arrived at the state capital. By then their numbers topped twenty-five thousand, swelled by students from across the country. The Selma March became the beacon of civil rights activism for our generation.2 Now it was our turn. Most of us had comfortable, white, middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds, and had been influenced by the ethical and politically liberal values of our families. Some of us went for adventure, to challenge the South’s social order and survive its wrath. After all, newspapers and television reporting were then filled daily with lurid pictures of snarling police dogs, belching water cannons, exploding tear gas grenades, and other tools of war hurled at African Americans and northern white kids marching arm-in-arm toward martyrdom . Several members of our group were Jewish and were perhaps especially attuned to issues of social justice and minority rights. Most of us went with our families’ blessings. My grandfather had long been offended by the southern treatment of blacks and offered to pay my plane fare. Beyond that I was on my own with the exception of a per diem pittance each of us received from the Fund. But when John Gary called his mother to announce his arrival in Opelika, Alabama, she became frantic at the thought of his remains being later discovered in some Alabama cotton field. Her near hysteria “didn’t help my state of mind,” he later wrote.3 Defying the Mold At first blush I did not appear to fit the role. I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and had been raised in Virginia at a time when the races were still segregated and the Confederate flag sometimes adorned the stage of our school auditorium. I was taught to revere Robert E. Lee and refer to the Civil War as the “War of the Northern Aggression.” Outdoor movie theaters were segregated with the whites’ cars parked in the middle of the lot facing the screen. Blacks had to park on the sides. Regrettably, my parents were enmeshed in these southern cultural values of class and caste, which I hurriedly tossed aside during my first year at the University of Pennsylvania. Moreover, in my rebellious teen years, I had come under the influence of my grandfather, who long championed civil rights for blacks. A man of letters, he had authored many college textbooks on American literature used on campuses across the country. My admiration for him led me to loathe the racial prejudices of my environs. Into the Southern Cauldron 17 Fueled by visions of racial justice, we broke into small groups and on...