Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote

7. The First Witness, Jesse Stegall

Z 63 Z chapter 7 The fIrsT wITness, Jesse sTegaLL In any multiple witness trial, a significant strategic decision for a lawyer is choosing the first witness. The first witness will likely get the longest, toughest, possibly nastiest crossZexamination. The first witness will set the tone of the case, impressing or not impressing opposing counsel and, more important, the judge. You don’t want a witness you must protect excessively with objections, sound or not. That will only annoy the judge. You must keep in mind that one of your tasks is building the record for an appeal, here to the far more receptive arena of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. For us the choice to lead off was not that hard. Jesse Stegall was an elementary school principal, married, a father, a man with a lot to lose in publicly seeking to vote in hostile Forrest County.1 My friend Jim Groh found him. ddd Every one of the small group of lawyers who made up the southern trial staff of the Civil Rights Division had certain landmark events in his career. Jim Groh had worked on the Tennessee sharecropper cases with John Doar when John first became first assistant. Jim was also proud of being the first division lawyer to talk with Jesse Stegall. Groh grew up on a farm near Richland Center, Wisconsin. After majorZ ing in history at Ripon College, he briefly taught high school history and German before attending Marquette Law School in Milwaukee. Jim joined the Civil Rights Division right out of law school in 1960. He was, as he put it, a “less than closet Republican.”2 In late September 1961, Jim, then twentyZseven, was “sent down to cruise Forrest County and make cold calls on possible sources/witnesses”: The first witness, Jesse stegall Z 64 Z We were still feeling our way around in Mississippi, having spent most of 1960 in Tennessee and then focusing on the Middle District of Alabama . . . with time out for the Freedom Riders for most of May 1961 . . . Hattiesburg was obviously a gold mine, and Jesse was obviously the key to the mine. By that time I had probably visited fifty or so counties full of frightened, intimidated, and often very marginally educated people. To find a school principal and other teachers—people with graduate degrees—who were willing to try to register and to testify was like finding the Holy Grail. I also believe that Hattiesburg was the largest town we had tackled to date . . . Forrest County immediately became a hot prospect. I don’t think it is any secret that the Kennedy Administration at the time was interested in early, dramatic and successful results, and I suspect that is why Forrest was put on the front burner.3 Because of the Berlin crisis, Jim was recalled to active army duty from October 1961 until August 1962. But he had made a contribution in Forrest County, just as he had in Tennessee and in Alabama. Fresh out of the army, he grabbed a suitcase and left for Oxford, Mississippi, where he helped safeguard James Meredith, serving as one of his dormitory roommates durZ ing the battle to achieve Meredith’s entry into Ole Miss. Jim would not be in court in Jackson with us on March 5, but Jesse Stegall would. ddd Who was Jesse Stegall? What gave him the necessary courage to step forward? Stegall was born in Charleston, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, in 1931. His father, James Willie Stegall, was a hard worker and devout Baptist, who moved his family to Laurel when Jesse was three. Bruce Lumber Co., his father’s new employer, had family housing for its workers called “Bruce’s Quarters.” The Stegalls lived there until 1940, when his father obtained an apartment at the Maple Street government projects. Public housing would be home until Jesse finished Oak Park High School in 1950. I knew just one of my grandparents, my father’s father, Willie Stegall. He worked in Memphis at the York Arms Company, which was like a sporting goods company. And he would send us boxes of balls and bats, damaged products that we could play with. I once asked him The first witness, Jesse stegall Z 65 Z how we got the Stegall name. It came from the German Jew who lived on the Tennessee-Mississippi line, our master in the slave...