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• 3 • CHAPTER 1 The Simple Expedient of Theft “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.” —JOSEPH STALIN Returning to my alma mater, the University of Arkansas, in September 1960 to enter law school, I found my senses refreshed by the gorgeous Indian summer that nearly always settles on the Boston Mountains at school time and also by a new curiosity about the peculiar state that I had begun to embrace as my permanent home. My knowledge of Arkansas, at least outside the immediate environs of the university campus, was limited and myopinionsof it still a little unflattering. My high school at Joplin, Missouri, had integrated in 1955, and my glorious senior season in football was tarnished because two arch-rival schools in Arkansas, Fort Smith and Van Buren, canceled their games with us rather than have their boys play on the same field with a black youngster, the speedy running back on my team. I had followed, as acutely as a young sojourner from Missouri could, the confrontation between the governor and the United States government at Little Rock’s Central High School and the gothic politics and legal struggles of its aftermath, all of which occurred while I was an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas. Arkansas was apt to be a good laboratory for a student of law, although at this point I was still not sure whether I wanted to be a minister, a coach, or a lawyer, which was my father’s goal for me. But the story that dominated the statewide newspaper that September and October for a change was not school integration but a perverse judicial battle that was being waged in a couple of country 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 3 courthouses in the Grand Prairie east of Little Rock. It afforded a colorful introduction to Arkansas election fraud and the quintessential Arkansas political boss, which would before very long become the twin objects of my career in the law. The story, which was recorded sometimes humorously on the front pages of the ArkansasGazette, involved the heroic attempts by the political boss of Prairie County and his foe, a politician from the adjoining county of Lonoke, to steal an election for the state Senate from each other. StateSenatorJerryJ.Screetonwasthe prototype small-townSouthern political leader, a bellicose segregationist who could deliver stem-winding speeches from the Senate lectern in Little Rock and go about town back home in Hazen as the mayor, school board president, bank chairman, and backslappingfriendtoall.Screeton’slast hurrahas the Delta’s pre-eminent demagogue would occur nine years later. In 1969, he deputized 120 auxiliary policemen armed with shotguns and hunting rifles and parked rice combines and barricades at the town’s entrance to confront a skinny black youngster from Memphis with a lame arm calling himself “Sweet Willie Wine” (his real name was Lance Watson), who was going to traverse the main street of Hazen on foot on a hot August march from Memphis to Little Rock. It was a gesture that the young man thought would demonstrate to African Americans that even in the east Arkansas Delta they need not fearinsistingupontheirconstitutional and God-givenrights. Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, concerned that some harm might actually befall the young man on his highly publicized trek down old US Highway 81, dispatched state troopers to watch, but Wine/Watson sauntered through the steamy town unbothered. Screeton, a laughingstock owing to his overwrought stunt, pulled his men back before Willie got to town and was not to be seen, then or much afterward. “I came, I saw, I walked through Hazen,” Willie pronounced as he exited the western edge of town. In the late summer of 1960, Screeton faced oblivion from a more traditional force, the electorate. Prairie and Lonoke Counties had a sort of gentleman’s agreement that they would share the seat in the state Senate from that district, a Prairie County man serving one term and a Lonoke County man the next. But Screeton calculated that the district needed his uninterrupted services and ran again. Lonoke County put up its finest, Joe T. Gunter from the town of Austin, and on the evening of the Democratic primary Joe Gunter seemed to have prevailed, at least 4 • The Simple Expedient of Theft 1GLAZE_pages:Layout 1 4/22/11 11:27 AM Page 4 [3.14.246...

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