The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South (review)

The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South. By Gail Williams O'Brien (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 334 pp. $45.00 cloth $18.95 paper

As World War II came to an end, many Americans feared a repeat of the bitter (and bloody) conflicts of 1919 when racial violence had erupted across the country. In 1945, the same conditions were present that had ignited post-World War I urban race riots and vicious attacks by southern whites against blacks (many still in their uniforms). But 1946 was not a replay of 1919. O'Brien seeks to understand why post-World War II violence was less intensive and less extended than almost anyone had anticipated.

Despite the expansive title, The Color of Law is not a broad survey of race, violence, and justice in the South of the late 1940s. It is an exhaustive examination of one episode--the so-called "Columbia, Tennessee, Race Riot" of 1946. To tell this complex story, O'Brien has drawn upon an extraordinary range of traditional sources--including 2,000 pages of grand-jury transcripts that were obtained after legal action was filed--and she has skillfully supplemented the written record with nearly fifty interviews. With great subtlety, O'Brien describes the complex web of personal relationships and assumptions that bound together local and national conservative elites in their attempts to discredit black (and labor) postwar protests as examples of communist subversion.

The Columbia racial conflict initially had the makings of a typical white-black race riot. In late February 1946, Glady Stephenson, a thirty-seven-year-old black domestic worker quarreled with William "Billy" Fleming, a local repairman, about the cost of fixing her radio. The disagreement escalated into an argument and then a fight between Fleming and Stephenson's son, who had just returned from service in the navy. The local police reacted in the usual fashion, assuming the guilt of the Stephensons and charging them with attempted murder (Fleming was cut as he fell through the shop door). After mother and son were released from jail, a mob of angry whites formed and threatened to lynch the two. Black residents armed themselves to defend the Stephensons, and when city police marched into the black community, four were wounded by small arms fire.

State patrolmen, sent by the governor of Tennessee to put an end to the disturbance, disarmed and arrested every black man in sight, systematically wrecking black businesses and homes and generally terrorizing the local African-American community. The patrol was soon supplemented by a substantial National Guard contingent. The action was by all accounts a "police riot," but when it was over, the local grand jury denied any danger of a lynching, praised local authorities, attacked the national press for fostering racial and class hatred in its coverage of the events and indicted twenty-eight black residents for "attempted murder," or as accessories to attempted murder, in the shooting of the white officers. To add insult to injury, when defense attorneys requested a change of venue for their clients, a local judge moved the trial to a nearby county with a population that was overwhelmingly blue-collar, virtually all-white, and renowned for its hostility to blacks.

If the riot and its immediate aftermath had followed a well-worn historical script, however, the ultimate outcome was unexpected. In the first trial of twenty-five black men, the white working-class jury of stereotypical "rednecks" ignored the prosecution's demand that they defend southern chivalry against the attacks of "lousy pinks and pimps and punk . . . traitors and anarchists . . . Reds, Yellows, Communists" (49-50). They found twenty-three of the twenty-five not guilty and reduced charges against the other two. As O'Brien notes, these working-class whites may have...