The Secrets of the Hopewell Box: Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City's Coming of Age

Mink Slide

The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 69 new sheriff’s swearing-in ceremony. How appropriate that ceremony chairman Garfinkle had arranged for Dave and Lewis Hurt to present their friend Garner with a nickel-plated inauguration pistol and Jake with a gold badge—symbols of the victory they had assured months earlier with their theft of the Hopewell box. There was no way to know then that their routine acts of roadside justice, overnight road-grading, and Election Day shenanigans had begun the rise to power of what the Tennessean would call “the Sheridan-Robinson-Garfinkle machine,” and that for the next twenty years it would win election after election by similar tactics and similar margins for mayors, governors, and United States senators. But the first taste of victory could not have been sweeter. There they were on the front page, Dave and the other Old Hickory boys from the wrong side of the Cumberland being reluctantly acknowledged for their success. They had whipped the mayor of the city, outfoxed the election detectives of blue-blooded Walter Stokes, and shoved it in the face of the morning newspaper that clearly hated them. But what the newspapers had to say was now of keen interest to Dave for reasons beyond the election. Each day he searched their columns for clues about his chances of going to federal prison. Not for election theft—for murder. Mink Slide That Dave White and his buddy J. J. Jackson ended up doing the killing was not surprising, considering their temperament. In view of their political clout, this turned out to be fortunate for the gestapo . Jackson was the state highway patrol’s rising star, a political prot égé of a judge Boss Crump had recently gotten appointed to the federal bench. On the basis of past performance, he was the man Mink Slide James D. Squires 70 Crump called on to handle troublesome Election Day precincts. A strapping six foot five,he was a fearsome sight.In the 1944 elections he had shown up at a Nashville polling place, announced himself as a representative of “the People’s Ticket, by God,” and pulling a pistol from his coat said, “Here are my credentials.” He promised to “blow this place full of holes. There’ll be plenty of smoke if it isn’t fair.” When the Tennessean photographers later caught him rousting voters with his pistol, Jackson had thrown his coat over his head and said, “The boss told me to duck.” Crump liked that. Jackson had been promised the job of chief deputy to new sheriff Garner Robinson. But when Crump gave it to Jake Sheridan, Jackson was instead promoted to captain and made chief of the Nashville highway patrol division.This created a sergeant’s vacancy lower in the ranks, which Jackson gave to his sidekick Dave White. The two were reveling in their good fortune one Monday night in late February when the telephone rang at the patrol station. It was Governor Jim McCord himself, calling about “the most disastrous and regrettable thing that has ever happened in Maury County.” In what proved to be a harbinger of the racial strife that would fracture the nation twenty years later, black snipers in nearby Columbia had ambushed the city police chief and some of his officers. Maury County sheriff J. J. Underwood had called McCord requesting highway patrol assistance. Earlier that day a black man, James Stephenson, had gotten into a dispute over a radio repair and pushed the repairman through a plate glass store window. Stephenson’s mother, Gladys, who had attempted to help her son by hitting the repairman with a shard of broken glass, got cracked with a city patrolman’s nightstick and was pummeled by a passing white man who joined the fray. But no one had been seriously injured, and Stephenson had been arraigned for assault and released on bond. But by nightfall, there was talk that a lynch mob was coming for Stephenson. It hadn’t been just any repairman whom Stephenson had put in the hospital. It was William Fleming, twenty-eight-yearold brother of Flo Fleming, a decorated war hero who was a The Secrets of the Hopewell Box 71 member of the state highway patrol and who had only recently defeated incumbent sheriff Underwood. At about 6:30 p.m.,the three thousand residents of the Mink Slide (or Black Bottom) area of...