The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South

4. African American Sensations: Jim Crow Justice and the Richmond Planet

4 AFRICAN AMERICAN SENSATIONS Jim Crow Justice and the Richmond Planet THUS GREW UP A DOUBLE SYSTEM OF JUSTICE . . . W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1903) A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N S E N S A T I O N S On 14 June 1895, an aging white farmer, Edward Pollard, returned from his fields to find the body of his wife, Lucy, outside their home in Lunenburg County, Virginia, southwest of Richmond. She had been hewn repeatedly with an ax, and more than eight hundred dollars was missing from the Pollard home. Found with two twenty-dollar bills, a black man from North Carolina, Solomon Marable, was charged with the crime, and he confessed to his involvement as an accessory. He implicated three local black women, Mary Abernathy and Pokey and Mary Barnes, as the actual murderers. “Feelings were high” in Lunenburg and the surrounding counties , and lynchings appeared imminent. The local sheriff spirited the four defendants out of the neighborhood, assigning a deputy to guide them on a trek on foot through the night to the Petersburg jail to the northeast.1 In the following eighteen months, this case would become a sensation in Virginia’s African-American community and, to a lesser extent, among whites. Solomon Marable would be tried twice, convicted both times, and hanged for his part in the crime.This part of the story was expected by most observers. Pokey and the two Marys—who came to be known collectively as the Lunenburg women—had a much more interesting, complex, and telling path to tread. The saga of the Lunenburg women provides a sort of best-case scenario for blacks facing southern justice in the Jim Crow era. They resided in Virginia rather than the still-more-prejudicial deep South. Lunenburg County was 60 percent black, and in 1895 this population was not yet fully humbled by disfranchisement.2 Indeed, black as well as white citizens sat on their juries in the first series of trials. The defendants were women, and what chivalry whites could muster for black womanhood therefore softened the hardest edges of Virginia’s judicial system. The case attracted enough attention that prominent white lawyers helped to protect the rights of the accused. And the case against them stood chiefly upon the weak evidence of an accusation from a black man who was himself accused of the crime. It is a measure of southern racism that—despite these mitigating circumstances —the Lunenburg women were repeatedly convicted in the Virginia courts. It was only a series of unusual actions by both blacks and whites that saved the women from the gallows. This story of sensation, crime, and justice vividly demonstrates how different African American sensations were from those in the white press and public. Because blacks had a very different relationship to the government, the police, and the entire system of jurisprudence in Virginia, the cases most sensationalized in the black press and community were quite distinct 112 A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N S E N S A T I O N S from the patterns of interest and public obsession so evident in white culture . Just as Du Bois found a double system of justice, so did Jim Crow spawn a double cultural system of sensationalizing crime. Black sensations were simply unlike the white sensations outlined in previous chapters; this chapter, therefore, must have a similarly distinct tone and focus. From 1880 to 1920, African Americans in the South experienced not only segregation and disfranchisement, but also a surge in lynching, whites rioting against their neighborhoods, and milder forms of intimidation. White crimes against the race were so common as to be a steady drumbeat in the black press for decades. But their ubiquity also meant that individual crimes against blacks rarely became notable sensations in the African American press; they were simply too commonplace. Prosecutions of black criminals in white courts were likewise everyday occurrences. In place of these sorts of stories, the most haunting cases in the black community involved strong evidence of the innocence of black defendants, as with the Lunenburg case. Such cases raised a larger question: would prejudicial white courts be able to acquit? In a sense, the greatest crime for African Americans at the turn of the century was no...