Revisionist History - Mr. Hollowell Didn’t Like That

Episode Date: August 3, 2017

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I finished law school on the first Friday in June of 1960. On the following Monday, I went to work for Donald L. Hollowell, who was the ultimate civil rights lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia at the time. Vernon Jordan, one of the great figures in the American civil rights movement, talking about his mentor. And I went to work for him right out of law school for $35 a week. And there were no other jobs at the local government level, county, state, or federal. We couldn't even take the bar review course at John Marshall University because Georgia law required education be separate and segregated. So I went to work for Don Holloway. My first day at work, I was in the Atlanta Municipal Court helping him get demonstrators from the Atlanta University system out of jail.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History My podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood This episode picks up where the previous one left off With the story of an extraordinary man named Donald L. Hallowell Hallowell died in 2004, but I wish he were still alive, because he has so much to teach us. Like, how do you keep going when all seems lost? How do you behave? How do you conduct yourself? If you're one of the leaders of a losing cause, and for most of his life Hallowell fought uphill,

how do you prepare those behind you for the day when you might succeed? What did he look like? Hallowell, big guy, heavy guy. He played quarterback at Lane College. Vernon Jordan is a big guy as well. Imposing. Char Charismatic I mention that only because it's not a trivial fact The two of them, Jordan and Hollowell Would drive around Georgia from one end of the state to the next To towns and courtrooms where a black lawyer was not just an anomaly But a provocation If you were 5'2 with a little squeaky voice, it didn't work

I would just like to think that the people at the university and around the university are sufficiently fair-minded to want to see... I watched all these old grainy videotapes of Hallowell in the Auburn Avenue Library in Atlanta, and I became fixated on his hands, which would rise and fall as he talked. They were enormous. In Atlanta's segregated buses, there'd be a little sign on the back of the seat where the white section ended.

It would say, Colored, directing black people to their place. Sometimes, when no one was looking, Halliwell would unclip it and stick it in his coat pocket, mess things up a bit until the bus driver noticed, or some white lady got hysterical because she inadvertently sat in a seat still warm from the presence of a black person. Hallowell was subversive in his own way, but also formal, proper. They used to say he talked like the black Shakespeare. Hallowell once paused in the middle of a trial to instruct the court on the correct pronunciation of negro. Not nigra,

your honor, negro. Another time, he was up against two district attorneys in court, and the moment he got up to speak, the white judge swiveled in his chair with his back to Hallowell so he would not have to suffer the ind judge swiveled in his chair with his back to Halliwell so he would not have to suffer the indignity of gazing upon a black man. What did Halliwell do? Just kept talking and talking in those slow, formal tones until it was the judge who get to a town. And so a principal or school teacher or the local doctor, somebody that's got some independence, that's where you spend the night. I slept a minute a night with Holloway. You you know, piled in the same bed. It better be a big bed. The two of you were... Yeah, but there were no big beds in those.

No, I was gonna say. There were no king size beds. But no, no, it was...H Halliwell was a real hero. In the early morning of November 5th, 1953, a woman named Betty Jo Bishop calls the Atlanta Police Department in hysterics. In her car is the badly beaten corpse of her boyfriend, Marvin Lindsay. She tells the police that the two of them had been attacked when they were parked on a secluded road on Atlanta's South Side. It's a sensational case.

In fact, it was written up in one of those pulp crime magazines that were so popular back then. Official detective stories. March 1954 issue. Wanted. The man in the Pyramid Hat. I can't do justice to the spirit of pulp journalism, so we're going to reenact some scenes from the article,

starting with this description of the moment Betty Jo Bishop meets Atlanta's chief of detectives, Glenn Cowan, on a November morning. Suppose that you begin by telling us your name. Bishop. Mrs. Betty Jo Bishop. I'm a widow. You were with Marvin Lindsay tonight? Yes. Tell me what happened. Bishop tells the detective about driving to Jonesboro Road.

We were only there a few minutes when this man came out of the woods. It was terrible. He struck me with his fist and Marvin had to fight him off. Then he walked around the car and hit Marvin with something heavy. Marvin pleaded for him to stop, but he wouldn't.

She covered her face with her hands and broke into long, but he wouldn't. She covered her face with her hands and broke into long, racking sobs. Cowan waited patiently until she recovered her composure. What happened then, he asked. What happened then? Well, after he got tired of hitting Marvin, he ran into the woods. Marvin was lying half in and half out of the car, so I walked around to the driver's side and made him lie across the seat.

He was bleeding something awful, so I knew he was hurt bad. I drove to his home in Blair Village and told his brother John what had happened, and John got in the car and we drove to Grady Hospital, but it was too late. Marvin was already dead. They're in the police station. She can barely hold it together. She's all beaten up. Her lover is dead.

She tells the officer that the assailant had come back after killing Marvin and raped her. Maybe Detective Cowan takes her hand in sympathy. Maybe he waits a few moments to let her collect her thoughts. Then, as the article describes it, he asks her to describe the assailant. I'm not sure. It was very dark and I was scared. He was tall and thin, I remember that much. Also, when I grabbed one of his hands, I remember it felt kind of bony.

Slowly, gently, Cowan draws a description out of her. The man was in his late 30s or early 40s, about 5 foot 11. Thin, wearing a leather jacket, dungarees, a funny kind of hat, pyramid-shaped, and he was swarthy and had dark, oily hair. The article never comes out and says so explicitly, but if you're a reader of the pulp magazine Official Detective stories in March 1954, you know what Swarthy means. The killer's black. That's why this is such a sensational case. Betty Jo Bishop is an innocent white widow,

and she and her boyfriend have been attacked by a mysterious black man. Atlanta's finest immediately got to work. They scour the crime scene. The killer had a rolled-up newspaper, which he'd apparently left at the scene. And he'd circled two want ads, one for a dishwasher at a local restaurant. The police go to the restaurant. Did a thin, swarthy man with oily hair answer an ad yesterday for a dishwasher? The owner of the restaurant says, yes.

Doesn't remember his name, but remembers the man said he used to work at Elite Bowling Alley on Hunter Street. The coat-check girl at Elite Bowling Alley says, oh, that's Willie. An eyewitness comes forward, says he saw a man near the crime scene, swarthy, wearing a pyramid-shaped hat. They scour the area around the crime scene, stumble on a little cottage. Inside is 39-year-old Willie Nash, unemployed handyman, swarthy, dark hair. They arrest him. He confesses. So who do you call if you're Willie Nash?

Things are pretty bleak. What you really want is a white lawyer, because it's 1954. The jury's going to be all white. The police department is all white. The judge is going to be white. Willie Nash knows where the power lies in Atlanta, Georgia. But Willie Nash is poor. So he's forced to settle for one of the very few power lies in Atlanta, Georgia. But Willie Nash is poor. So he's forced to settle for one of the very few black lawyers in town,

a man two years out of law school, still wet behind the ears, Donald L. Hollowell. When Nash realizes he has no other choice, he breaks down into tears. I'd have cried too, Hollowell says years later, if I'd have been Willie Nash under those circumstances. This was years before Vernon Jordan joined Hollowell's firm, but he knew all about the Willie Nash case. Everybody in black Atlanta did.

That's the case where he held up the latest panties before the jury. And that was a case that set Hallowell up. A few years ago, the Smithsonian interviewed a man named Robert Carter, another legendary black attorney. Carter talks about trying school segregation cases in the deep South in the 1950s with Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall, two other pioneering black lawyers of that era. They would be in court up against the local white school superintendent, and black people from the community would show up, cram into the balcony, hang on every word. It wasn't that they expected to win because they often didn't. They just wanted to see a black person

in a position of formal authority over a white person. In Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama at the height of Jim Crow, that was history being made. Every hearing, every trial with a black lawyer was public theater. During cross-examination,

a white witness might forget his role in the trial and start asking questions of the attorney, of Motley, say. And Connie Motley, a black woman in 1950-something, would reprimand the white male witness, say, my job is to ask the question, your job is to respond. And everybody would gasp. In the evening, Carter says he would walk through the black neighborhoods and hear people reenacting the trial in barbershops and beauty parlors. In other words, there were two conversations going on at any given time. There was the legal conversation, witness, judge, lawyers, accused. If you were a white lawyer dealing with

the white world, that was the conversation you worried about. But there was a second conversation, which was between the black lawyers and the people in the balcony. And if you were an underdog with a limited chance to win at the first conversation, then that second conversation was really important. Donald Hallowell was very good at the first conversation, the legal one. He was a master of the second. There's a great documentary about Hallowell made by the Georgia civil rights scholar Maurice Daniels. This fight will require foot soldiers for equal justice. Daniels does a long interview with an attorney named Howard Moore, who worked with Hallowell in the 1960s. And Moore talks about arriving early at a hearing into the police shooting of a black teenager to handle things before Halliwell got there. When I got down to Bibb County and went to the courthouse,

there were about 3,000 Negroes on the steps. And I went into the courthouse, and there were about 3,000 or as many as they could get in the balcony upstairs. And when I walked in the courtroom, the people upstairs, the black people, said, that ain't Halliwell. You know, where's Halliwell? That ain't Halliwell. I don't know what to do.

I don't know. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do, you know. So I said, well, I'll act like Halliwell. I'll just object in the loudest voice I can. And then people upstairs in the bathroom said, well, it ain't Halliwell, but he sound like Halliwell. When Halliwell showed up

at the court inquest, he put the police officer on the stand. He'd shot a 17-year-old boy named A.C. Hall. Halliwell took the officer through his testimony, bit by meticulous bit,

slowly exposing the officer's lies. The cop was in tears by the end. I've never seen that before or since, when a lawyer just takes complete control of a witness and binds that witness to his will, not with shouting and screaming, but with systematic, well-structured, well-placed questions. Now, did Hollowell win a victory for the bereaved family of A.C. Hall?

Was the officer prosecuted? Of course not. It's hard enough to win a conviction against a white cop who shoots a black kid today, let alone in 1962 in Bibb County, Georgia. This was about the second conversation. Between Hallowell and the thousands of people on the steps, we are not entirely powerless. the second conversation. Between Hallowell and the thousands of people on the steps, we are not entirely powerless. I can bind a witness to my will. One more case, because there are dozens of them. Hallowell never stopped moving in those years.

This one was in 1961, and this time Hallowell was with the young Vernon Jordan. Our client, James Fair, a black kid from New Jersey, had been arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die in the electric chair in 24 hours. Hollowell and his team go down to the town of Reidsville, Georgia, to argue for a new trial. The judge in the case was Judge W.I. Don't want any niggers in my court gear. He had that reputation. On Monday, we went and we tried the case. At lunchtime, the judge and the white lawyers and the white court officials went across the town square to the white-only restaurant and had their lunch.

Hollowell, C.B. King, and I went to the only grocery store on the courthouse square, ordered a pound of bologna, loaf of bread, mustard, Coca-Cola, and a baby Ruth, and sat in Mr. Hallowell's car in the parking surrounding the courthouse and ate our lunch. We did it on Monday. We did it on Tuesday. Wednesday, we were trying the case, and a black lady waved at me. And I met her in the vestibule of the courthouse.

I'll never forget it. And she said, Lawyer, we've been watching y'all eat that bologna for two days now. She says, just have a Coca-Cola and don't eat that bologna today. And when the court ends, which is 3.30 or 4, y'all drive to my house for lunch. So they go to her house. That's the moment Jordan remembers 50 years later, that moment of grace and quiet rebellion

outside the courtroom. And we walked in, and the table was set for royalty. Her best linen, her best china, her best crystal. The aroma of the southern food was was almost crippling. It was as it circled our noses. And her neighbors had come and put on nice sundresses and their husbands had cleaned up and they welcomed us and then we joined hands and and her husband gave the grace and he said this unforgettable sentence which was Lord way down here in Tattnall, we can't join the NAACP.

But thanks to your bountiful blessings, we can feed the NAACP lawyers. So, Willie Nash. Betty Jo Bishop's swarthy assailant. The case we began with. Donald Hallowell's trial by fire. If you look back on Hallowell's career, it's all there, every theme in that first case. Nash has been indicted for murder, rape, and robbery. The prosecutor has a murder weapon, a bloody piece of pipe.

He has Nash's confession. And he has a witness, a black man named Julius Harris, who places Nash at the murder scene. The moonlight was shining directly on his face when I glimpsed him, Harris testifies. For Hollowell and Nash, it looks pretty bleak. But then, one of the prosecutors is trying to remember Julius Harris's name and can't. And he says in an open courtroom, the eyewitness, you know, that fat nigger. Halliwell jumps out of his seat and almost shouts, a Negro is as entitled to respect as any other person. The judge agrees, declares a mistrial. The second trial is two months later.

This time, Hollowell has time to prepare. He puts the head of the Georgia State Crime Lab on the stand and asks, did you find any blood on the alleged murder weapon? The man says, actually, he didn't. Hollowell moves on to the police. Turns out they have multiple conflicting stories about what happened that night.

Willie Nash testifies, says his confession was beaten out of him. As for the witness who said he saw Nash's face by the light of the moon, Hollowell points out there was no moon over Atlanta that night. Finally, Hollowell turns to the alleged victim, Betty Jo Bishop. Turns out she had a second boyfriend, who left town right after the murder of her first boyfriend. And when she pulled up to Marvin Lindsay's brother's house with Marvin's dead body in her car,

the first thing out of her mouth was, I know you think I did it, but a nigger did it. Finally, Halliwell calls the doctor who examined Bishop right after the alleged rape occurred, and the doctor concedes that he could find no evidence, not bruises or sperm, to indicate that a rape actually occurred. That's when Halliwell holds up an item from police evidence, Betty Jo Bishop's underwear. Halliwell waves them in front of the jury. 1954, Atlanta, Georgia.

A black man waves a white woman's underwear in the air in front of an all-white jury. Now, who's that for? Is it for the jury? Of course. He's saying Betty Jo Bishop is lying through her teeth. But it's really for the audience. He's saying enough.

You can imagine that up in the balcony, there was a collective intake of breath at that moment, something that could be heard clear across Atlanta. And that night in a thousand homes, somebody stood up and played out that scene, just like Hallowell, to a chorus of disbelief. Willie Nash Goes Free. But it's still not a real victory.

Because what's the real lesson of the false indictment of Willie Nash? That every white person in that courtroom lied, freely and blatantly. The police lied, The witness lied. The victim lied. The press lied. The murder weapon wasn't a murder weapon. The rape wasn't a rape.

And the only reason all the liars got caught was they couldn't even be bothered to keep their story straight. It didn't seem worth the effort. I know you think I did it, but a nigger did it. It's not as if the whole group of them, the victim, the police officer, the witness, the doctor, the press, got in a room and worked out an elaborate story to tell the court. That would be a conspiracy. But you only need a conspiracy where there is a system to conspire against. There was no system to conspire against. They were the system. The Nash case wasn't a victory, but it was a warning.

Things got worse for the civil rights movement before they got better. The Willie Nash case was in 1954, the same year that the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education decision that racial segregation was unconstitutional. After Brown came what is known in civil rights history as massive resistance. The white political power structure of the South rose up and the backlash began. One by one, white governors and mayors and senators who had been at least moderate on racial issues were replaced by hardline racists.

Alabama had a governor in the 1950s, Big Jim Folsom, who used to say, all men are just alike. I don't think he really meant it, but at least he was willing to say it. By the early 1960s, Alabama had taken a big step backwards. Their new governor was George Wallace, who famously declared, Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. The decade leading up to the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a dark time in American racial history. We forget this now. Martin Luther King led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, but after that, he had years

in the wilderness, when even members of his own community had turned against him. And in October of 1960, at the lowest ebb, King gets arrested. He was already on probation for a traffic violation. He'd moved from Alabama to Georgia and didn't get a Georgia driver's license within the requisite 90 days, for which he had been sentenced to 12 months in public works camp, which was the Georgia euphemism for a chain gang. King got that sentence suspended, but then he got picked up for taking part in a sit-in, and the prosecutor said that meant he'd violated his probation and now he needed to do his 12 months on the chain gang. By the way, if you think that this has anything to do

with driving in Georgia with an Alabama license, you're crazy. This is what things had come to in 1960. You have asked me what other plans do we have in connection with Reverend Martin Luther King's release. So who does King call for help? Donald L. Hollowell, of course. And the morning after King's arrest,

Hollowell stands on the DeKalb County Courthouse steps addressing a group of reporters. Of course, this would depend upon whether or not the court granted our motion to vacate the order of yesterday. If the court fails to release him of course we would take other steps to appeal or to effect... Hallowell is trying to get King's case thrown out. But the problem is that King is no longer in Atlanta.

He's banished. In Maurice Daniels' documentary, Hallowell's wife, Louise, talks about what happened when her husband went to retrieve King from the county jail, only to be confronted by the warden. When he got there, he said, I came to get King king out this morning,

or something like that, to that effect. And he said, well, he ain't here. And he said, well, what do you mean he ain't here? He said, well, they took him away this morning sometime, and they carried him down to the state prison. And he said, that's where he is. He ain't here, so you can't get him. Well, Mr. Hollowell didn't like that.

I love that line, Mr. Hollowell didn't like that. Daniels picks up the story with Andrew Young, another of King's inner circle. That was the worst night of Martin Luther King's life. They took him from the DeKalb County, put him in leg irons and handcuffs, laid him on the floor in the back of a paddy wagon with nobody back there but a German shepherd. And they drove him from Atlanta to Reidsville. That's 300 miles. There were no expressways then. 300 miles on bad Georgia roads. Reidsville, the same place where Jordan and Hollowell ate their bologna sandwich in the car. They know the town well. The state prison in

Reidsville was notorious. It was the kind of place where they use that phrase, in quotation marks, that somebody got shot trying to escape, or where they got beat up by a guard out on the chain gang. When King's followers heard Reidsville, they honestly feared that he was going to end up dead. But there's not a hint of that in his attorney on the courthouse steps. Learning that Reverend King had been taken to the Reedsville prison, I would say that I indicated to authorities on last evening that we were desirous of having Reverend King at this hearing. However, they informed me that they had already transmitted the papers yesterday afternoon to the Board of Correction and that it was in their purview to move him when they desired.

Hallowell's composure does not break. Why? Because he's not just talking to those reporters. He's talking to the black people of Georgia, telling them that it will take more than the abduction of their leader to break the spirit of their movement. We know that as a matter of normal practice, it is several days before a prisoner is moved. However, when we called at 8 for the purpose of

ascertaining the whereabouts of the sheriff for making service, we were informed that Reverend King had been taken down to Reidsville at 4.05 this morning. Later that day, Halliwell flew to Reidsville, invited along

the national media. The White House was watching. Halliwell walked into Reidsville and walked out with his client. It's a surreal moment. The state of Georgia basically tried to kidnap the nation's leading civil rights leader. There's press everywhere. Someone puts a camera in Martin Luther King's face. Everyone's eyes are on him. There's a famous. Someone puts a camera in Martin Luther King's face. Everyone's eyes are on him.

There's a famous picture of that moment. It ran in all the newspapers. And you can imagine that when people from the movement saw it, they first looked to see whether King was okay, and then they asked, where's Halliwell? Sure enough, there he was. In the background, off a little to the left, crisp white shirt, elegant black bow tie, impassive, implacable.

This is what gave me hope, okay? Vernon Jordan again. I went to see him to talk about Hallowell, but more than that, because I wanted to understand what it means to persevere. It's not just that these stories are shocking and extraordinary. It's the sheer weight of them. A white woman has her boyfriend murdered and then just randomly pins it on a black man who just happens to be in the neighborhood. A police officer shoots a teenager

in the back and gets off scot-free. A kid gets arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die before he can even mount a defense. Your leader gets whisked away to a chain gang because he didn't get his license changed within 90 days. You fight an uphill battle all morning in the courtroom, then you eat your bologna sandwich in your car like a fugitive. And it never ends. You get in the car and you drive to one end of the state, and the judge swivels in his chair and will not offer you the basic courtesy of facing you as you speak.

Then you sleep two in a bed, in a stranger's house, and do it all again the next day and the next day. I don't understand how Donald Halliwell did it. And maybe more importantly, I don't understand how he kept everyone else, the people behind him who didn't have his strength, from giving up. Is there any question more fundamental than that? I'm not sure there is. So I went back to Vernon Jordan a second time. After he's told me about Nathaniel Johnson and Willie Nash, I sat in his office in Rockefeller Center,

and he told me one last story. It's about when he was in high school, the same school Martin Luther King went to, David Howard High on Randolph Street, an all-black school in the black part of town. Jordan was in the band, and one day the principal gets a call from the school superintendent, a white woman. The senator from Georgia, Richard Russell, was running for president.

She wanted the David D. Howard High School band to be at Peachtree and Baker Streets to play with these hand-me-down instruments from white schools as Richard Russell went up Peachtree Street on his way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Richard Russell was a hardcore segregationist, one of the most powerful men in the Senate, who used his position to block anything even looking like civil rights. A man who, as a matter of principle, did not think black people should be allowed to drink from the same water fountain as white people.

This man wanted the black students of Atlanta to play in his honor. The principal told the bandmaster, and the bandmaster told us at band practice at 2.30, a trombone player named Maynard Jackson and a trumpet player named Vernon Jordan said, hell no, we won't go. Big discussion took place. You and Maynard Jackson were at school together?

Yeah. Maynard Jackson, in his day, was part of the same band of brothers as Donald Hallowell and Vernon Jordan and Martin Luther King. The big argument took place, and at the end, the trombone player and the trumpet player said, wait a minute, we raise it, but we got to go. Because if we don't go, our principal and our bandmaster will lose their jobs.

So we played at Peachtree and Baker Street for Richard Russell in 1951. You swallowed your pride. It wasn't pride. It was a practical decision. 21 years later, Maynard Jackson was sworn in as mayor of Atlanta. Right? So you got 1951, a bad situation, and you get through it. 21 years later, he is conducting the political symphony of Atlanta.

And that's why you can't get angry. You have to get smart. Yeah. Did you at least play badly? No, we were too good. We were a hell of a band. Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel,

and Xiomara Martinez-White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to our actors, Jody Markell and Ken Marks, and to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg at Panoply.

I'm Malcolm Gradwell.