JUSTICE IN ALABAMA

Two years ago I made a trip around the world, visiting 15 different nations. There were occasions when I was called upon to explain Oxford and Little Rock, Birmingham and New Orleans, along with police dogs and sit-ins. I recall the troubled soul of a Chinese woman in Taipei who had come to hear me speak at a Church of Christ gathering. She simply could not understand how “the leader of the free nations of the world” could have so much racial strife.

Perhaps I caused her to be more sympathetic by a brief review of the Negro’s progress in the United States since slavery, and by pointing out that whites as well as Negroes are involved in the civil rights revolution, and that all of this is part of the struggle for freedom, in America as well as elsewhere, for Americans realize that “liberty and justice for all” is an ideal not yet fully realized even in the United States. She appeared to be impressed that I readily conceded that our Negroes are often treated unjustly, and that it is a condition that nearly all Americans hope to correct. I pointed to her own Chinese culture that goes back thousands of years, which nonetheless has always had its racial tensions; and I observed that the United States in the brief span of but one century has assured more rights to its racial minorities than any nation on earth. “So give us another hundred years and see then where the Negro in America is,” I asked of her. “These people were slaves one hundred years ago, but now some are university professors, government officials, scientists, professional baseball players, and all the rest. So we are working on it,” I said to her.

If I were back in Taipei or New Delhi on this night of September 30, 1965, I would have much more difficulty explaining Hayneville, Alabama than I would Selma or Los Angeles. It is easier for the oriental mind to understand the intemperance of the man of the street than the miscarriage of justice in a court of law. Even the assassination of a president is less perplexing to a foreigner than the exoneration of a murderer in, a court of justice.

It is now a matter of record, yea even judicial record, that Thomas L. Coleman, a deputy sheriff in Hayneville, leveled his shotgun on two gentlemen of the cloth and blasted them, killing one and seriously wounding the other. He was tried for manslaughter rather than for murder, because it was supposedly without malice aforethought. If he were found guilty, the sentence would have been from one to twelve years in prison. But he is tonight a free man”free” in the sense that he will not even go to prison. But as Eric Sevareid said on CBS News: “He goes to a different kind of prison: the prison of his own conscience, which is with him in the night. And to this prison he has been sentenced for life.”

It is a sad day for our blessed Land when justice is absent in our courts of law. Perhaps a Lee Harvey Oswald can be explained, but how do you explain a magistrate of justice who refuses to postpone a trial so that the star witness (the hospitalized clergyman who was unable to testify) can give his testimony? And how do you explain twelve jurors who free a man who shoots unarmed men? It is a dark day for America. I fear the judgment of God upon our nation if we are to have more of this. It was against such gross wrongs in high places against the weak that the prophets of Israel spoke.

I may not even try to explain to a Chinese or an Indian how such as this could ever happen in the United States, but I can and I must, for the sake of conscience, express my protest and indignation. And so I am sending the following letter to Mr. C. E. Yates, Jr., Hayneville, Alabama, who was the foreman of the jury. Or one might write to Judge T. Werth Thagard, Circuit Court, Hayneville, Alabama, to whom I plan to send a copy of this editorial. Millions of protests should thunder forth from an indignant nation. We must not allow a cold-blooded murderer, twelve cowards, and an unfair judge to desecrate justice without protest.

Mr. C. E. Yates, Jr.

Hayneville, Alabama

My dear Sir:

Like many other of our countrymen, I am shocked and incensed by the miscarriage of justice that occurred at your hands in your city on this last day of September, 1965. It is surely a day that will live in infamy in the history of Alabama, a state in which I also have lived and worked.

This grave injustice causes me to be ashamed to be of the white race and to be an American. I am ashamed of you and your fellow jurors, and I pity your sense of justice. That you would exonerate a murderer is despicable, and you must now assume your place alongside him at a trial that all thirteen of you have yet to face — the judgment of God, the Judge of us all!

The prophetic utterance of Amos needs to ring through the streets of Hayneville and in the hearts of twelve jurors who revealed that they fear men more than God:

“You have turned justice into poison and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood.”

Sincerely,                  

LEROY GARRETT

THE POPE’S VISIT

As we go to press with this issue the nation makes ready for the first visit of a pope of Rome to the United States. While the visit of the head of the Roman Catholic Church to a so-called “Protestant nation” may be expected to be a controversial event, it is certain that our country will respond with more enthusiasm than it would have a generation ago. That his mission is for peace rather than for ecclesiastical purposes, that he comes to plead for goodwill among men before the United Nations rather than to ordain cardinals at St. Patrick’s, lifts his visit above partisan criticism.

Any person in a position to influence the minds of upward of a half billion people is to be taken seriously by all the rest of us, especially when that person has absolute authority over the thinking of these people in all matters of dogma and morals (terms that include most everything as they are interpreted by the Roman Church). This is true of kings, presidents, and magistrates as well as serfs and peasants, and the fact is that scores of heads of state look to the Holy See as the highest human tribunal.

This position of incredible power could well make the pope the most important person in the world, not to mention the fact that he is the chief executive of the richest and largest organization in the world, with the possible exception of the United States Government, which may be richer, though not larger. He is the only man in the world before whom both kings and serfs do obeisance.

All this makes it extremely important what this man thinks and believes, and what values he cherishes. If it is important to me what my next door neighbor believes, and what he teaches his children, who in turn play with my children, then it is important to me as to what manner of man the pope is, who influences the morals of hundreds of millions of people.

For hundreds of years the popes have been shut up in the parochial environment of Rome, surrounded by old prelates hardened by tradition and limited by a hierarchy immune to change. Not only have the popes all these many years been Italians, but they have restricted themselves to Italy during their pontificates. They have consequently fallen behind the on-rushing world, refusing to change because of a fear of change.

Pope John, during his short rule, changed all this by “opening the windows of St. Peter’s to the world,” as it has been put, and he no doubt would have ventured out into that world had he lived. Pope Paul has gone on to “open the doors of St. Peter’s” and has moved out into a broader ministry than any pope in history. Already he has visited the Holy Land and India, and now he visits the United Nations and the United States. He may next go to Poland behind the Iron Curtain. In all these places he is in contact with world leaders who have backgrounds much different from his own. He has met as an equal with both the archbishops of Canterbury and of the Greek Orthodox Church, as well as other representative clergy of all major faiths.

This cannot help but effect a man. He not only gets a better view of our troubled world, but he enters into dialogue with men who differ with him theologically, but who share with him a concern for peace. All this tends to thrust him forth as a leader of a wonderfully diverse world culture rather than a monolithic ecclesiastical institution. Such a diverse culture can follow only a leader who has both depth and breadth.

If all this produces a more liberal pope, one who will grow ‘Weary of the medieval ways of his church, and thus insist on the changes that are long past due, it will be a great blessing to the world. With this hope in view I can endure with some patience some of the trapping that goes with a papal visit that I don’t especially like, even to the point of defending it all before a wife who complains about “all the fuss going on over the pope.” And defending a papal visit to the United States really doesn’t sound like me. Maybe I have lost my faith!