Alabama: A Whitewashed Court

Only a few spectators were on hand in the slave-built courthouse in Hayneville, Ala., when two by now famed cases involving the shooting and murder of civil rights workers came to trial last week. From their relaxed air it was plain that few in Hayneville expected any convictions.

First defendant was Thomas Coleman, 56, a pudgy former highway department employee, who had already been acquitted of the shotgun slaying of Episcopal Seminarian Jonathan Daniels, and was subsequently charged with wounding Daniels' companion, Roman Catholic Priest Richard Morrisroe. Though the priest had been blasted in the back, Coleman was indicted only for "assault and battery," a charge that Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers termed ridiculous. As the trial began, Flowers requested dismissal of the case, so as to leave open the possibility that Coleman might be rein-dieted on a charge of assault with intent to kill. Circuit Judge T. Werth Thagard was only too happy to comply —dismissing the case "with prejudice," meaning that he did not want to hear it again in any event. (In the unlikely possibility that Coleman is reindicted, another judge can preside.)

Next day, in the whitewashed courthouse, Klansman Eugene Thomas, 43, one of three men charged with murdering Detroit Housewife Viola Liuzzo near Selma, faced a jury that included eight Negroes. It was the first racially mixed criminal jury in local history, the result of a federal court order that Lowndes County, which is 84% Negro, include a reasonable number of Negroes on its venire lists. But the Negroes were carefully screened, and turned out to be, in Flowers' bitter words, "nothing more than Uncle Toms." Despite impressive circumstantial evidence —an FBI ballistics expert testified that the bullet removed from the woman's brain was fired from a revolver owned by Thomas—the verdict was "not guilty." When Judge Thagard asked the Negroes individually whether they had concurred, each looked at the floor and muttered: "Yes, sir."