RACES: Second-Class Citizen

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In the State penitentiary at Richmond, Va., young Odell Waller awaited death this week by electrocution. A Negro sharecropper, guilty of murdering a white man, Waller would have died long since if his case had not become a cause célèbre.

Liberals, writers, college president, labor leaders, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge had asked the President to investigate. Fortnight ago, 18,000 Negroes, massing at Madison Square Garden to orate about racial discrimination, had added their petition. Worried over the Negro's role in democracy, the New York Times declared: "The Waller case transcends sectional issues."

50 Sacks of Wheat. The case had a humble beginning. Waller sharecropped a wheat and tobacco farm in Pittsylvania County in southern Virginia. His landlord was Oscar Davis, a white tenant farmer who, no matter how hard he worked and sang hymns in the Methodist church, never got out of debt. Black and white, Waller and Davis were two poor, desperate men at the bottom of the South's economic heap. When the Government curtailed Davis' tobacco allotment, Davis cut Waller's acreage and denied the poverty-stricken Negro his due: one-quarter share of the threshed wheat. The Waller family—Annie, his aunt, Mollie, his wife—faced a winter of starvation. Waller put a pistol in his pocket, went to Davis to demand his 50 sacks of wheat. According to Waller: "Mr. Davis said I won't gonna get that damn wheat away from here," and reached into his pocket. "He usually carried a gun. I opened my pistol and commenced to shoot at him." Davis, shot four times, died.

Waller was arrested for murder. A young Virginia lawyer defended him. A jury of ten farmers (all employers of sharecroppers), one businessman and a carpenter listened to the case for two days, took 52 minutes to find him guilty.

Poll-Tax State. Liberals rushed to his defense. Among them was John F. Finerty, prominent corporation lawyer and civil-libertarian. Suave, greying, publicity-shy Mr. Finerty had fought in other causes: notably for Sacco & Vanzetti, Tom Mooney.

Finerty maintained that Waller had not been tried by a jury of his peers, argued that destitute "second-class citizens" like Waller were barred from serving on Virginia juries, because they could not afford to pay Virginia's $1.50 a year (cumulative) poll tax. Juries were generally picked from poll-taxpayers' lists. But though he had made the point, Waller's young trial lawyer had not introduced , proof of it into the record. Because of that oversight, Finerty's appeals for a new trial were denied by one court after another.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused the case twice. Protests grew louder & louder.

Virginians were vexed over "outsiders sticking their noses into Virginia's affairs." But some were also deeply disturbed over Virginia justice. Finerty was joined before the Circuit Court of Appeals by Edmund Preston, Richmond attorney, member of the State's leading law firm. Governor Colgate W. Darden Jr. granted stay after stay. The Richmond Times-Dispatch declared: "Add the fact that we are in a war for survival in which we are depending heavily for victory on the colored races, and the significance of the Waller case becomes clearer."