Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle

Author:Kevin Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2004-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

As soon as he was back at his desk Monday morning, September 21, White had renewed his offensive against the colored lawyers. The safety of distance gave his efforts a harder edge. He sent Judge Jayne a detailed account of Cecil Rowlette’s demands and a plea for help “in checking the rapacity of these lawyers.” His closest ally in the Detroit branch, meanwhile, received strict orders to ratchet up the pressure. “I do not think it would be a bad idea for you to hint gently that... if necessary we will make public all of the various things these lawyers have said and done which will end them for all time in the eyes of the colored people,” he said. “They have got to know that we are doing the employing in the case and we are going to pay the bill and it’s not for them to dictate to us what we shall do.” By week’s end, he had the response he wanted. Julian Perry, who had been all but silent throughout White’s time in Detroit, stopped by Jayne’s chambers to say that he, too, wanted a “first-class white attorney” to take over the defense. He would insist that his co-counsels follow his lead. What’s more, he would personally offer the job to the NAACP’s first choice, the former Bar Association president. “The situation is simmering along nicely,” Jayne reported Friday.58

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

All week long, word of Whites pressure on the defense team had been spreading through colored Detroit. Friday night the backlash hit, striking at the true heart of the NAACP’s campaign. That evening, Reverend Joseph Gomez, pastor of powerful Bethel AME, told a packed meeting at the colored YMCA that he was launching his own Sweet Defense Fund, explicitly intended to be “a local organization, uncontrolled by outside politics.” Gomez himself was probably doing a bit of ministerial maneuvering, setting himself up against Second Baptist’s control of the NAACP branch, perhaps even exacting a bit of revenge for Bradby imperiously shutting Gomez out of the branch’s executive board earlier in the year. Whatever his motivation, Gomez tapped into a deep well of resentment at the association’s high-handedness. By meeting’s end, some of the most important organizations in the black community— including Gladys’s home church, St. Matthew’s Episcopal—had joined Gomez’s campaign, and plans were under way for a competing series of Sunday rallies that were sure to drain money away from the NAACP.59

That news, in turn, gave Cecil Rowlette all the leverage he needed to derail White’s offensive. In the course of a bitterly fought conference with the branch officers Saturday afternoon, Rowlette tossed aside his earlier concessions to White and instead demanded the right to take the case to the next stage the following weekend, when the defendants would be arraigned before Judge Murphy and the defense would have its last opportunity to have the charges dropped. To make sure that the branch was listening, he resurrected his promise to resign if he didn’t get his way, a threat that suddenly seemed much more dangerous than it had the week before.

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