He Calls Me by Lightning by S Jonathan Bass

Author:S Jonathan Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2017-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

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WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN

In a bitter irony, ACLU attorney Charles “Chuck” Morgan used Caliph Washington to integrate Alabama’s prisons, but he did little to help Washington gain his release.

ASLEE WASHINGTON, CALIPH’S mother, could not understand why her son was still in jail. She believed that God worked a miracle through Judge Frank Johnson, and she wanted to thank him and ask him why Caliph remained behind bars. Aslee, who never learned to read or write, asked a friend to write Johnson and request an audience with him. “She would like very much to thank you personally for ordering his release,” the friend wrote, “and would also like to see your order.” In July 1965, Washington’s family and friends believed that Johnson’s decree would result in Caliph’s immediate release from prison. “There are so many things about his release and re-arrest that are puzzling,” the family friend wrote Johnson.

In response, the judge wrote Aslee Washington that her request for a private meeting was inappropriate and unnecessary. “This Court’s order was based strictly upon the applicable and controlling laws as I understood it,” he explained. “Nothing else entered into the matter; therefore, no expression of appreciation is appropriate.” Johnson explained that Caliph Washington was represented in his court by “competent counsel,” and that any questions should be directed to that attorney, Fred Blanton.

Blanton, however, would not represent Caliph Washington during the appeal of Johnson’s ruling. “I would have liked very much to have supported your decision in the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit,” Blanton wrote Johnson. “I had hoped the court in New Orleans would have appointed me, but such was not the case.” He complained that the Washington family talked with attorneys for the ACLU and the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP and that he had been “frozen out of the picture.” He wanted to help “indigent defendants,” like Caliph Washington, receive quality legal advice, but “to be upstaged, especially after that hectic day in Montgomery last December, is hard to take.”

What Blanton did not realize was that the Washington family had no patience to gamble on another court-appointed attorney. They needed some certainty after the last public defendant, Kermit Edwards, mounted defenses that twice resulted in the death penalty for his client. Within days of the state’s appeal to the Fifth Circuit, the Washington family formally retained Orzell Billingsley, Jr., and David Hood, Jr., to represent Caliph in all state and federal courts. Part of that agreement “authorized and empowered” them to “employ any and all other attorneys” that they deemed necessary to “represent us in this matter.” Since the Washingtons had no money to pay attorneys, Billingsley looked for funding sources (and legal assistance) elsewhere—namely from the NAACP and the ACLU.

Orzell Billingsley asked for assistance from his close friend and longtime drinking partner, Charles “Chuck” Morgan, Jr., who opened the ACLU’s southern regional office in Atlanta in 1964. The thirty-four-year-old Morgan earned a law degree from the University of Alabama and maintained a lucrative private law practice in

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