The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South by Gail Williams O'Brien

Author:Gail Williams O'Brien [O'Brien, Gail Williams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780807824757
Google: jH6RzQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1999-11-15T00:11:56.119552+00:00

Morton's Funeral Parlor in the aftermath of the patrol raid on February 26. (Courtesy of United States Attorney's Office, Middle District of Tennessee)

As Justice Department attorney Eleanor Bontecou recalled, Bomar and Dickinson “wanted to carry out totally different policies” in Columbia.93 No one summarized the pair's differences and their import better than Methodist Publishing Company employee and State Guard captain Walter W. Hogan. In a letter to Dickinson drafted during the grand jury hearing, Hogan agonized over the havoc wreaked in the Bottom by state troopers, and he lamented the unequal justice they meted out to blacks and whites. “On that Tuesday morning when all the shooting was over the Mink Slide area was pretty well wrecked,” he began, and he continued:

I would not criticize the Highway Patrol for any plate glass they shot out or anything else they did to get those negroes out of there, and I think they are to be commended for not killing anyone in the process of getting them out. But I feel very strongly on the matter of deliberately wrecking places after the shooting was over. I have no idea what the Federal Grand Jury will do but I have an idea they will do nothing about the Highway Patrol—yet I know they stole cigarettes by the carton out of those stores and I know at least one brick was thrown through an undamaged window because those things I saw.

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