The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan

315 Pages·2016·3.53 MB·English

by  Laurence Leamer

Dedication
Dedicated to the memory of Julian Bond (1940–2015)
Contents
Dedication
Prologue: Fists Against the Earth
PART ONE | NIGHT OF THE BURNING CROSS
Klan Business
A Public Display
Thirteen Knots
“Good Job, Tiger”
A Precious Enclave
The Klan’s Signature
The Value of Things
Bloody Nails
An Open Casket
A Major Injustice
Missionary Work
Prayers in the Night
A Lesser Crime
Black Sheep
A Capital Offense
The Second-Most-Hated Man
A Matter of Justice
“The Forces of Evil”
“Sizzling of the Flesh”
A Verdict
PART TWO | A TIME OF JUDGMENT
“Where in the Hell . . .”
Sunday School
Turning Back the Tide
“Who Is Shelton?”
The Day of Reckoning
Freedom Rides
A Personal Brawl
Riding Again
Eternal Vigilance
The Schoolhouse Door
Good Working People
“Seeds of Hate”
A Race Thing
Scrawny Pine
A Follower of Christ
A Pain in the Stomach
A Political Prisoner
Never
Censored
Lowering the Boom
Private Matters
Fighting the Fight
A Wannabe
PART THREE | ROLL CALL OF JUSTICE
“Novel, but Unlikely”
An Eye for an Eye
A Clear and Powerful Message
Natural Consequences
A Book of Prophecy
“As You Lie, You Forget”
Intruders in the Night
“Blood Will Flow”
Shots in the Night
The End of an Era
Sending a Signal
Curveballs
“Nice Job, Daddy”
Purity of the Race
A Jury of One’s Peers
Trading Places
“That’s My Mom”
Remembrance
A Question of Justice
Death Has No Hold
Where Are They Now?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photos Section
About the Author
Also by Laurence Leamer
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue: Fists Against the Earth
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING on March 21, 1981, a young woman was out
riding her bicycle with her dog along Herndon Avenue in Mobile, Alabama, a
modest residential street no more than three hundred yards long. It was the first
day of spring, and in the predawn light, the woman saw what she assumed was a
dummy hanging from a camphor tree and continued down the road. A few
minutes later, an elderly man went out to buy the morning paper and saw what
he figured was a black man breaking into a house. Once he got back to his own
home, he called the police. Other passersby saw what they thought was a man
strung up by a noose, his feet barely off the ground, and they too phoned the
police.
When the officers arrived there shortly after dawn, they found the body of a
black man hanging from a tree. They cordoned off the vacant lot at 112 Herndon
Avenue but left the body there and waited for the coroner to do the job of taking
it down and removing it. When one black person heard about the murder, he
called a friend, and that person called someone else, and soon scores of black
spectators arrived.
There had not been a lynching in America in a quarter century, and no one
standing looking at the body had ever seen such a crime, but they had heard
about it from family members and read about it in social science books in
school. And they believed they knew what had occurred. White men had lynched
a black man, and they had done it to send a message of intimidation and terror.
This was something they thought would never happen again, and many of the
black onlookers wept, others fell to the ground beating their fists against the
earth.
PART ONE
Night of the Burning Cross
Klan Business
AT THE WEEKLY meeting of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America
(UKA) in Theodore, Alabama, on March 18, 1981, Bennie Jack Hays stood
before the dozen Klansmen and raged against the rise of black people. Bennie
was the Great Titan, the highest-ranking officer of the UKA in the southern half
of Alabama. The bespectacled, white-haired sixty-four-year-old might have
spent his last years rocking his grandchildren on the porch, but he had risen
quickly in the Klan despite being Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant
organization that had once considered Catholics no better than infidels.
The Klan leader lived in a house on seven acres in Theodore, which was
fifteen miles southwest of Mobile. Theodore was a poor white man’s redoubt,
small homes and trailers spread out among the jungle-like foliage. It was as close
to paradise as Bennie was likely to get, especially because he had a cabin for
Klan meetings on his property.
The Klansmen attending the evening assembly sat in several rows of chairs.
An altar-like shrine stood in the front of the room. There set a candle, a container
of water, an open Bible, and an American flag with a cross laid across it. A
Confederate flag stood in the corner.
“Your Excellency, the Sacred Altar of the Klan is prepared, the Fiery Cross
illumines the Klavern,” said Thaddeus “Red” Betancourt, the Klokard or teacher,
pointing to the lit candle.
“Klansmen, what means the Fiery Cross?” asked Bennie’s son-in-law Frank
Cox, the Exalted Cyclops or Klavern president.
“We serve and sacrifice for the right,” said all the Klansmen.
No one in the Klavern spoke the sacred language with more passion than did
Teddy Lamar Kyzar. He was a plump, expressionless young man with an
enormous head and pink, baby-like skin. Kyzar stood just barely over five feet
and looked like a boy among grown men. A few years before, a group of black
men had stolen Kyzar’s watch. From then on, he had hated the whole race, and
the Klan gave him the chance to strike back.
Some of his fellow Klansmen dismissed Kyzar because of his height, but that
just compelled him to do almost anything to be accepted as their equal. He
placed himself at the head of the line volunteering for what the UKA called
“missionary work,” and his favorite involved beating up black men.
When the Klansmen had their victim bloodied, bruised, and spread-eagled on
the ground, the last thing they did before walking away was to tell the man
straight-out: “The cops are Klan, and you go to the cops, and we’ll come back
and kill you.”
Kyzar lived in Mobile on Herndon Avenue in one of the four houses Bennie
owned and had broken up into apartments. A few weeks earlier, the Klan leader
had come to the street and thundered about whites watching black Mardi Gras
parades.
For the next black parade, Bennie commanded that Kyzar and some other
Klavern members slash tires all around the area and ordered that the tires be cut
on the sides so they could not be patched and that at least two tires of each car be
punctured. The Klansmen waited until the sounds of music and cheers wafted
out across the streets and then started slashing and puncturing away. Kyzar
bragged that he had damaged tires on sixty-five cars in one parking lot alone.
That had been a great day for Kyzar, but since then, he had gotten in trouble.
He had taken a recruit’s application money and spent it at a bar. The Klavern
could have decided he was not proper Klan material and thrown him out. But he
was liked by a number of Klan members, and the group decided instead that they
would whip him.
Kyzar shuffled to the front of the room. If he had walked out of the meeting,
no one would have stopped him, but these were his friends and he was part of
what he considered a marvelous kinship, and he knew he had to take his
punishment.
Per protocol, the sacred items were taken off the altar, and Kyzar knelt down
with his hands on the wooden surface. After a few words justifying and
ennobling what was about to take place, the Exalted Cyclops hit him with a
leather belt. Kyzar tried not to flinch or to show any pain, but he was close to
crying. After the Exalted Cyclops struck him the last of the required fifty lashes,
Kyzar limped back to his seat.
The men deferred to Bennie not only because he was the Great Titan, but
also because they saw him as a man of a substance far beyond theirs. Bennie also
had all kinds of properties and business interests to which they could hardly dare
aspire.
He was born Herman Otto Houston in rural Missouri in 1916. His own father