The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists

Series II: Southern Activists

Sub-series 3: Clifford and Virginia Durr

Appendix II.3G: Transcript of Audiotape 22

Location: ?the Durrs’ home

Speaker: Clifford Durr

Interviewer: ?Henrietta McGuire

Date: Unknown (probably late 1960s or early 1970s)

Repository: University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University, Special

Collections Department, Historical Collections and Labor Archives

Transcriber: Barry Kernfeld

Item number: Audiotape 22

Occasionally, both here and on some of the other audiotapes in the Durr sub-series of the Jack Rabin Collection, Clifford Durr indicates that these recordings are being made in preparation for writing a book. His biographer John A. Salmond discusses Durr’s unfinished autobiographical project in the final chapter of The Conscience of a Lawyer: Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899-1975 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama, 1990), 202-204. The exact relationship remains unclear between, on the one hand, these audiotapes in the Rabin Collection, and on the other, Durr’s autobiographical documents at the Alabama Department of History and Archives, detailed in Salmond’s footnotes to the pages cited immediately above. Did Salmond, who trawled exhaustively through the Alabama Archives, choose not to mention the striking Henry Jackson case that Durr discusses in detail? (See below, pages 13-18 of this transcript.) Or, as perhaps seems more likely, is the present tape a unique item, not represented among the autobiographical documents in Alabama?

Audiotape 22 runs out at the conclusion of Durr’s account of the police court portion of the MacMurray College case, which came to be known as Nesmith vs. Alford. The box for audiotape 19 in the Jack Rabin Collection is labeled thus: “Side 1. Continuation of McMurray [sic] case beginning with circuit court trial. Side 2. Continuation of McMurray. Beginning of Zellner.” But this material has been erased on audiotape 19, and the remainder of Durr’s spoken account of this case is apparently lost, at least in this particular version. In Standing Against Dragons: Three Southern Lawyers in an Era of Fear (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1998), 184-187, Sarah Hart Brown discusses Nesmith vs. Alford. Brown refers to an interview of Clifford Durr by “Henrietta,” and Brown cites an unidentified item describing the continuation of the case, the “Henrietta Transcript,” that resides in Durr’s papers at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. The following transcript includes the first portion of that same story, and the woman interviewer is likely to be Henrietta. Her surname may be McGuire; see the introductory notes to the transcript of audiotape 21.

In this transcript, “[?]” indicates an inaudible word and “[ ? ? ]” indicates something more substantial—two or three words, perhaps a whole phrase, and occasionally an entire sentence—that is inaudible.

Durr: Let’s see if this is recording now. It’s old tape. I hope this is not the one that was getting a little weak and unhappy . . . [interruption of recording]

[recording resumes] I think I’ll hold this close to me. This might be better.

As I’ve said earlier, I didn’t come back to Montgomery with the idea of crusading for any cause of any kind, but – and there was no particular agitation as far as the Negroes were concerned. Things were moving along smoothly. As far as a white person could tell, most of the Negroes seemed to be accepting themselves at the white person’s evaluation of them, or at least they were acting that way.

McGuire: [distant and inaudible]

Durr: When we came back – we came back in about May of ’51. It was almost two years later before I was back in the practice of law. The – there were a few who were trying to do something toward getting Negroes registered to vote. One was E. D. Nixon, a Pullman-car porter and quite an interesting character. He was head of the local organization of the N.A.A.C.P., which was very small. Nixon himself told me that it took about 10 attempts before he was registered to vote, over the years. Finally, it took – I believe he told me he had actually filed a suit in court. So they let him register if he would dismiss the suit. Also, he would try his best to get lawyers for Negroes who had coun – who couldn’t get counsel, who were charged with rape and like heinous crimes, and trying to get a little justice in the courts, but there was very little he could do.

He had been a client of my nephew Nesbitt Elmore before I came to Montgomery, so he began to come to me for some small legal problems and also because Virginia was interested in the – she had been interested in the voting rights business for a long time, why he would tell her about what was going on in the Negro community.

He had very little support from the Negro community as a whole. As a matter of fact, the attitude of some of the upper-class Negroes – not all, by any means – was that they wish this fellow Nixon would quiet down and leave things alone, because they’re getting on all right and he’s going to . . .

McGuire: Rock the boat.

Durr: . . . rock the boat and get them in trouble.

Nixon was very understanding of that. He said, as he put it, “I work for the Pullman Company. I’m a member of the union, and my bread and butter doesn’t come from Montgomery, so I can do things that they can’t afford to do. They would have to lose their jobs.”

I suppose the main line of my – the cases that did have some social significance that I handled – and this was not limited to Negroes – were cases against the loan sharks, and that is a problem that has not been settled yet. Not all Negroes by [recording interrupted].

[recording resumes] Negroes and sometimes whites would come to me. Their salaries had been garnished and judgments had been obtained against them – for judgments obtained on – for money borrowed from these loan sharks. The Alabama law fixed the maximum legal interest rate at 8%. Nevertheless these loan sharks were charging anywhere from 200 to 800 percent per year, so if a Negro borrowed $25, he would be paying that back $5 a month, and he might be paying that for several years. You can see what that would amount to in the end, but if there was one default, then they would get judgment. Judgment would be obtained against them.

Of course these people were uneducated. They didn’t know their rights, and so little was involved, they couldn’t afford to employ lawyers. Maybe $25, maybe $50, which doesn’t allow any leeway for paying lawyers’ fees, but it was very important to a person that might be making $50 a week and has a wife and five children.

So I started going into court, knowing that these people couldn’t pay me. When they would file suit against my clients, I would agree to represent them, and I would immediately put in a plea of usury.

The long and short of it was, the case was either dropped or settled. In the course of about one month, I knocked out about $3,000 of claims with a little more than telephone calls. The Negro would come to me with a suit having been filed against him. I’d call up the loan shark, and I said, “Now look here. I want a complete statement from you as to every dollar you’ve loaned him and every dollar he’s repaid. If he still legally owes you any money, I’ll try to help you get it. But I want to tell you that if you are suing him when he doesn’t legally owe you money, you’re going to have all the trouble in court I can cause you for malicious prosecution,” or sometimes it would be seizing their property, things of that sort.

The long and short of it was, generally the loan shark will say, “Let me look back at my books. I’ll call you back.” Then he would call back, “I’ve made a mistake. I’ve been checking up here, and he – that note is paid off.”

I remember one typical case where a Negro woman came to me in a great state of distress. Her husband had gone to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. He had given her about $10, which was all the cash. He had a little – a second-hand automobile that he was paying for in time. The collectors for one of these loan companies had come to her that morning and said, “You still owe – your husband owes $175 on that car, and unless we have this money in full by tomorrow morning, we’re going to seize the car.” She was in a great state of distress, because the husband’s job was not on a bus line, and the car was the only way he had to get to work, and she didn’t have but the $10. So I called up the loan shark who had financed this deal and told him again I’d help him get any money legally owed, but if he seized that car, he was going to find himself in trouble in the courts. Again, he said he would check up. He called back, and he said, “I’ve made a mistake. I’ve checked my records, and the balance due is $6 and a half.” So I said, “All right. My client is on the way down to your office with a $10 bill, and I’m expecting her to come back here with that note marked ‘paid in full’ and with change from that $10 bill.” That was the kind of thing that was going on.

Then we had a little gimmick that was being used, particularly in the automobile financing, to cover up the fact that there was usury. You would sell cars to people on what they called the “time price.” They would pay for it on time. The time price was considerably higher than the cash price, which meant that interest was being charged, and insurance and all kind of charges, and then the conditional sales contract would then be discounted with a bite, and the dealer would get his money out.

I was representing some truck drivers at the time. I won’t go into – fully into that story, but the most – a good deal of the trucking that is done, is – you see the name of the trucking company on the truck, but generally the drivers own their tractors and trailers. The arrangement is the trucking company finds the business. They’re the ones that have the licenses from the Interstate Commerce Commission [?], and so they will pay the drivers a percentage of the revenue. The driver would provide his own tractor and trailer and pay his own – all of his expenses, in percentage – in return for a percentage of the revenue.

These truck drivers first came to me, and my associate Irving James felt that they were being shortchanged on the traffic charges, that they would bill the shipper at one rate and reporting -- reported a lower rate to the drivers. We checked into that and found that it was true. But this particular company also had a subsidiary that sold the drivers their tractors and trailers on time on these conditional sales contracts. These tractors and trailers are not small affairs. They’ll run up, the two together, 20- or 25-thousand dollars. So the monthly payments might run to anywhere from six- to eight-hundred dollars a month.

When we began to check into the freight charges, the trucking company began to put pressure on the drivers by canceling their hauling leases. Here they were left with no business to haul, and these payments of 6- or 8-hundred dollars a month. Maybe they’d paid a half or two-thirds of their tractors and trailers, and then they would be seized, and then they would lose all their money.

I had several cases in the state courts, which I lost. The cases were decided on an old Alabama case that was accepted as law throughout the country, called the Time – the Tidewater case, which said, in effect, this really wasn’t usury. This just was a time price, and anybody could contract to sell at any price they saw fit.

This kind of situation, it was obvious that the bank that partly handled the paper had been in on the financing from the very beginning. They had provided all the forms, showed them how to calculate the prices and everything else. So I found a provision in the national banking act that said that if a national bank collected usurious interest, the person against whom it was charged could, after paying the debt in full, turn around, within two years, and sue the bank, by way of penalty, for twice all the interest charged. This is not just the excess over the legal rate, but twice all the interest charged.

So I finally got a few of these truck drivers to – who had paid off their tractors and trailers – to agree on a penalty suit in the federal court. Interestingly, I had about 12 cases – more than that -- drawn up, these truckers wanting to go ahead with the suit. But finally, all of them withdrew but three. They said, “We’re afraid. We’ve got to do business with the bank and we don’t want – the banks, and we don’t want to make them mad.” But I went ahead with the three. I lost it in the District Court. I appealed to the Court of Appeals, and they upheld me that this was – time price was nothing but a device to conceal usury and quite a bit of consternation, but the banks continued to collect usurious interest and admitted it, but nobody would bring suits because they were afraid of their credit – the effect on their credit standing.

But that was the kind of thing I was doing, but we did know Nixon and were aware of his work, and Nixon would occasionally – one of the great grievances of the Negroes in Montgomery was their treatment on the buses. Under a city ordinance, the driver could – the Negroes were required to sit in one part of the bus and the whites in another. The Negroes even entered the bus by the rear door and the whites in the front door – front door – and very often the collection was – the money was – had to be paid at the front door, and then the Negro had to get out of the bus and go around to the back door of the bus to enter. Sometimes after the Negro had paid his money and headed for the back door, the bus driver would shut the doors and drive on and leave them stranded, as a – as a good joke. Their treatment had been, traditionally for many years, very rude and arbitrary, depending upon the nature of the driver. Very often – about 85% of the traffic was Negro, and the Negroes would – in the morning and the afternoon, when they were going to their jobs – they would be packed in to – off in the rear of the bus, like sardines, while seats – empty seats – would be kept at the front, reserved for the whites, who didn’t use the bus at all. So here are the Negroes standing and crowded in, with empty seats reserved for the whites.

This had been a long-time grievance, and Nixon used to talk to us – he said – about it. He said, if we could just get the Negroes to agree to stay off the bus one day, to show the bus company where their revenue comes from, we think things would be better.

This hadn’t gotten beyond the conversational stage, but two of our daughters then were at the high-school age, where they would go to dance, and their – Anne, the oldest sister, would send them down some of her evening dresses or some of her clothes, which Virginia would try to make over for them. She happened to ask Mr. Nixon one day if he knew a good sewing-woman who would work at night and help her with the sewing. He said yes, Mrs. Rosa Parks was a seamstress who works – does alterations for the Montgomery Fair. She has an invalid mother and quite a lot of expense, and she does work at night. So Virginia had gotten Mrs. Parks on a number of occasions to come out and work with her in the sewing, and we’d become very fond of her. She was a woman of – a very quiet, pleasant person of a great deal of dignity and self-respect. We found out that she could type a little bit and was also working for Mr. Nixon as his secretary for the N.A.A.C.P. So she was involved in some activities of a racial nature.

Then again, Nixon came in one day and brought a lawyer – Negro lawyer – just been admitted to the bar, Fred Gray. Fred had no money for law books, no-one to turn to, and so I offered them the use of my law library and told him that I would help him with his little cases and show him how to do the things, because regardless of how bright a lawyer is or how good his legal school education is, there’s some of the practical things that you have to turn to another lawyer to do. So he would come to me with his first little automobile claims, and I would show him how to draw his complaint. I saw that you didn’t have to tell him but the once, and [?] examine an [?] of title, what to look for and things of this sort. He would sometimes use my library, and I became very fond of him.

A case finally developed on the buses that looked like it might be of cause for a test suit challenging the constitutionality. There was a young Negro girl named Claudette Colvin, who was not more than 15 or 16 years old at the most. Hardly weighed 100 pounds. Had no background -- her family were uneducated – they’d had no background in civil rights activities. They’re the kind that generally just did their job and tried to stay out of trouble. She was going to the Carver High School, and there was a bus that came by just about the time that school got out, so she was taking that bus back home. It stopped in town and was full of these school kids, all Negroes, but it happened that a couple of white men got in the bus. So Claudette Colvin and the girl sitting next to her were ordered to get up and give their seat to these white men. The other girl did, but Claudette for some reason refused to move. She got stubborn and, as she put it, “I done paid my dollar and I ain’t got no right to move.” The long and short of it was that policemen were called. Three of them were – appeared. They put handcuffs on her, took her out of the bus in handcuffs, this 15-year-old girl that weighed, say, about 100 pounds, and she was roughed up a little bit.

The people in the Negro community were outraged, including Nixon, and they had gone down to see the police commissioner, a man by the name of Dave Birmingham, who was sort of a Jim Folsum type and a fairly decent kind of a guy. He had tried to keep the police from brutalizing the Negroes as best he could, but he was – this delegation headed by Nixon told him the story of Claudette Colvin, and he just said, this is not right. So he immediately called the manager of the bus line. Now this bus line is part of a national chain owned in Chicago, the National City Lines. He said – told the manager he was sending this delegation over to see them. The long and short of it was that after some discussion, the manager of the bus company agreed to go along with the idea of a first of – for better courtesy, more courteous treatment, which of course was the claim that they insisted on [ ? ? ] that anyway. But what they call the “first come, first served” program, that the Negroes would still sit in the back of the buses, the whites in the front, but the Negroes would fill it from the rear and – as they moved toward the front, and the whites would start sitting in front, move toward the back, and then when all seats were taken, the next person that got on, whether Negro or white, would stand up. That was – looked like it would solve the issue. But the bus company’s lawyer, who was a good, solid Dixiecrat, persuaded the bus company that this was illegal and would be a violation of statute – I don’t think it would at all – and again reminded the bus company that its franchise – it had a 30-year franchise from the city – would soon be up for renewal, and this might cause complications, so they better not do this kind of thing.

Appeal was taken in Claudette Colvin’s case, but she didn’t turn out to be the right kind of client, and so the case was dropped. About six months passed, and one night Virginia and I had just gotten home from the office and put on a pot of coffee, as we generally do, when the phone rang. It was Mr. Nixon. He said, “I’ve just come back from my run on the railroad, and my wife tells me that Mrs. Parks had been arrested. I have called the police department. They recognize my voice or recognize that I am a Negro. They won’t tell me why she’s been arrested or give me any of the details. Will you please call up and find out?” So, being a lawyer, of course they’d have to talk to me. So they told me that she was arrested for the violation of this segregation ordinance, and the bond was only $100. Mr. Nixon had happened to own some real estate in Montgomery, and he was in position to make bond. My car was in the shop for repairs at the time, so I told him, if you’d come by and pick me up, I’ll go down with him and we’ll get Mrs. Parks out on bond.

Virginia overheard the conversation, and of course she – Mrs. Parks was – she was very devoted to Mrs. Parks, so she went down with us, and we made bond and got Mrs. Parks out of jail. We took her home for that night, and she made some coffee, and I had the feeling that she would like very much to use this as a test case. She told me the story – she told us the story of what had happened. Of course, according to common belief in Montgomery – and there’s a story going around that she’d been riding the buses, sitting up front for three or four days, trying to get arrested, so as to make a test case. Well, it was a spontaneous action if there ever was one. We asked her why – what had – did happen. She had gotten on the bus, which served a predominantly Negro neighborhood. It was very seldom a white got on. She sat about the third seat from the front. The Negroes just sat most anywhere, because no whites got on. It just happened, as they pulled out, two white men got on. She was asked to get up and give one of them a seat, and again the woman sitting next to her had gotten up and relinquished her seat. But she said, “I don’t know what happened to me.” Said, “It had been stuffy in the shop where I had been working all day. It was pretty close, and I was tired. My arthritis was bothering me. I’d done my shopping and I had my lap full of groceries, and I just decided – something got into me, and I said, I’ve had it. I’m not going to do it.” And that was – just this impulse of the moment, was what triggered off the Montgomery bus boycott.

In any event, after we got a hold – talking to her, I told her – I said, if you want me to represent you, I can, and I think I can get you off, because you haven’t violated the Montgomery city code, which with you have been charged with, because you were – there was not another seat available for you, and the code especially provides that no-one should be required to relinquish a seat unless another seat is available. But I said if you do want to make a test case, I think the city lawyer is going to switch around the state law or do all kinds of things, and this means the case in on the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. It’ll to cost a lot of money, and I said, moreover – besides, I want to keep on living in Montgomery if I can. But I said Fred Gray is – could arrange things with the N.A.A.C.P. legal defense fund better than I could. Fred was out of town. So I get the case set for Monday. I knew he would be back that Saturday. I just happened to have seen him that morning. So if you want to make a test case, why, we’ll let him handle it.

That night she didn’t quite tell me what she wanted to do, but I – I thought I knew. But Virginia and I went on home and left her there. Her husband, by the way, was pleading with her, “Rosa, please, don’t you get in trouble with the white folks. Please don’t you do it.” But in any event, she decided she would make a test case of it

The – I believe the arrest was Thursday night. The case was set for Monday morning. Nixon got busy with some of his friends and decided that here would be a good occasion for this boycott of the bus, the Negroes staying off the bus one day just to show the bus company where its money was coming from. So they got busy, and they tried to pass the word around. But the Negro community of Montgomery, as you know, is pretty badly scattered. They got up an old mimeograph machine, and they worked up a statement urging the Negroes to stay off the buses Monday, just as a protest against the – this was the day of Rosa Parks’s trial.

Well, they had quite a break. The story I got at the time was this – it was deliberately [?-ed] by one of the Negroes, and I think I got it from Nixon at the time – that one of these flyers was dropped to the sidewalk, and a white man saw it and picked it up and dashed immediately down to the Montgomery Advertiser in his excitement. The general idea was, look what these damn niggers are up to. So, as a consequence, Sunday morning paper had a front page story about the bus boycott, and the general thrust was that – was look what they’re up to. Of course the Negro preachers got the story with their breakfast coffee.

McGuire: [?] opened up?

Durr: The churches [?] while the word was passed around. Monday morning, these buses were running empty. Occasionally you would see maybe two or three Negroes who hadn’t got the word, but by late afternoon, you saw only a few scattering of white people.

Of course Mrs. Parks was found guilty in the recorder’s court and the appeal was taken. Now, Gray, being only about a year-and-a-half out of law school, of course had quite a burden on his shoulder, and he was in and out of my office quite a bit. Martin Luther King [?]. In fact, on the law involved, I drew up a – the legal part of those early statements that he made, and we were in constant consultation. The people of Montgomery knew what was going on, but it wasn’t publicized, so there was not much that could be done about it.

But in any event, even following the New Orleans affair, we began to get a few rather unpleasant phone calls, and they increased, but they were not – they were annoying, but not too bad.

Again, a little sidelight. This same day, Birmingham, this police commissioner that I mentioned, had formerly lived in Birmingham and had been a good friend of Virginia’s father. Virginia had gone over to the post office to get the mail one morning and ran into Dave Birmingham. Dave said, “Virginia, are you being bothered or threatened to any extent?” She said, “We’ve had some nasty unpleasant telephone calls, and a lot of people are sort of staying away from us, but nothing that I’m – we’re taking too seriously.” He said, “Nobody’s tried to burn any crosses on your lawn?” He said – she said, “No.” He says, “If anybody starts anything of that sort, you let me know.” “But,” he says, “I don’t think they will. I don’t think you’re going to have any trouble.” Virginia says, “Why?” He says, “They’re scared of Cliff.” She said, “What do you mean?” He says, “You know, the Durrs are known as killers.” Virginia was flabbergasted. She said, “What – where did they get that reputation? What is it based on?” He said, “You know how Cliff acted down there in New Orleans He blew his top and tried to kill this fellow Crouch.” “But,” he said, “it’s in the blood.” He said, “His grandpa on one occasion tried to kill a fellow and – right there on Court Square.” He said, “He pulled the trigger of his pistol five times, but the ammunition was old, and it misfired.” So Virginia said, “Didn’t they – wasn’t he indicted for attempted murder or something?” “Oh,” he said, “no. Everybody knew Mr. Durr was a solid citizen. Nothing ever happened to him.”

So Virginia came home. Again, he reassured her that he didn’t think we were going to have any trouble, but he would be sure – feel free to call him if anybody did start things, but this reputation of the Durrs being killers would protect us.

Virginia came home. By the time she got to the office, she wanted to know all about Grandfather Durr’s attempted murder. He had been a very solid, respectable citizen, one that was in the cotton business, Lehman, Durr, and Company, a pillar of the First Presbyterian Church, and asked me if this was true. I told her of course it was. I told her the story as it happened, as I’d always heard it.

He was a man who was very slow to wrath, but he had a high regard for his own sense of honor. The man had come to his office to argue about some business matter and become very rude. And Grandfather, in a very dignified way, had kept his temper. The man had finally left. Two or three hours later, the more Grandfather thought of it, the madder he got. He was finally – this was an affront to his honor and integrity that he couldn’t put up with. So he reached in the bottom drawer of his [?] desk and got out this pistol. He knew this man hung out around Court Square, which is the main square of Montgomery. He went up to him, and he said, now Mr. so-and-so, “you’ve reflected on my integrity. I’m not going to take it.” But fortunately the pistol hadn’t been shot for 30 years, and the ammunition was defective. It was – it had five – five bullets in the revolver – five, but every one of them misfired.

So, Virginia again, “Why didn’t they indict him?” I told him [sic] that the people of Montgomery knew Grandfather, and if Grandfather tried to kill a man, the general reaction was that Grandfather was – he probably needed killing. So, these little – these little bits come along.

We began to follow the – work very closely but quietly with the people involved in the bus boycott. The Negroes organized a car pool. So many of the people lived too far to walk. But you’d just see streams of Negro women in the morning and at night walking to their jobs as cooks or maids, in cold weather and hot weather and rain, some of them walking as much as four or five miles a day. But those who had cars were getting up early in the morning and going around and taking people to work. They might make several trips.

The police immediately started to break up these car pools. The bus boycott, as I’ve said, it started for one day. The original idea was one day. But there was such enthusiasm, once it got started, that here Nixon over the weekend had gotten busy and organized the Montgomery Improvement Association, and the question was, who would head that up? Nixon was the natural leader of Montgomery. He’s the one who had been in the fight a long time, but he said, “I’m on the railroad. I have to make a living. I’m away so much. It would be better to have someone here all the time.” So he suggested the name of Martin Luther King, who had been in Montgomery only a few months as the preacher of a respectable Negro Baptist church. King was well educated and well liked, but he hadn’t been in Montgomery long enough to be involved in any of the factional fights among the Negroes. So this was Nixon’s suggestion. So after the night – after the trial, the day of the first boycott, a big mass meeting was held, and here was the – just the almost ordinary run of Negroes pushing the leadership. Some of them would make speeches, wasn’t it wonderful we stayed off the buses all day, and then you got this reaction from the cooks and maids: “Stay off one day! We ain’t thinking about going back to them buses ’til they starts treating us right.” And King, with his oratory – he was developed into this very effective leader.

The boycott – the car pools began to go, and that – this was the only way so many of the Negroes could hold their jobs. They – one day’s loss of work could be very disastrous to many of them.

Then, finally, this began to attract the attention in the Northern press. It was a little slow in doing it. Money began to come in, and some buses or station wagons were bought and contributed. And the mayor, Gayle, finally – oh here was another little thing that was going on. The housewives were running a little car pool themselves for their maids. They were taking their maids backwards and forwards to work. But this was done on a fiction, you know, that my maid Mary is a good old-fashioned type and she doesn’t have anything to do with these . . .

McGuire: New-fangled.

Durr: . . . radical Negroes, but you know that she’s a friend of the goon squad. There’s a myth that the Negroes had a goon squad, and if any Negro attempted to get on the bus, they would be beaten up. The goon squad never came to life, but it was a very useful fiction. So Mary, she was a friend of the goon squads, and she was – she’s a very good old-fashioned type, and so I just go get her and take her back.

So, so many housewives were doing the same thing, on the same fiction. Bopth sides knew it was a fiction, but it served a useful purpose. And so many of the women around Montgomery, the white women, started out quite sympathetic to the Negroes, because they knew about the bus situation, and they knew that their maid or their cook would arrive in the morning just exhausted or so angry she couldn’t work because of the treatment she had had on the bus. And in the early days of the boycott there were quite a number of letters from very conservative, traditional Montgomery housewives, saying, look here, now let’s be realistic about this thing. We know that these Negroes have got a grievance here. Now let’s correct it and give them some decent treatment on the buses.

I recall one of the stories along the lines of that fiction, and this is – maybe we can work it in the book and maybe not – but we had had – my mother had had working for her for many years Mary Harris, who was a wonderful cook. I think she’d worked for mother about 30 years. But as mother got in her late 80s, she began to get a little feeble, and finally she got to the point where she needed someone with her all the time. So we decided that she and Mary got along so well together that we’d put somebody else on the cooking job and just let Mary sit with mother, which she did, and it worked out very satisfactorily. Mother was thought of as the head of the family in a way, and in the afternoon kinfolks – cousins and nieces and nephews – would drop by.

So Virginia, after work, had dropped by to see mother. We lived at an apartment close by. Mother’s house was set back from the street quite a distance in some trees. Virginia was talking to mother when these cousins and brothers and sisters and aunts came around, and of course the conversation was about the bus boycott. So one of them – Mary sat there, saying nothing. So one of them finally said, “Mary, what do you think about this bus boycott?” Mary’s response was, “I just declare. I just declare. The way these colored folks is going on, carrying on about that bus boycott.” Say, “I don’t have nothing to do with it. I just declare the way they is going on, but I don’t have nothing to do with it.” Said, “Don’t none of my folks have nothing to do with it.” Said, “There’s my – my brother Willie. He works for the cottonseed oil company and says a friend of his got a old ramshackle car, and he drives around here every morning and picks five or six of ’em up that works there,” and say, “They just goes all together, and at night they get in his old ramshackle car, and he takes them home. They don’t bother nobody.” And he [sic:] said, “There’s my son Oscar.” Said, “He got a old car of his own. He works there for the pure oil company, and he drives around in the morning and picks up some of his friends and drops them off on the way to work. Then he goes to work and gets on the company truck, goes about his business.” Then said, “He don’t bother anybody. Now there’s my sister Louvinia,” I [sic] said, “She cooks for some white folks.” Said, “Ain’t too far. She just walks. [?] says, “I don’t have nothing to do with that bus boycott, and none of my folks. We just stays off the buses and leaves that boycott alone.” So that – this again maintained Mary’s standing as a good old-fashioned – a good old-fashioned type.

Of course Mary knew that Virginia and I had a little different attitude, and Mary had a way, when she saw us coming, she could rush out and get us at the gate. She would begin to exchange news about what was going on. The day after this affair I was with Virginia, and we stopped by to see mother, and Mary apparently saw us coming, and she met us with the gate – at the gate. So Virginia said, “Mary, you old hypocrite. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, talking like you were – were there yesterday and making out like you didn’t have anything to do with the bus boycott.” Said, “You know last Wednesday night?” Said, “I was over there at that Holt Street Baptist Church – Baptist Church, when Reverend Abernathy was speak – was speaking, and you were shouting ‘Amen’ louder than anybody.” Mary’s response, “Well I’ll stay this, Virginia.” Say, “You know how it is.” Says, “When you’ve got your head in the lion’s mouth,” said, “I think the best thing to do is sort of just pat the lion on the head.” So there were many stories of this kind that went on.

But the police, in trying to break up the car pools, starting arresting the Negroes for any little offense. They might be going 18 miles an hour, and they would – in a 20-mile zone, so they would – rights would never be bothered, even if they were going 20 miles an hour, or 22. Then, as you know, we have no automobile inspection law. We have some regulations governing the standards for cars, but there’s no inspection law. So they’d stop – they’d – the police would begin to stop – stop these cars and have an inspection right then and there, and say the lights were not right, or the brakes were not right, and you can’t – you’ve got to stop the car right here and have it hauled to a garage for all these repairs to be made. Worse than that, they started roughing a great many Negroes up. It became almost a matter of routine to rough up Negroes when they were arrested for minor offenses. Now they would not do that to Martin Luther King. or Abernathy or the others, because they had – the press was watching them too closely, but these were the humbler Negroes. And so some began to show up at my office, that had been roughed up. The charges against them might vary from reckless driving to – right on through to assault and resisting arrest and all kinds of things. They would show me their bruises. Sometimes bruised heads. Sometimes all over their shoulders. Sometimes they’d been hit with clubs. Sometimes a two-by-four. Sometimes a rubber hose, according to their story. After a conversation with them, I’d find out that some other white lawyer had asked – had referred them to me. So I would call up the white lawyer and say, “What about it?” “Well, he was really – they treated him rough, didn’t they?” I said, “Yes, they did, but,” – I said, “It’s awfully nice of you to be sending me clients, but this is not exactly my line of work. I never have been in criminal law. I haven’t spent much room [sic]in the court room. I’d – I’d appreciate it more if you just went ahead and represented these clients instead of sending them to me.” The response I would get immediately. “I’m a young lawyer just getting started. You know if I start taking these cases of this kind, I never will build up a law practice.” Or, “I’m thinking about running for the state legislature, and you know, if I get into these cases, it would ruin me.” One of them, I remember, “The most important case I ever had in my life is pending before that old s.o.b. Judge – Judge Walter Jones, and,” he said, “if I start getting into cases like this, you know what – you know what that son – s.o.b. will do to me in the trial – in this case. I never will have a chance.”

So, several I – that I thought ought to have a doctor look at their wounds, I’d send them to a doctor. The doctor would call me back. None of them was seriously injured. I’ve – the doctor would call me back. Said, “It look like he got hit pretty bad.” Then he says, “Of course, I couldn’t testify that this was a rubber hose, but they’re consistent with rubber hoses, these bruises he’s got, but I wouldn’t be willing to testify what the reason was. I don’t know.” Avoid getting involved in it. This happened several times.

I found out too that several of them, before coming to me, had gone around and reported to the FBI. Someone had told them to go to the FBI. I warned them against doing that, if I got them first, because at that time, the FBI, they had a program of what they called cooperation with the local police, and if a Negro would go to them, they’d promptly advise the police, and they might find themselves beat up again. I couldn’t testify to that, but I’d been told by a number of Negroes that – that this did go on.

All I could do – I said most of these people had charges against them for – not too serious. They might be traffic violations or assault or something of the sort. And about all I could do – they didn’t have any money for – not only not to pay me a fee, but certainly not to carry it through an expensive appeal. You knew damn well that they would be held guilty in the police court regardless of what the facts were. And about all I could do – and they would be generally given not only a fine, but maybe a sentence of 30 days or something of the sort. So I would appeal the cases to the circuit court and a jury, knowing again I’d win before the circuit court, but the city prosecutor didn’t like to work too much, and so I’d make a deal with him to settle the case by dropping the imprisonment and maybe cutting the fine in about half. That’s about all I could do with some of them.

But the cases got rougher and rougher, and I just decided something should be done about it. I talked to several of the men of Montgomery that I thought were part of the power structure, the kind of men that I knew could get on the phone and call up the mayor or the police commissioner and say, “Look here, this kind of thing is getting out of hand. You’ve got to tell your police to quiet down.”

But I was deeply concerned about non-violence breaking down. I was concerned as a Montgomery white man. The non-violence held up far better that I had thought. I just would have nightmares of the thought of some Negro who had been in the armed services for a few years, maybe had served in Korea – a policeman would rough him up or start roughing him up, or his wife. He wouldn’t take it. He’d resent it. Then maybe a policeman would get killed, and retaliations would start one way or the other, and we could have a bloody holocaust. So I went to several of the people that were – I thought could – did influence enough to call the police commissioner and the mayor to do something about it.

But I began to get from them a very strange and disturbing reaction. I found myself thinking back to what happened in Nazi Germany after the war, when the concentration camps were liberated. As shocking as that was, I think the – we were even more shocked and horrified with the attitude of the German people, who said, they didn’t know it was going on. To our way of thinking, they’re bound to have known this thing was so general. But I ran into the same line of thinking with these people in Montgomery that I talked to, good respectable citizens. They knew what the police were doing, but they convinced themselves that they didn’t know, because knowing would impose some sense of responsibility on them to do something about it. So they can rationalize and get themselves in such a state of mind that they really convince themselves they don’t know what’s going on.

So finally I decided that some of these case have got to get into court if for no other reason than to use the courtroom for a public forum. The newspaper reporters are generally pretty good. They’ll write up an honest story. And I was driven to feeling that we had to do something by an extreme case, and this is my Henry Jackson case, which I’ll tell you about.

McGuire: [ ? ? ] It’s 20 after 12.

Durr: All right.

Jackson was brought to me by another Negro whom I had known for quite a long time. Jackson himself was a very nice-looking man of – I would say in his middle 30s, tall, well built. He had a bandage around his throat. He pulled down the bandage, and there his throat had been cut from here to here. The stitches were fresh in it. They hadn’t been taken out. Then he showed me the backs of his hands that were sliced up, as if they had been through some kind of a meat cutting machine. Then he took off his shirt, and diagonally across his back, there was another cut of about 18 inches.

Then he proceeded to tell me his story. He had been walking along one of the main streets of Montgomery, or at least a smaller street just off the main street, which led to Monroe Street, which was at that time the Negroes’ shopping center. According to his story, he was going down North Court Street to make a purchase in one of the stores on Monroe. And there was a little stand on the side of the street where cigarettes and some fruit and tobacco and things of that sort were stored – were sold. He saw a man who ran the store, a Mr. Katz, talking to another man, and just as he passed by, the second man stepped back, and they collided. Then Jackson said – he thought nothing about it – he said, “Excuse me,” and started on down the street. He’d taken only a few steps when he said he’d felt this knife in his back. Then he threw back his hands to protect himself, and that’s when his hands were cut. Then he said he started to run, and this man grabbed him by the shoulders and reached over one of his shoulders, reached over the other, and that was when his throat was cut.

The next thing he knew, several policemen appeared on the scene. He was taken to the curb and sat on the curb bleeding profusely – he said he was – thought he was going to bleed to death – while an ambulance was sent for. He was put in the ambulance, taken back to the – taken to the hospital, where his throat was sewed up. For some reason, nothing was done – seemed to have been done about the cut in his back, which seemed to me quite deep, or the cuts on his hands. Then, after the emergency sewing of his throat had been done, the police came and took him to the jail, where he found a charge had been sworn out against him, by the man who did the cutting, for assault with intent to murder.

I had never known Jackson before. I knew nothing about him. I was just going by his looks and his story. It seemed to me to be a plausible story. He was telling – speaking honestly. But it’s my experience as a lawyer – and I suppose many of ’em have had similar experiences – a client comes in and tells you the most plausible story, which you believe and accept until you get in the courtroom, and then you find other witnesses have presented al- – under cross examination your client breaks down, and it’s been a cock and bull story from the very beginning. I’ve had other cases where clients came in and told me stories which I could not believe, thought they were really cock and bull stories. Finally, I would say, “Now look here. You want me to represent you. You’ve got to come out and let me know what – what really took place.” They would insist that it was just as they had described it, and with some skepticism I would start investigating it, and then I’d find that they were telling the truth right along.

So I called – Jackson told me where he worked. He worked under a Mr. Norman, who ran a Norman Building Supply Company in Montgomery. Sold plate glass and things of that sort. So I called Mr. Norman. Ask him about Henry Jackson. His response was, “He’s been working for me for about eight years, and I want to see he’s one of the most reliable employees I’ve ever had. He’s the kind of fellow that does his job. He gets along with people. Fighting is the last thing that I would expect of him, because he’s just the kind that is easy to get along with.” And he said, “He does his job and then he goes home – gets in his car and goes home to his wife and children.” He said, “I know of this incident. Of course I didn’t see it myself, but I would be delighted to come down and testify as a character witness.”

So then I start trying to get – possibly to locate some eye witnesses. Of course Jackson had been – he thought he was going to bleed to death. Many people were passing by, but he was not in any condition to start – stop people and start taking down names of witnesses. So first I went to see Mr. Katz, who ran this little cubbyhole store. He was very evasive. I could not get any answer out of him at all. Finally he did say, “I’ll have what I have to say, if I’m subpoenaed, in the courtroom.” Then he added, “I’ve been running this stand here for 30 years, and I don’t want to have any trouble with anybody.” But I asked him again, I said, “Will you at least tell me if you saw a knife or any kind of weapon in Jackson’s hands?” He hesitated a moment and said, “No, I didn’t.”

So I go to the police station and look up the records there. They have the names of some witnesses, but no statements from – from anyone. Finally the day comes for the preliminary hearing before the city recorder to . . .

[The recording is interrupted, as the tape runs out on side A. Durr pick up the story on side B:]

Durr: Better run this a little bit here to make sure it’s playing. Sometimes it gets off and is not recording.

This is a continuation of the Henry Jackson story. We go before the recorder, for the preliminary hearing, to determine whether Jackson would be bound over to the grand jury on this offense. I believe the penalty ran from a minimum of two to ten years. It might have been 20. I’m not sure now. It’s irrelevant.

The first witness for the prosecution is the man who had done the cutting. This time he was in a police uniform. He had been a policeman off-duty. He testified that he was talking to Mr. Katz when he saw this Negro come reeling down the street, reeling drunk, but he pays no attention to him. Here’s a Negro reeling drunk in the middle of the day in the -- when the streets are crowded, and even though – even an off- -- even a policeman pays no attention to him. It sounds a little strange. But any event, he said the first thing he knew, Jackson had bumped into him, and then he looked up, and Jackson started -- was cursing him and he had a raised knife ready to stab him. So then, he said, I took out my knife, and that’s when I started cutting him. That was the substance of his story, that this was a defense from an assault started by the Negro, a completely unprovoked assault by a drunken Negro.

I got him committed, cross examination, three different times, to saying that every time he sliced at Jackson with his knife, Jackson was coming toward him. At the appropriate time I was going to ask Jackson to take off his shirt and then ask this witness how he accounted for the slice on his back. But we nev- – did – never reached quite that point, because I asked the policeman first, I said, “What happened to Jackson’s knife when you started cutting him? Did it fall to the sidewalk?” He said, “No, but we took it away from him.” I said, “When did you take it away from him?” He said, “Before we put him in the ambulance.” I said, “Where was it at the time?” “It was in his pocket.” I said, “Was it opened or closed?” “It was closed.” In other words, here’s the story that the Negro attacks him with an open knife, and when he draws his knife out, the Negro while in the process of being carved up, closes his own knife up and puts it in the pocket – in his pocket.

This was a little too much even for the city attorney, so at that point he asked the judge for a recess so that he could confer further with his witnesses. He’s gone for about 15 minutes while Mr. Norman and I are sitting in a little – waiting in a little ante-room. To whom he talked, I’m not quite sure. I suspect possibly the mayor and the police commissioner. But any event, he came in. He said, “Cliff, it looks like to me that maybe we’ve got the wrong man for assault with intent to murder.” I responded to that. I said, “Dave, you know damn well you have.” But then he went on. He said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If your man will plead guilty to a simple assault, I will recommend a $10 fine, and we’ll dispose of the matter that way.”

Of course that angered me considerably. I lost my temper. Here was – it’s pretty – it’s obvious what he was trying to do. If the Negro pleaded guilty to assault, that would put the heat on [sic] the policeman, and there would be no occasion for disciplining him or even for an inquiry. So I just lost my temper, and I don’t know exactly what I said to Dave [?Crossland], but they were a little indiscreet under the circumstances. But he goes on to tell me, “This is a good deal for you, because,” he said, “I wouldn’t say it, but you might not ultimately get him off if you were in – go in the federal courts invoking the Civil Rights Act or something of that sort. But I want to tell you, unless you accept this, I’m going to do everything I can to send him to the penitentiary, and I believe I can do it.”

At that point he left the room, and then Mr. Norman spoke to me. He said, “I’m not sure that you’ve done the right thing by Jackson. I cooled down a little bit, and I said no, maybe I hadn’t, because after all it’s his liberty at stake, and I shouldn’t make this decision for him. So Mr. Norman and I stepped out of the room into the street, where Jackson and his wife were waiting, and I told Jackson of the deal that had been offered. I told him, I said, “Now, it’s up to you to decide. It’s very obvious that they’re out to frame you. But I want to say, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll stay in this thing with you to the end, if necessary right on up to the Supreme Court of the United States, and you don’t have to worry about an attorney’s fee.” He said, “I just don’t think it’s right to plead guilty to something I haven’t done. I just can’t do it, because I didn’t draw my knife on him. I didn’t start any trouble at all.” And his wife came up, and she – she was agreeing with Jackson. Then Mr. Norman broke in. He said, “Listen here, Jackson. They are out to get you. Maybe you will win this case in a trial by jury, or on appeal. But,” he said, “you’ve got to realize that you are living here in Montgomery, or close to it – close to Montgomery, and these police can make life miserable for you. You have to come into your work in your car. They can be stopping you for any kind of trumped up charge, accusing you of speeding.” He said, “Henry, I’m – if you don’t accept this deal, I think you might as well make up your mind that you will have to move and seek employment somewhere else.” He said, “You’ve been working for me for eight years. Your job is available as long as you want to work there. You’ve got to think of your wife and your three children. And I will pay the fine for you, and I will pay the hospital bill for sewing you up. But I want you to come on back to work and not have any more trouble.”

Then Jackson stepped to one side and talked further with his wife. Then he came back, and actually tears were coursing down his cheeks. He said, “I reckon I’ll have to do it, but it just ain’t right to plead guilty to a lie.” So we go back in, and there was a felony, of a very serious felony. We plead guilty, and it’s disposed of with a $10 fine and costs, a total of $14. That confirmed my feeling that this somehow had to be brought into the court to – not that I hoped to win the cases, because I didn’t, that is, unless they were appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and the money was not available type – kind of thing.

McGuire: [ ? ? ] you could give the reader some idea of how much a case – how much it cost to carry a case all the way up to the – I have no idea. I suppose most readers do not. Just some rough estimate of how much . . .

Durr: The cost of an appeal would vary with the amount of testimony in the case. First of all, you would have to pay – if you’re appealing to the State Supreme Court, you would have to pay for – the reporter for a complete transcript of the records, with several copies. I don’t imagine – I don’t remember exactly how much they charge per page, but it was considerable, and I would say just an ordinary case would cost – just to prepare the record – would cost a minimum of about $150 if you were going in the state court. In addition, there are court costs that would – various kinds, that would probably come to maybe another $50 or so, and then there would be the cost of a bond to stay out of jail during this period. And if you happened to have a friend who had a substantial amount of real estate, you might persuade him to go on your bond for you. Otherwise you’d have to go to a bonding company, and let’s suppose the bond was $1,000, and certainly in a felony case, that would be an ordinary bond, but they would charge about 15% of that for the – for the bond.

So you see, the type of clients that I have been talking about were Negroes who at that time were probably making not much more than $50 a week, and many of them had wives and families and children ranging from 1 or 2 to 5 or 6. So every dollar counted with them.

I found, too, that while some of the organizations would put up court costs in what you call policy-making cases that were going up to the Supreme Court with the basic issues of law, they would not do it in these small cases where the individuals involved and the principles of law involved were all very clear.

So we disposed of the Jackson case that way. The court – the newspaper reporter who was covering the case wrote a story that was just a – he didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes. He wrote a factual story. A person just reading the headlines would say, here’s a Negro who had assaulted a policeman. But anyone who would take the time to read it very carefully would say, something funny is going on here, because here is a Negro accused of assaulting a policeman with a knife. He’s charged with a serious felony of assault with intent to murder, and yet the case is disposed of for a $10 fine. What’s going on here? But people don’t go into the – that way.

Then a few days after that, the afternoon paper carried an editorial. They did not mention my case specifically, but there were several other instances where the police had assaulted Negroes and had charged that the – they were defending themselves, that the Negro had attacked them for some strange reason. But the general line of the – of the editorial was, isn’t it terrible the way these uppity Negroes are endangering the lives of our police.

So the next case that comes to me – I decided that this does have to go into court. I had been give a small donation by someone in the way of conscience money. Said, “Would you just hold this and use it for civil liberties cases. I want to make some contribution.” And I did write around to a few – got a few friends that had some money, and they agreed to put up the money to the extent of the court costs. This was my Bessie Mae Prince case. She came to me because her husband worked for the Durr Drug Company. He’d worked there for many years. She had been convicted – the story was pretty much this. She and her husband had gone over one Friday night to the home of a – of a friend. The purpose was to – her husband wanted to ask this friend to go fishing with him the next day, but they found several other neighbors had dropped in. So in the course of the evening the men got into a poker game, and the women talked and listened to – watched t.v. Along about 11:30 at night, the police knocked on the door. The men were in a back room, playing poker. She was – went to the door. They – one of the policemen immediately accused her of having been slow in opening the door. What did she mean by not coming to the door when he knocked and keeping him waiting there? Then he proceeded to kick her out of the door, according to her story, and off of the porch, where she fell and was painfully hurt. Then they went in and arrested the men for gaming. Now it’s – there’s no law against playing poker or gambling in any way in a private home. It’s just in a public place that’s set up for that kind of business. Poker playing or bridge playing for stakes in a private home is not a violation of the law. But the woman was screaming with – in pain. She finally was able to come back into the house, and the police sent for the patrol wagon, and the whole group were arrested, the men for gaming, and she was arrested for disorderly conduct, because of her screaming, and the police said that she had cussed ’em out some way.

In any event, the men had gone ahead and paid their fines, which were very small, something like 10 or 15 dollars each, so they could go home. They settled the matter right – without a trial. But she was stubborn, and she insisted on a trial, and so she was tried before the recorder’s court and fined $10 for disorderly conduct. She had gotten a lawyer who represented her, and getting off with a $10 fine was quite an accomplishment, he felt, under the conditions, but she just wasn’t going to take it. She said she hadn’t been guilty of anything, and she wanted to appeal the case, but she didn’t have any money, and her lawyer advised her very strongly against it. Said, just forget about it. Pay the $10, and you’ll be spending a whole lot more money and you’ll have a trial de novo before a jury, which – and you might really get – have the sentence increased, and they might even put you in jail a while. but she said, “I just can’t take it. Will you represent me?” I agreed to appeal the case for her, and I went into it, and I found that the statute under which she was indicted – the city ordinance had been drawn in such a sloppy way that it just didn’t make sense, so even before the trial I made a motion for dismissal on the grounds of the vagueness of the statute, and the judge in the circuit court upheld me, and the case was dismissed, because of the faulty statute.

Then I turned around and brought a damage suit against the two policemen that had mistreated her, I think for false arrest, malicious prosecution, and assault. I told her, I said, “Now this – we’re not going to win this case, but you might do something for your people by taking it.” She agreed to go ahead and was very eager to go ahead, but was put under tremendous pressure from her husband, who was terrified and tried to persuade her to drop the case, that you’ll get into more trouble. The police, as they told me, were driving around the house every night, and they would turn the lights of the police car onto the house. Just – no more rough stuff, but just this constant process of intimidation.

But she stuck with it. And another rather interesting thing: she had been – had to go to the hospital and had to have an operation. There were some – one of the female organs was damaged. But the young lawyer who had represented her before the police court sent me a letter that he had received from the doctor. He inquired about the nature of her bruises, and he reported – this was before the operation – that she was badly bruised around the area of her kidney and back. So I wanted to get the doctor, to find out from him whether this kick or the fall, whichever it might have been, had been a contributing cause to the condition that resulted in the operation. I talked to him over the phone. He denied absolutely. He said it had no connection. He denied absolutely to me that he had ever found any bruises on her at all. And I’m sitting there with the letter which he’d written this other lawyer in which he said he did find these bruises, so I – it’s a very dangerous thing to try to subpoena a doctor as a witness when he’s – doesn’t want to be subpoenaed. He can ruin you.

So we went ahead as best we could with the factual situation, and the Negroes who had been in the house, they mustered their courage and were magnificent in their testimony of what had happened. Of course the police told their story. They completely denied they had – the officers had shoved out the door – kicked out the door and shoved her off the porch. Denied absolutely that she’d ever – he’d ever done this kind of thing. He just told her to go outside and not cause any trouble, and instead of going outside, she’d started screaming and cursing him and so on.

On cross examination the officers were squirming considerably. I asked how they happened to have made the raid. They said the television was playing loud, and they just stopped by to – they were cruising around and they heard the television playing loud, so they stopped by to tell them to turn down the volume. But there wouldn’t have been anything more to it, except for my client’s behavior and her cursing them when they knocked on the door. I asked if there’d been any complaints from the neighbors about the loud noise. No, there hadn’t. Matter of fact, the little shack in which the friend lived was sort of set back by itself, and there weren’t any neighbors close by.

And again, the newspapers wrote the facts of the case as brought out at the trial. They gave a decent, a very competent and honest reporting job. But of course the jury wasn’t out more than a few minutes when they came back with verdict for the – in favor of the police.

So then, having raised this little money, I appealed to the State Supreme Court, raising all the legal issues I could raise. I was very careful not to treat this as a civil liberties case any more than I could help, and I made a point when I was appealing cases to the Alabama state courts to cite as authorities the Alabama constitution and Alabama decisions rather than the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court decisions, because, on the books, we have some very fine provisions in the Alabama constitution, particularly guarantees of individual rights, and in some respects I think they even go beyond the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution.

The process of getting an appeal heard and argued, it took almost two years, but the Supreme Court reversed the case and sent it back for a new trial. Knowing that a new trial, the same thing would happen . . .

McGuire: Did you take it to the Supreme Court?

Durr: I took it to the Supreme Court of Alabama, and I got a reversal there on some point of law, a jury instruction, and the Supreme Court upheld me on the law. It just sent it back for a new trial. So I told her, I said, “Now you’ve – we’ve made the point. We got these police a little bit uneasy. They are – I think they’re going to slowed down a little bit, because they don’t like to be sued. They’re pretty confident that they’re going to win, but there’s always this uneasy feeling, maybe a jury might go haywire someday and I’ll find myself personally stuck with a judgment.” So we agreed to settle the case if the police would pay all of the court costs, which they did. So in a way, just as a matter of principle, I think it accomplished something.

Then another case along the same line, just to use the courts for a forum to educate the people. It was a very fascinating case, called the – it was the MacMurray College case. The name of it was Nesmith against Alford. Here are the circumstances.

I had just gone home from work when I received a call from a man in a little town in Illinois who said that he was a lawyer for MacMurray College, a small Methodist college, middle-class students, and he said, “Our Dean of Men and his wife, who was acting as chaperone, and ten of our students are in your local jail, and I wish you’d see if you can get them out, because term time is about to start again, and we want them back at college.”

So I go to the jail, meanwhile having called a bondwoman to see if I could get bond made. I asked to see Dean Nesmith. The officer in charge says, “You can’t see him yet.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “We’re still processing his case.” I said, “What is the charge against him?” “Disorderly conduct.” I said, “What time was he arrested?” “About 1:45.” I said, “Here it’s now about 5:30. You’re still processing a minor case of disorderly conduct from 1:25 to 5:30. I want to see him.” They made me wait about 15 or 20 minutes more, and then I was permitted to see Dr. Nesmith, who was a very dignified gentleman. He told me his story.

He was not only the Dean of Men – this was a coeducational college – but also head of the sociology department, that field trips were part of the curriculum for sociology majors. They had made a field trip to some Indian digs around – nearby. They made one field trip around some penal institutions, to see the operations there. On one occasion they’d gone to Chicago to study the problem of housing and the dislocations caused by the influx of people from the rural communities into the big city. So they decided that they’d make a field trip to the South. Of course the race issue was predominantly in mind, but they wanted to study the sociology of the South generally.

This was a coeducational school, and about – I think of the 10 students, 6 were girls, as I recall, and 4 were boys. They had written ahead to make their arrangements. They generally camped out, slept wherever they could. Sometimes they would sleep in the basements of Methodist churches. But in mapping out their trip, they would write some Methodist church and ask both for a place to stay, if they could use the church ground to camp out on, or get in the church some quarters that were not being used – they all had sleeping bags – and also for suggestions as to people who might be interviewed. They’d also written the Chamber of Commerce to ask for suggestions as to people to interview.

On they trip down they’d first stopped off at Little Rock, Arkansas, where they – an appointment had been set up with General – Governor Faubus, of the – you know the Little Rock thing. He’s the one that defied the Federal government, and Eisenhower had sent in the troops. Faubus, at the last minute, he couldn’t keep the appointment, but he did have his executive – administrative assistant there, and they had quite a long interview with him.

Then they’d come on through Mississippi, not only interviewing people that – with whom they’d made advance arrangements, but also people on the street, at the filling station, when they would – they were generally preparing their own meals, cooking out, and making sandwiches -- people they would run into in the grocery store. Both white, black, Ku Kluxes and moderates – all types.

They’d stopped – the one thing that had interested them in Mississippi was a large cattle farm, and they went there to observe the dislocations caused by the transition from a cotton to a cattle economy and the resulting unemployment. Then they’d gone to New Orleans, where they’d run into a man who was working on housing, and they were particularly interested in housing. They spent a great deal of time with him. But he happened to be quite a segregationist, so they talked to him about that too. They had not – there was a cattle farm near Montgomery, a large cattle farm that they wanted to stop by, if time permitted, and see what was going on, but they were primarily concerned with making an appointment – meeting an appointment they had with Mayor Hartsfield of Atlanta to talk to him, but Montgomery was on the way, and it occurred to the Dean, before they got to Montgomery, this was the place where the bus boycott started, and maybe it would be interesting to the students to talk to some of the Negroes involved about the bus boycott, and non-violence as a technique of social change.

So they had gone to the – checked in at the headquarters of the Montgomery Improvement Association. One of the leading Negro ministers was there, and he happened to have been one of the prominent figures in the bus boycott. So they arranged for these students – this was nighttime – for the MacMurray students to sleep on – with their sleeping bags in the Montgomery Improvement headquarters.

The Negro minister made arrangements for them the next day to interview a lot of the people, and the students got extremely interested. These first were some of the older people, and then some of the younger Negroes began to drop in from the state college and talk about some of the problems they had had.

So time was running on. They wanted to stop by briefly and see Tuskegee Institute on the way to Atlanta, but this 9 o’clock appointment was – of the next morning was staring them in the face, and they didn’t want to miss that. So finally, one of the Negroes said, “Now, you might save time. If you want to do that, there’s a cafe. It’s a Negro cafe. No whites ever come in. It’s in a Negro community. But they have very good food, and it’s clean, and I can arrange to get us a private dining room where you can have lunch and continue your interviews during the lunch period, and then you can be on your way without the delay of a further stop for lunch.” That made sense to them, so they stopped – they went there for lunch and continued the interview, and then they were arrested while eating in the Regal Cafe, or maybe it was afterwards, while they were still there.

All this conversation is taking place at the jail. The bondsman, when finds out what the offense is, he says, “I’m not going to make bond for those people.” He gives us a reason, that the – there’s a lot of kids involved, and you make bond and they’re liable to leave town, and I’ll be stuck with them.” So I finally asked him if they will at least, and I said, these are not kids. Here’s Dr. Nesmith, the Dean of this Institution, a solid person, and his wife, and will you at least make bonds for them?

There was a reason for getting them out, particularly. They had brought along their three-year-old child on the trip. She had not been used to being left alone, and she’d been having a great time. So the child was with them in the Regal Cafe when they were arrested. They were taken to jail, and the child taken away by the police, and didn’t know what – they had – she had no – they had no idea what had happened to the child, but they said they would turn her over to the matron at the children’s home. So here are Dr. and Mrs. Nesmith, the [?bondsman] had reason to make bond for them, but they don’t want to leave the students in jail, but they were worried to death about their child.

[telephone rings; recording interrupted]

. . . their main concern was with the child, and they could understand it. Forget about us. It’s not going to hurt us to stay in jail overnight.

So the – then we start on the quest for the child – three years old, and never been separated from her parents at night. The desk sergeant at the jail tells us that she is in the custody of the matron of the juvenile detention quarters. That’s part of the jail, on the top floor of the courthouse. So we go to the courthouse and find all doors locked. Finally, I get the attention of an orderly, a person who was working, mopping up the floors, and he gets someone who lets me in, and we go up to the juvenile detention quarters, and the matron says she hasn’t got the child and she doesn’t know where the child is, but we’ll have to get in touch with Mrs. Bradley Lee, who is with the state welfare and in charge of this kind of thing.

So I called Mrs. Bradley Lee at her home. The response that I get was, the child is being well taken care of, she’s in good hands, she’s in the charge of a licensed foster mother, and I can be sure that she’s well taken care of, and she will bring the child to the sheriff’s office and deliver him [sic] to the parents the next morning. I said, “Listen. The parents want the child right now, and they are fully competent to look after the child. They’re on bond.” She says, “Look here. I don’t have the child, and my dear husband died only six weeks ago, and I don’t intend to be gallivanting all around at night just to get this child to the – in the hands of the parents, when I will have the child there safely by 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.” I said, “You don’t have to go. You just tell me who has the child and where the child is, and we will go and pick the child up.” “No, I’m not allowed to do that, because she must be released by someone in authority, and I would have to be there to release her, but she will be released to her parents at the sheriff’s office at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.”

I get nowhere, and so then I call Wiley Hill, whom I had known many years and who was a [?] Court judge. I catch him in the shower – he’s getting ready to go out to a party – tell him what the situation is, and ask if he will call Mrs. Lee and release the child into my custody. Of course, being a lawyer, I am an officer of the court. So, he’s quite sympathetic. He says, “I will call her right away and tell her to release the child in your custody, and you will assume the responsibility.” I tell him that I’m on the way home, to have her call me at home.

So, [?] Mrs. Nesmith in the car. We drive out to our home. Await a call. It doesn’t come. I call Mrs. Bradley Lee again, and she – this time, it’s not her dear husband, but she has her niece visiting her and this is very unreasonable of me to be expecting her here at nighttime to be gallivanting around, this expression she uses, to get the child. I said, “Didn’t Judge Hill call you?” “She [sic] called me, but he didn’t say when I should release the child.

So finally I make an implied threat of even a kidnapping charge. She gets a little concerned, and then she’s got to check with the matron of the jail. She will call me back. Again no call comes. So finally I get Dr. Nesmith in the car, and we drive out to her home, having her address. She comes to the door and is very upset, us coming there, disturbing her at nighttime for this child, when she has a niece visiting her. I said, “Again, you just tell us where the child is, and we’ll go get the child. If it’s necessary for you to formally release her, I’ll bring her by here and you can sign any papers that are necessary.”

She doesn’t give on that. She’s not responsive. Again I remind her of Judge Hill’s call, which she admits that she got. So finally I add a few more threats to what might happen to her, and she says, “I’ll not go get the child, but if you’ll come to the sheriff’s office at 11 o’clock tonight,” said, “I’ve called the licensed mother” – whatever the expression is – “and she says – she’s washed the child’s – the child is going to sleep, and she’s washed her clothes, and the clothes are not dry yet.” I said, “You just tell her, forget about those clothes, that her mother’s got a bag in the car. They’ve got plenty of dry clothes and we’re on the way with the dry clothes.” Then she said, “She’ll release him [sic] at night – 11 o’clock at night.”

So we go down at 11 o’clock at night, and the child is delivered to us at the sheriff’s office. This was the first chance I really have – after we get the child, we bring her out to our house, and she’s quite well behaved, not – seems to be too upset. This was my first opportunity I have to really talk to Dr. Nesmith, who tells me the circumstances that I’ve already related: how they got into this difficulty.

The next morning we go before Judge Lowell, the recorder, for the trial. The kids are brought to jail in the paddy wagon – are brought from the jail into the courthouse and locked up in a little anteroom. Dr. and Mrs. Nesmith sit in the main courtroom, because they are under bond.

The police first the stand. There were a whole series of them. One who says that – the time I think was about 12:30 – that he received a call advising that whites had been seen entering the Regal Cafe, and so he alerts another policeman and tells him to check into the matter. That’s all the first policeman testifies to, that he’d just received a call that whites were seen entering the Cafe.

So then we get the policeman who was told to check into the matter. He states that he goes to the Regal Cafe. He looks in the door, and they were – here were the Negroes and whites sitting there together. I asked him what they were doing. They were eating and talking. “Did you hear any improper language, or were they making any undue amount of noise?” “No, they were just sitting, eating and talking.” I said, “Did you say anything to them at all? Did you tell them that you should not – that this might – their presence in the Negro cafe might possibly cause trouble.” “No,” he said, “I just – I looked in, and then” – but he said, “I did ask one of the Negro ministers if all the people there were from Montgomery, and he said, ‘No, some of them were not’.” And so I said, “Then, what did you do?” “I called back to police headquarters and reported what I’d seen.”

Then in about ten minutes another police officer appears on the scene by himself. He testifies that he goes in and opens the door, and he looks in. “Did you say anything to them?” No, he didn’t say anything to ’em. “What were they doing?” “They were eating and talking.” “Were they talking loud or in an ordinary tone of voice?” “No, they were just talking in an ordinary tone of voice.” “What did you do?” “I called headquarters and reported what I’d seen.”

The next person to appear on the scene was Chief Ruppenthal, the Chief of Police, who testified that he went into the – first he went into the main part of the cafe. “What was going on there?” “Just Negroes were eating and talking.”

I asked all of the earlier policemen, was anything unusual going on in the streets or any undue number of people? No, they all said, just about the normal number of people walking down the street.

So the Chief says he goes into the main part of the cafe and looks around, and then he goes to this private dining room. “What do you do there?” “I go in.” “Do you say anything to any of them?” “No, I don’t say anything.” “How long do you stay there?” “45 minutes.” “Did you under any circ – did you tell them that this might be a dangerous thing, and it was best for them to leave?” “No, I didn’t tell them.” He said, “I didn’t speak to ’em until I told ’em they were under arrest.” I said, “Were they engaged in any disorderly conduct?” “Not at the time.” I said, “The time you arrested them for disorderly conduct, how were they behaving? Were they behaving the same way?” “Yes,” but says, “the disorderly conduct was the crowd that had collected on the streets.”

I began to ask, who else was present on the street. It finally develops the police commissioner appears on the scene, the head of the state highway patrol, the deputy chief of the highway patrol, and four more from the highway patrol – I think a total of seven police, and seven, at least seven police cars, including the highway patrol cars, and ultimately two fire chiefs’ cars appear on the scene, but I’d asked them all – I even asked the chief – what about the number of people on the street at the time you got there? “There were just no more than the normal number. But I arrested them, because they had caused a crowd to gather on the outside, and that was dangerous.”

Now this statute is a very interesting statute, the disorderly conduct: “It shall be unlawful to disturb the peace of others by violent, profane, obscene, or offensive language or conduct, or conduct calculated to provoke a breech of the peace.” Now, he concedes that they were not doing anything themselves that was disorderly, but this was so contrary to the accepted mores of the community that it might cause a breech of the peace if some white Klux or white extremists had known about it. But I asked again whether anybody in the street could look in and see the whites and Negroes there. “No, the blinds were down, and you couldn’t see.” “From inside, could you look out and see a crowd gathering?” “No, you couldn’t, but before I arrested them, I did go out of the room and look, and I saw that it – a large crowd had gathered.” Then I asked him who was present in the crowd. “They were all black, except two or three newspaper reporters, and the rest were all police officials, either city police or the state highway patrol. But when I told ’em – the first thing I said to them, coming in and seeing the crowd, I said, ‘Let’s go,’ so we took them to the patrol cars and took them all down to jail.” “What was the crowd doing?” “They were just standing there.” “Did you hear any threats or any boisterous language in the crowd?” “No, but the crowd had gathered.” “What were they doing?” “They were just looking around.” But nevertheless they were taken to jail after he had been in the room with them for 45 minutes.

So then I asked him on cross-examination, if in his experience – long experience as a police officer, he would say that the presence of a police car were likely to attract crowds. “It would attract maybe a small crowd. People stop to see what was going on.” I said, “Would the presence of two police cars attract, like – attract more people?” He conceded that it would. Then I said, “Wouldn’t the presence of seven police cars, the chief of police, the police commissioner, and the chief of the highway patrol, and several deputies . . .

McGuire: The two fire chiefs.

Durr: . . . the two fire chiefs – wouldn’t they attract a still larger crowd?” He assumed that that might be true, from his observation as a police office, but nevertheless the crowd had attract – had attracted.

It happened that I had located some Negroes. Fred Gray and I were trying the case together. He was representing the Negroes, and I was representing the whites. By prearrangement – this was before, when the situation was still tense, and we thought it was better to have the academic freedom issue separate from the others, and we’d be more likely to get support from the university community when the chips were down. So Fred had gathered together – got a few of the Negroes who were in the crowd. So I put them on the stand, and I asked them what they were doing there. They were looking. I said, “What happened? What caused you to gather there – stop there?” “I saw all those police cars, and I wanted to see what was going on.” [laughter] “Did you ever find out what was going on?” “No, I didn’t know what the trouble was. I just saw these crowds – all these police cars around the Regal Cafe.” And the other ones testified to much the same thing.

The judge was conducting the testimony with great dignity, and the little girl had been getting pretty restless in the courtroom – only three years old – so my daughter Tillia happened to be there on the occasion, and she went to Mrs. Nesmith and offered to take the child outside to play with her a little while and to get her quiet. So she did, but then the judge pounded the gavel and threatened her with contempt of court for disturbing the proceedings, because she was disturbing the proceedings by taking the child out.

In any event, these kids – for the other part of the trial, they were still in this side room, locked up, and they went through the usual routine of the drunks and the fights and so on that you generally have in court cases. The most miserable looking kids that I’ve ever seen in my life, very concerned about what was going to happen. They had been arrested.

McGuire: They were all white.

Durr: They were all white. They might get expelled. What would their parents think? And so on. Virginia had stayed at the office, holding it down, and she came over to report to me that the president of the college had called and said to tell the kids that he was trying to get the A.C.L.U. interested in the case and to stand firm, that we were backing them up. I went into this little anteroom, where these kids were waiting, and reported to them, and all at once they came alive. Isn’t it wonderful. The Prex is for us. They thought they were just completely ruined.

So we ended the testimony hearing in the morning on this note, with the police commissioner and all the others testifying that they were behaving – all they were doing – the segregation ordinance, even the city ordinance, had been repealed – and I get that in the record – about a week before, on the advice of the city attorney, that it was unconstitutional. So disorderly conduct was the charge.

So the judge announces that he is recessing for lunch, and he will pronounce sentence at 3 o’clock, and we’re all to report back to the court at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Then the kids are put back into the paddy wagon and taken back to the jail and locked up.

So we report back at 3 o’clock, and this time the kids are allowed to sit on the front row while the judge pronounces sentence on them. He’s apparently been spending his time during lunch recess writing an opinion and an order. Now in a police court the opinion and order is this: “Guilty.” “50 – about $10 in costs for you.” “Guilty.” “30 days for you.” And that’s the way the police court operates, but this was formal matter.

So, no, the kids were not there . . .

McGuire: [inaudible] . . . have a lawyer?

Durr: Oh yes.

McGuire: [inaudible] too?

Durr: Yes. I was the lawyer.

McGuire: Yeah, but I mean cases of the drunks and the [inaudible]

Durr: Oh, they can’t have lawyers.

McGuire: Yes.

Durr: I was wrong in saying the kids were brought in. They weren’t brought in at that point. They were still locked up in this side room.

So the judge calls the court together, and then he starts reading his opinion and order. It was in the form of a lecture to the students and Dr. and Mrs. Nesmith on the – their misbehavior and how thoughtlessly they were – had endangered their own lives and the lives of the people in this community, and how their conduct in going into this cafe and eating with the Negroes could well have resulted in serious disorders and violence, and maybe someone might have been killed, and they must understand that they cannot come in and interfere with our way of doing things. Then he proceeds to announce that he fining all the kids $50 and judge – and Dr. Nesmith and his wife, with their being older and should have known better, $100.

Then he gets through with reading his opinion and order, and he looks up in great consternation. There’s one little detail that he’s overlooked. He’s delivering a lecture to the kids, but by oversight they’re still locked up in the anteroom. [Laughter.] So the bailiff was ordered to bring them in, and he goes . . .

Interviewer: Oh, no!

Durr: . . . goes through this . . .

McGuire: The whole thing again.

Durr: . . . farce again.

Here, to make bond for this many, immediately we’re going to appeal, but I – I didn’t know what the amount of the bond was. I was in touch with the college, who said they would provide –send some bond money down, but I hadn’t gotten it, and I had visions of them going to jail again. So we all lined up, including Fred Gray’s clients, who were Negroes, and – to sign up, but I have no money for bonds, and my bank account is not such that I could put up the money, and I feel someone pressing with their hand against my pants leg, and I put my hand down there, and it comes out with a wad of bills that would choke a horse. Fred Gray had sneaked to me some money he had raised. So I think this came out to a total of about $1,500.

McGuire: Good Lord!

Durr: So we make bond and they go back to the college to await the trial before the circuit court and a jury. As I said, Fred is handling the Negroes in a separate case. He asked for a trial without a jury. I asked for a jury.

[End of side B. The tape runs out at this point.]