Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose
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in the spring of 1971, Leonard decided ‘it was time to get something done’. He arranged to fly to Washington DC and meet officials from the Justice Department. As he boarded his plane, he realised he was being tailed – by two CPD detectives.
‘I explained to the Justice Department that we wore the flag of the United States on our uniforms, that it stood for liberty and justice, and we weren’t getting any.’ The officials promised to look into it. But soon after Leonard’s return, he was called one night to the Columbus Medical Center, the city’s main hospital, where a doctor had got drunk and was threatening patients and nurses.
‘I told him he was under arrest. He turned to me and said, “Nigger, you can’t say that.” So I cuffed him. Then a captain came and called another white colleague. They suspended me from duty for eight days.’
On the afternoons of 29 and 30 May 1971, Leonard and some of the Afro-American League members held a small demonstration outside the police headquarters. Their protest reached its climax the following day, when ten of them, including Leonard, carefully removed the US flag from their epaulettes, stitch by stitch.
‘We had the media there, and we tried to explain that the flag represented what we’d fought for in Vietnam and couldn’t find in Columbus. There was no liberty or justice inside the CPD, and it was treating black people in the city with brutality. The chief came out of the building and faced us. He looked at us with hate in his eyes and said, “You’re fired.” He went along the line and took our shields and our weapons.’
Later that day, the CPD held a press conference, confirming that Leonard and six others had been dismissed for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer’. Columbus’s Safety Director, Joseph W. Sargis, told reporters: ‘These officers have repetitiously made baseless allegations of unlawful conduct, racism and discrimination against their fellow officers.’ The chief and his men had ‘exercised patience and forbearance concerning the conduct individually and as a group by these officers who call themselves the Afro-American Police League’. Beside him on the platform, two senior cops nodded vigorously – the CPD chief, B.F. McGuffey, and his future successor, Curtis McClung.
The black officers’ dismissal triggered a wave of protest, which was further fuelled in early June when the police shot dead a twenty-year-old African-American whom they claimed had been a robbery suspect. On Saturday, 19 June, the civil rights leader Hosea Williams of the Southern Leadership Christian Council led a demonstration by about a thousand people in support of the fired seven, demanding the reorganisation of the CPD on racially equal lines. Mayor J.R. Allen denounced his proposals as ‘an attack upon this city and its citizens’ by ‘a group of outsiders with no legitimate concern here’. The demands being made by Williams and the former patrolmen ‘could only be described as an extortion note’.
Mayhem followed. For three nights, Columbus was afflicted by rioting and arson, with grocery stores, a lumberyard and a confectionery company fire-bombed and set ablaze. Firemen and their trucks were shot at, and their hoses cut. At 1.10 a.m. on 22 June, Mayor Allen declared a state of emergency. In Columbus, Allen – who died a few months later in a plane crash – is remembered today as a reformer who believed in racial integration. On this occasion he acted like a medieval monarch, and issued an ‘ordinance’ by proclamation. Bars, liquor stores and shops selling guns and ammunition would be closed until further notice. Notwithstanding the Constitution of the United States, and its First Amendment protecting free speech, any gathering on the streets of Columbus of more than twelve people would be illegal, and its members subject to arrest. Protest marches would only be allowed if their organisers had obtained a permit from the Mayor’s office in advance. Allen was buoyed by a message of support from Georgia’s Governor, the Democratic future President Jimmy Carter. He too denounced Hosea Williams: ‘There is no evidence he wants to solve problems. He wants to create one.’
As sporadic rioting and arson continued, Columbus’s long hot summer reached its violent zenith on 24 July, with a march – banned under the Mayor’s emergency ordinance – to the CPD headquarters. Later, the police – inevitably – claimed that they were trying to disperse it peacefully, and only used force when they came under attack. Equally inevitably, accounts by surviving black participants are very different.
‘Before we started, pickaxe handles had been handed out to the cops, and they just beat us,’ Leonard said. ‘Men, women and children. Some of the kids and women got real scared, started running. I was walking with a woman who was pregnant and this cop said, “Hey Leonard, you hiding behind a pregnant woman?” He beat me on the head, knocked me to the ground, fractured my skull. Somehow I got away and ran to an old lady’s house. I was taken to hospital in Fort Benning, because I was a veteran. They arrested me in hospital, for assaulting a cop.’
By the end of the day, five police officers and five marchers had been hospitalised with serious injuries. The following week, another demonstration was broken up and eighty-one people arrested and jailed. Trouble simmered for the rest of the summer: by the time of the last conflagration, on 6 September, Columbus had seen 161 fires set by arsonists – some of them, it was widely believed, by whites, motivated not by anger at police brutality but by the prospect of making insurance claims.
As for the seven fired patrolmen, they launched a federal lawsuit that took twenty-two years to resolve. Three times Columbus’s Federal District Judge, Robert Elliott, an old-time segregationist, refused to entertain it; three times the US Supreme Court and other appeal judges insisted that he should. Finally, the case was settled out of court, and the former patrolmen were each awarded $133,000. But the emotional cost had been overwhelming.
‘I was warned by my own lawyer: leave town or face getting killed,’ said Leonard. ‘So I came here to Atlanta. All of us lost our jobs, our wives, our homes. My first wife was a schoolteacher in Columbus, and she was threatened, told she’d lose her job. One time I was unemployed and couldn’t make my child support payments. Columbus had me jailed.’
The Columbus Police Department badly needed a new broom, and with the appointment of Curtis McClung as its chief in 1976, one seemed to have arrived. Possessed of a degree in police sciences, he was skilled at handling the media, and wanted to be seen as a new model police chief, not a backwoods lawman. On first taking office, he told reporters that he was determined to expunge the stains left by the events five summers before. Nevertheless, experienced black investigators, who might have had much to contribute to the hunt for the stocking strangler, were swiftly excluded from it. Early in his service in 1967, Arthur Hardaway had been the first black patrolman assigned to the downtown Broadway beat, responsible for a business district that was then entirely white: ‘The chief called me in and told me no black officer had ever walked Broadway,’ Hardaway said. ‘He wanted to determine the reaction of the whites and he thought I had the personality to be able to do it.’ That experiment passed off successfully: ‘The business people accepted me pretty good; treated me with respect, invited me in and offered me Cokes, like I guess they did the white officers.’
The stranglings were a very different matter. Hardaway had been a detective since 1968, working mostly in robbery-homicide, and had solved several murders. ‘When the stranglings began, I did a few door-to-door interviews. But when they formed a special task force to investigate them, I wasn’t picked for it, though I was one of the top investigators, and I’d worked on that squad a long time. I didn’t know then if it was a white man or a black man who had committed those crimes. But the victims were influential people and they still had that racial concern in their heart in Columbus. The people who were making decisions still had that racist mentality.’
Hardaway spent years acquiring an impressive list of academic qualifications, only to see a long line of less experienced and less well-educated white officers promoted over his head. A methodical, unassuming man, he answered my questions in his south Columbus living room with the same precision he had once applied to murder cases, despite having become partially deaf. He left the force a disillusioned man in 1992, to scratch out a living as a small-time building contractor.
He was not the only skilled black investigator to be left out. There was no more experienced fingerprint expert on the Columbus force at the time of the stocking stranglings than Eddie Florence, the cop who later turned to real estate