ILLINOIS: Society Is Wonderful People

Jim Montgomery remembers Nov. 15, 1923 very clearly. He had just quit his steel-hustling job at a Waukegan machine plant and was having a game of 10¢ black ball at the Aggressor Pool Hall with his friend, Finis Moore. But Jim and Finis got to arguing and suddenly they were heaving pool balls at each other.

Jim’s wife, Sentoria, heard about it and came rushing down to take him home. But she couldn’t keep him there—Jim strolled back to the poolroom for a while, then sauntered over to the Busy Bee for a cup of coffee. That was when the cops came. They hauled Jim to Waukegan jail and started talking. “All right, you black son-ofabitch, tell the truth,” demanded one. “We know you done it.”

“Done what?” asked Jim. “Raped that white woman,” the cop replied. That, swears Jim Montgomery, was the first he knew that he was in real trouble. Mamie Snow, a 62-year-old white woman who peddled doughnuts in Waukegan’s squalid Negro district, had been found, beaten and moaning, near the Oakwood cemetery. Mamie vowed that she had been raped and the police told Jim that she had named him as her attacker.

One Day True. At first, Mamie was a little confused about identifying Jim. (It was “forgetfulness,” explained relatives, a trait which made it necessary several years later to send Mamie to the Elgin State Hospital for the insane, where she died in 1947.) But later she got quite positive about it. At the police station, Montgomery recalls, he was beaten up by the cops and the prosecutor told him, “if you were down in Georgia or Mississippi … we would turn you over to the K.K.K., and we are liable to do it up here.” The Ku Klux Klan was strong in the Midwest in those days. Jim Montgomery’s trial, on a capital charge, lasted only one day. The prosecution offered no convincing medical proof of rape, but the jury convicted him anyway. He was sent to Joliet for life.

In prison, Montgomery tried to make the most of his ride on the slow train to nowhere. He struck up a friendship with a more famous prisoner, Nathan (“Bebe”) Leopold of Chicago’s sensational Leopold & Loeb slaying, and from him learned how to read and write. After that he kept pretty much to himself, read a lot and spent his leftover time hoping for justice.

Back home in Waukegan, Sentoria Montgomery did more than hope. She worked part-time as a cook, spent about $7,000 of her own and her brother’s money trying to get her husband out of prison. For 24 years she found only frustration; but two years ago she found Luis Kutner, a flashy, wealthy Chicago lawyer.

After Kutner took the case (he likes to take on “charity cases” which intrigue him), he discovered that all important court records were destroyed or missing. But Lawyer Kutner’s investigators did obtain a medical report submitted by a Dr. John E. Walter of Waukegan the day after the crime. It showed that Mamie Snow had not been raped. The prosecution, ruthlessly bent on convicting him, had suppressed the report.

The Doctor Explains. Called into federal court last June during a hard-won review of Jim Montgomery’s trial, old Dr. Walter testified that he had indeed examined Mamie Snow; he could testify positively that she had not been raped. Why had he kept quiet about this vital fact while Jim Montgomery wasted in prison? “. . . You don’t know our prosecutor at that time,” testified the doctor lamely. “He wanted his way and if he did not get it, there was trouble . . . and I’m not a fellow who looks for trouble.” The state called no witnesses, refuted none of Kutner’s evidence.

Last week, Jim Montgomery sat uneasily in federal court while Judge Michael Igoe read his ruling. “James Montgomery,” said the judge, “has gone the merry-go-round of Illinois justice . . . His conviction was secured by the use of false testimony, fraud and suppression . . . The court finds that the trial was a sham . . . The issue was not the guilt or innocence of rape—but that of racial subjugation.”

A messenger from Joliet handed Jim a $10 bill—the usual parting gift from the prison—and he walked from the courtroom a free man.

Steady Praying. No one could give back the lost years, but Kutner thought the State of Illinois should have the decency to award Jim Montgomery some money for his trouble (“My talking figure is $100,000,” said the lawyer).

But big Jim, gulping at freedom, was too happy to worry about that for the moment. “I ain’t holding no grudge,” he smiled. “I still think society is wonderful people. Man, I’m living for the first time. I prayed steady, seems like, for 26 years. Took the good Lord a long time to get around to me.”