ALABAMA: Hold Everything

It looked for a while as though Alabama’s campaign against its hooded mobsters was getting somewhere. Seventeen white men, including a former deputy sheriff, were arrested for flogging, molesting and intimidating their fellow citizens in the Birmingham area. William Hugh Morris, a Birmingham roofing contractor and state director of Alabama’s Federated Ku Klux Klan Inc., was jailed for refusing to give the court a roster of Klan members. A new grand jury was appointed, .and instructed to keep the investigation rolling. Said State Attorney General Albert A. Carmichael: “There will be no let up. We shall strike this bunch of bums on all fronts . . .”

Then came an embarrassing discovery. The Birmingham Post, a vigorous supporter of the inquiry, dug into the histories of the 18 new grand jurors and splashed its findings across Page One. One juror had been a Ku Kluxer himself. Another had served two years in prison for a felony, lost his citizenship rights. Five others, including the foreman, had police records for drunkenness or disorderly conduct. The only Negro on the grand jury could neither read nor write. Circuit Judge George Lewis Bailes decided there was only one “reasonable, humane and practical” way out: he fired the ex-convict from the jury, temporarily excused the former Ku Kluxer at his request, declared a six weeks’ recess for the others.

This week the judge himself had a little confession to make: he, too, had once been a Ku Kluxer, back in 1925.