CRIME: The Odds Were Right

Even before Alabama became a state (1819), riffraff, bond jumpers, cardsharps and other fugitives from Georgia were crossing the muddy Chattahoochee River to find haven in wicked little Phenix City. As time passed, respectable families came to Phenix City, too, but gamblers, pimps and narcotics pushers still ran the town, and fattened on the trade of soldiers from Ft. Benning, just across the river near Columbus, Ga. This year Lawyer Albert L. Patterson ran for attorney general of Alabama on a pledge to shut down vice throughout the state, and especially in his home town of Phenix City (pop. 23,000). He won the nomination, which means election, but he did not seem jubilant. In a speech one day last week, Patterson said: “I believe I have only one chance out of 100 of being sworn in.” The odds were about right. The day after the speech, Patterson was shot and killed in a parking lot near the Russell County courthouse.

Governor Gordon Persons ordered National Guardsmen carrying submachine guns into Phenix City, and rushed there himself. For the first time the Army put the whole town off-limits to Benning troops. (In World War II General George Patton, in command at Benning, once threatened to clean up Phenix City with tanks.)

Patterson’s murder was the climax of a long tradition of violence that has touched both hoodlums and the respectable families on upper-class Summerville Road. Hoyt Shepherd, onetime casino owner and political boss, has been attacked and wounded, homes have been bombed, Lawyer Patterson’s office was once set afire, and members of the Russell Betterment Association have been beaten on the street.

Governor Persons shut down Phenix City’s bars and gambling halls, offered a reward for the arrest of Patterson’s killer, and went up to the county courthouse for a showdown with Phenix City’s myopic law-enforcement officers. He warned them: “This is the end of the line.” Patterson’s son, John, said he would “carry out the program of my father,” run for attorney general, but many persons in Phenix City were badly frightened. Alton V. Foster, manager of the Chamber of Commerce, quit his job and got ready to move his family out of town. Said he: “This has reached the point where I personally cannot endure it any longer. I’m through.”