Greene County, Ala.: Change Comes to the Courthouse

There have been games of dominoes going on in the courthouse at Eufaw as long as the citizens of Greene County, Ala., can remember, marathon games played by old men in bib overalls and soiled fedoras. “I heard they been playing since the Civil War,” said one of the game’s regulars. The gossip and the political affairs of the county moved across the table with the domino tiles, yellowed now, like the players’ hands, by age and use. But the courthouse game ended last week and with it an era. A new black sheriff and judge were sworn in, completing the takeover of political power by an 80% black majority in one of the nation’s poorest counties. TIME Correspondent Joseph Kane attended Inauguration Day. His report:

THE domino players moved out of the anteroom of the sheriff’s office into the back room of a vacant store down the street a week before the inauguration. Said D.W. Bailey, 71: “Some of the niggers play dominoes but they don’t play like we do, so I’m told.” Greene County’s whites withdrew —some in bitterness, some in fear—when the time came for Sheriff Thomas Gilmore and Probate Judge William McKinley Branch to join five black school board members and four county commissioners in the courthouse.

The high-ceilinged courtroom where the ceremonies took place was packed with blacks who came to see the ragtag parade and oath taking that symbolized their assumption of power. On the way, the Druid High School Band kept cadence in the cold morning for the dignitaries riding in a mule-drawn wagon and the float covered with green and white napkins topped by a tinfoil telescope that proclaimed “Greene County—Focus of the Nation.”

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Six years ago, Greene County became the focus of several civil rights groups anxious to put into effect the newly passed Voting Rights Act. With only 452 of its 5,000 eligible blacks then registered to vote. Greene County provided an excellent laboratory for the bill. The Southern Regional Council, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference descended on the county. Within a year, the massive voter registration drive had brought the first black politicians into an election since Reconstruction: Thomas Gilmore ran for sheriff and was defeated, but the first black school board member was elected in 1966.

Last fall, Greene County black registrants outnumbered whites 2 to 1. Thomas Gilmore stepped forward again to run for sheriff against Big Bill Lee, the man who once whipped him in a lawyer’s office across from the courthouse for demanding the arrest of a deputy who had struck a black schoolgirl. This time, Gilmore won.

So did Branch, a Baptist preacher and schoolteacher, who sought the office that controls the issuing of deeds, land transfers, eviction notices, wills and mortgages. As with Gilmore in his race for sheriff, there was special satisfaction in his candidacy for Branch: his father had been thrown off a tenant farm when he was a youth. “There were no eviction papers ever issued, man. I’m going to look those records up now.”

The transition will not be easy. The three white clerks who worked in the probate judge’s office have quit; Gilmore was able to retain just one white deputy. The county’s white citizens have already fixed a critical eye on the new power structure. There is talk in the white community of an exodus from Greene County. Sheriff Gilmore is unconcerned by the reports: “That doesn’t bother me. Let them go.” But for the “white people of good will in Greene County,” Gilmore said, the new political reality could force a change: “They have no place else to turn.”

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On Inauguration Day, though, the blacks were content simply to enjoy a special moment of jubilation. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, head of the S.C.L.C., came to town and preached from atop a wagon parked across the street from Hattie Brasfield’s Beauty Shoppe. But it was Judge Branch who really got things going, there in the crowded courtroom after he was sworn in. “I’m here because God wants me here,” he said.

Yeah. Amen.

“This is an opportunity to serve my people. It is an opportunity ordained by God and it was substantiated by the voters of Greene County. I’m a little piece of leather but I’m well put together.”

Tell it, brother.

“All men want to be free, irrespective of color.”

Amen.