An early article from Louise Thompson on her terrifying arrest in Birmingham, Alabama for ‘vagrancy’ while a Communist organizer in the Southern city.

‘Southern Terror’ by Louise Thompson from The Crisis. Vol. 41 No. 11. November, 1934.

“BIRMINGHAM is a good place for good n***rs—but a damn bad place for bad n***rs.”

Thus spoke the officialdom of Birmingham, Ala., to me last May, and in the course of my experience there I learned what they meant. I was arrested as I went to enter the apartment of a woman whom I had known in the North. It so happened that the red squad was raiding her apartment at the time, and as I knocked at the door it was opened by a policeman who brusquely ordered me in. I did so, and was immediately placed under arrest. As they fired questions at me, one officer interrupted to ask:

“Gal, where you from? I know you ain’t from around here ’cause you don’t talk like it.”

“My home is California,” I answered.

“California, hell! You’re one of those–yankee—,that’s what you are!”

And with a few more remarks quite in keeping with the above they loaded me into the “black wagon,” along with the other persons in the apartment at the time, and off to the city jail we went. I was promptly locked up, with no chance given me to communicate with friends or an attorney. My attempts to question the procedure met with laughter or taunts from my jailers. “Held for investigation,” I learned later from my cellmates.

I spent the night with fourteen other Negro women held on charges ranging from drunkenness and pickpocketing to murder. One of the women was demented, and the two of us kept vigil that night, she, walking the floor and raving; I, wondering what was to happen to me on the morrow and what my friends would think when I did not return home that night.

The long night finally ended. Breakfast of huge soda biscuits, beans and a colored water which passed for coffee. Then I was called out, again taken for a ride in the patrol to the identification department for fingerprinting and “mugging” for the rogues’ gallery. Though I was being accorded the treatment of a criminal I had yet to know what I was being held for, and when I would be permitted to communicate with the outside world.

During the cross examination which followed, my questioners were inclined at first to make a joke of the affair, taunting me about “my comrades,” slyly alluding to some intimate relationship with the men arrested with me, and the like. But upon my refusal to answer any more questions until I had an opportunity to consult an attorney, their taunts turned to open threats which ran something like this:

“What about turning this gal over to the Ku Klux Klan? I reckon they know how to handle her kind.”

“Yeah, or a little tar and feathering might help.”

“How about talking to her through the rubber tube. She might be glad to talk then.” (I later learned that “talking through the rubber tube” meant beating with a rubber hose in the third degree.)

Again, one officer turned to me, pointing his finger and said: “See here, gal, you’re arrested now, see. And you say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’.” I was told later by some of the women prisoners that I was lucky not to have been slapped down when I refused to obey.

Eleven-notch Gun

Later in the day my friends finally succeeded in getting an attorney in to see me, after reading in the papers of the raid. He immediately prepared a writ of habeas corpus to force the placing of a charge against me or my release. And again I rode from the city jail to Jefferson county courthouse where the Scottsboro boys are imprisoned. There I was turned over to the prize red baiter and “n***r” hater of the plainclothes squad, Moser, who boasts of eleven notches in his gun for helpless Negroes he has shot down. These were his words of welcome:

“So you’re one of those–reds what thinks you are going to get social equality for n***rs down here in the South. Well, we think Communists are lower than n***rs, down here—fact is, we don’t even allow them to ’sociate with white folks, let alone have white folks ’sociating with n***rs. We know how to treat our n***rs down here and we ain’t going to stand for no interference from you–yankee reds. We ought to handle you reds like Mussolini does ’em in Italy—take you out and shoot you against a wall. And I sure would like to have the pleasure of doing it.”

With which this “protector of law and order” escorted me to the courtroom where I was to meet my attorney for a hearing on the habeas corpus proceedings. When my attorney read the writ, Moser triumphantly stepped up to the judge with a warrant for my arrest as a “vagrant.” Vagrancy is that convenient catch-all which serves all purposes.

My bail was set for $300 cash, my trial for ten days hence. On the tenth day I entered the courtroom and took my s¢€at on the side for Negroes to await the calling of my case. Surrounding the judge were a group of officers and others, whom I learned later to be members of the White Legion. From time to time they would suggest to the judge or prosecutor questions to be asked the Negro prisoners a ring before the bar of “justice.” The word “n***r” rang out from lips of judge, solicitor, officers, White Legionnaires every second. Any attempt on the part of a Negro prisoner to dispute testimony against him was met by, “N***r, do you dare to dispute the word of a white man?”’, or simply by loud bursts of laughter. Here was “southern justice” undisturbed by any militant interference!

My case was finally called and I stood before Judge Abernathy. The White Legion boys drew a little nearer, the police officers stepped up to testify. All eyes were focused upon me. The judge then listened to the testimony of the arresting officer, embellished with a few points to win the laughing approval of the crowd about the bench. Meanwhile the judge fingered the documents which disproved any charge of vagrancy against me, my status as a representative of the International Workers Order, the articles of incorporation which permit my organization to operate under state law, cancelled checks for my weekly wages. He looked at me intently and then asked of the crowd about him:

“Wonder where this gal is from? Looks like she came from Mississippi— that’s the way they mix up down there. Course it’s got nothing to do with the case, but I’m going to ask her where she was born as I’m mighty interested in how these mixtures turn out.” And to me, “Where were you born, gal?”

With no further questioning, the case was dismissed with the Judge declaring, “You can’t arrest the gal for being an octoroon.”

“No, she can’t help that,” was Moser’s parting shot.

I was not yet entirely free for another warrant was produced to arrest me on the charge of concealing my identity. A few days later, however, this second case was thrown out of court without my having to appear again.

The Bourbon authorities learned that the workers throughout the country were ready to apply their weapon of mass pressure against my arrest—and their experience with the Scottsboro case, with the Herndon case, made them cautious. They wanted stronger grounds to prepare another frame-up against a Negro engaged in working class activity.

The White Legion

Thus did I learn from first hand experience of the kind of “justice” meted out to Negroes in the South, of the unswerving determination of the servants of the State and of vested interests to keep the Negro people in utter subjection. And more, of the treatment of those who would help the Negro people in their fight for emancipation from this oppression. All the others arrested with me were white, yet they fared no better than I did, for as Communist suspects they are bitterly hated and granted no more constitutional rights than are given Negroes in the South. Being a Communist in the South is synonymous with being a fighter for the rights of the Negro people, of being a “n***r lover,” of trying to bring white and Negro workers and poor farmers together— of fighting against lynching, of challenging the southern ruling class’ traditional manner of treating Negroes. John Howard Lawson, prominent Hollywood playwright, who came to Birmingham to write up the terror was arrested as he left Jefferson county courthouse, fingerprinted and “mugged” and ordered from town. When he returned later with a delegation of liberals he was arrested again and charged with libel for telling the truth about the terror of Birmingham’s police and White Legion.

A word or two about the White Legion, this openly Fascist organization in Birmingham whose stated purpose is to fight communism and any move to lift oppression from the backs of the Negro people. Its membership fee is $5.00, which of course precludes any worker members. As a matter of fact it recruits its members from the officials of the city, merchants and other middle class elements. It maintains an office on one of the main streets of Birmingham and displays in the front window Communist leaflets and any material from the Negro or revolutionary press which advocates equal rights for Negroes. One week they displayed a picture of Langston Hughes with his poem An Open Letter to the South, in which Hughes appeals to Negro and white labor to unite in struggle for a better world. The comment scrawled along the margin was: “If this bird thinks we are going to have social equality in the South, he’s crazy!”

During the height of the terror against the Negro and militant white workers, the White Legion issued highly inflammatory leaflets seeking to provoke white against Negro workers. One such leaflet included this statement: “How would you like to awaken one morning to find your wife or daughter attacked by a Negro or a Communist!” It wound up with an appeal to pay the membership fee so that the White Legion could handle such situations in the traditional manner. During the planning of action against the class-conscious workers of Birmingham, one wing of the Legion was for riding through the Negro neighborhood and shooting indiscriminately into the homes of innocent Negroes, but cooler heads in the gang realized that such an extreme form of terror was a bit premature.

“Social Equality”

The southern press also played its part well during the reign of terror which did not end with our arrests, but went on in a series of raids upon the homes of workers over the entire city. The mining strike was at its height in Birmingham and for the first time Negro and white workers were militantly picketing together. The daily press came out with scare heads of “red violence” and “red plots” and references to “social equality.” One paper carried a story of a raid upon a Negro home which produced a “highly inflammatory” document—it was the Bill of Civil Rights calling for full political, economic and social equality for the Negro people. Yet those papers which went beyond the borders of the state carried not a line of the raids, the arrests, or the general terror.

That the press, the White Legion and the government officials always link the “reds” and Communism with the Negro question is not a mere coincidence. First of all, the International Labor Defense a the Scottsboro case has aroused the Negro people and rallied to their defense workers over the whole world. And it is the Communist Party which has analyzed the Negro question as that of an oppressed nation of people, defined the alignment of class forces for and against the Negro people’s struggle for liberation, and begun the organization of white and Negro working masses together. Revolutionary leaders in the South are boldly defying all that the southern ruling class has striven to perpetuate, and terror and jail bars do not stop them. Down in the heart of Dixie, the Black Belt, some 8,000 sharecroppers have organized a militant Sharecroppers Union to fight the starvation program of the A.A.A. which deputy sheriffs’ bullets have been unable to stop.

It is another matter, however, when organizations within the Negro group come forward as vehemently against any show of militancy on the part of the Negro masses and with as great enmity against a revolutionary program and revolutionary organizations as is expressed in the White Legion of Birmingham. Such organizations disregard the economic roots of the Negro’s oppression, and through collaboration with the ruling class seek to restrain the masses of Negroes from militant struggle. Such organizations accept the present system of capitalism and are willing to be satisfied with what hollow reforms may come without any fundamental change.

Revolution Called Necessity

But it is impossible to take one step in the direction of winning for the Negro people their elementary rights that is not revolutionary. Capitalism developed in America upon the super-exploitation of the Negro people and through the division created between white and Negro labor. Any attempt to end this super-exploitation, to destroy the enmity and to unite Negro and white labor is a blow at American capitalism. So it is that the southern ruling class is not going to budge from its position of exploiting and oppressing the Negro people. And behind the southern Bourbons stand the amassed strength of American finance capital—U.S. Steel, Wall Street investments in the plantations of the South, and the like. Any organizations among the Negro people which do not point out these class alignments must therefore, become the voice of reaction in the midst of a people struggling for freedom. So it is that the leadership among the Negro people must pass into new hands—into the hands of working class leaders, the Angelo Herndons, who will not be stopped by jail, by a desire to cling on to jobs, by death itself in leading the Negro people through the final conflict to complete emancipation.

The Crisis A Record of the Darker Races was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 as the magazine of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. By the end of the decade circulation had reached 100,000. The Crisis’s hosted writers such as William Stanley Braithwaite, Charles Chesnutt, Countee Cullen, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina W. Grimke, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg, Jean Toomer, and Walter White.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/sim_crisis_1934-11_41_11/sim_crisis_1934-11_41_11.pdf