
          Economics and a Murder Trial
          By Durr, VirginiaEliza Heard (Virginia Durr)
          Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 14-17
          
          The road to Hayneville and Selma (No. 80) leads to dreams of
asphodel and honey. The old cotton fields are now meadows filled with
slow-moving fat cattle that drift from one patch of shade to the
other, and in the Spring they are covered with waves and sheets and
masses of the loveliest and most fragile flower that grows, the wild
primrose. It varies in color from deep pink to white and it covers
the fields, the banks, the center stretches of the road and is
accented and made even more beautiful by patches of purple vetch and
crimson clover. In the Spring it brings the Black_Belt glory and along
with the primerose comes the honeysuckle, which is almost too sweet to
be borne and drugs one's senses with its overpowering perfume.
          The day of the first Liuzzo trial I went alone through the empty
countryside. A gentle wind rippled the primroses and brought the scent
of the honeysuckle and I felt I was in Sleeping Beauty Land,
everything was silent, empty and stretched for miles and miles under
the empty sky. I began to feel a keen loneliness and was glad to pull
in at a filling station to ask my way of a Negro youth who was keeping
the station and the store. "Where was she shot?" I asked him while he
serviced the car.
          He knew at once whom I meant and said: "Just half a mile down the
road on the left hand side."
          I went just half a mile down the road and there on the left hand
side were still the skid marks, scarring the dirt where the car ran
off the road with her dead hands on the steering wheel. And on this
day in Hayneville a man accused of murder was on trial charged with
shooting her fair in the face as he and others came abreast of her
car. A cold-blooded, calculated, planned and above all impersonal
murder was charged, for she was said to be utterly unknown to them,
and simply killed on "principle."
          When I finally got to the Courthouse in Hayneville, through more
miles of deserted countryside, I found the Courthouse surrounded, by
cars and by State Troopers, great, burly men with guns on their
hips. I went past the Courthouse and up the pleasant street of white,
green-shuttered houses and parked in front of one of the nicest, with
a lovely, flowering garden of azaleas. I noticed a string along the
fence with red rags tied to it and I thought it was to keep birds away
until a woman called to me from the porch, holding the screen door
half open. Her voice was not pleasant when she said: "You can't park
there, I don't want anyone parking there in front of my house. Didn't
you see the string?"
          So the red rags were not for the birds but for me, and this set the
tone of the reception the "outsiders" received in Hayneville that
day. I finally found a parking place and came back to the Courthouse,
thinking, "I'll never get in, there'll 

be such a crowd." But when I
did get in the courtroom was only half filled. It is a beautiful, tall
windowed, high ceilinged old room, and a bird kept flying through the
windows which were framed in green. Inside the courtroom, the jurymen
were being chosen, sunburned, angular, lean, and white. They looked
like all of the other thousands and thousands of white_men I had seen
all my life in all of the little country towns of the South and I
liked their looks and felt at once a sense of kinship with them, so I
resented the whispered comment I heard in front of me, "Just a bunch
of red necks."
          This came from the newsmen who filled the front of the spectator
side of the courtroom. There were over half a hundred: a clotted group
of handsome, squat, powerful, long haired and well dressed Englishmen
on the front row, and behind them the taller, cigarette smoking,
nervous Americans from all the great papers, magazines and TV and
radio chains, and mixed in with the Americans and English, a few
others from all over the world, notably one young Swede who seemed to
have the most feeling about the murder of anyone there.
          When lunch time came I was invited by a local reporter, a
red-headed boy from Tallapoosa County, to have lunch with the newsmen
on the lawn in front of the old white Courthouse. Every drug store and
restaurant was closed tight against the "outsiders" but we were
permitted to stand in the street and get a cold drink and food handed
to us through a wicket. We sat in a circle and the Tallapoosa boy and
I were the only ones in the whole group who looked for a
conviction. All of the newsmen were intelligent, experienced, polite
and cynical and, I must also add, contemptuous. They looked on this
trial as just another of the folkways of a barbaric Southland, for
which they felt no affinity and no responsibility. They spoke casually
of "fascism" and Nazism, compared the South to South_Africa and seemed
to think that here in the South was the repository of original sin.
          Since none of the white residents of Hayneville would speak to
them, they asked me a thousand questions: "Was it true that one man in
Lowndes County was known to have killed 15 Negroes and never even got
indicted?"
          I had heard the same tale, and thought of an old Negro who came by
once to cut the grass and in the course of the morning I found he had
come from Lowndes County and worked for Mr.-------, whose reputation
as a killer was so bad. I asked him, "Weren't you afraid working for
Mr. ------?"
          The old man shook his head, "No, Ma'm, I won't scared of him. He
won't no bad man, he wouldn't do nuthin' to you--that is less you
'sputed wid him." Evidently the old man had "sputed wid him" as he was
seeking sanctuary in Montgomery County.
          I also remembered the tale of Walter Jones. The first white_man
ever hung in Montgomery County, he had come up from Lowndes County
where he too was known as a killer, and had hunted down his enemy, a
white doctor who was sitting in a train at the Union Station, and
poked his gun in the window of the train and "blown his head off." I
had heard that tale with embellishments a hundred times. And the tale
always ended the same way, "The mistake he made was doing his killing
in Montgomery County. If he had just waited till Dr.------ got back to
Lowndes County he would never have been hung."
          By the second day it was plain to see that the man charged with
Mrs. Liuzzo's killing would not get hung and probably not
convicted. The feeling in the courtroom was not one of horror at the
slaying but resentment that it had taken place in Lowndes County.
          During that day's recess the reporters and I again had dinner on
the grounds. Here, various groups sat rigidly to themselves, all
eating from the same kinds of boxes and on the same ground, but having
no word to say to each other.
          The KKK group was large. There were there, also, weary looking
women, handsome children and sunburned men, country people, some who
had gone to town and worked in the steel mills and suffered the
torments of Hell in the burning mills and the dirty, smoky, town of
Bessemer. Such as they are not only exploited but looked down on by
the other citizens of Birmingham and Jefferson County. "Poor white
trash" is the usual term applied to them. I remembered from way back
when the men in the mills worked twelve hours a day and 24 on the
swing shift in heat and flame and danger, with no union and no
protection or compensation for the injuries they received. They lived
when they were off work in dingy company houses, traded with scrip at
dingy company stores, and all day the smoke hovered over them, lit by
the flames at night. We used to ride out to see a "run" and watch the
little figures working with the molten steel and wondered how any
human beings could stand the heat.
          And out of this life had come many Alabama Ku Kluxers, the men
looking slightly askew and their women weary and with that vague, wan
look that suggests pellagra some time in their lives. Some looked as
if they had had pellagra of the body, mind and soul. And I thought
once more of the times when the mills closed down and the men were out
of work and the credit cut off at the store and while the mules were
watered and fed, the people were thrown out of the houses, not fed,
not watered, and expected to provide for themselves. I had worked with
the Red Cross all during the Depression and I could look back now and
see vividly just these same kinds of people coming to the door, so
ashamed of having to take charity and trying to excuse themselves for
their failure, as if it was their fault. And I remembered the gaunt,
fanatic preachers who hollered at them that they had sinned and that
their suffering was the price of their sinning, and who, as though
they did not have Hell enough on this earth, sent them to an even
hotter Hell each Sunday.
          Out of these conditions had come these fanatic, joyless, pitiful
and ignorant people who were filled with hate of the "riggers" and of
all who helped them out.
          There was a public relations man at the trial, looking like a
parody of an old southern colonel, big, black hat, string tie, dirty
white shirt and dirty white whiskers, passing out hate literature
which went after not only the "riggers," but the Jews, Communists, and
Catholics, the U. S. Supreme_Court, the President of the United_States
and the United Nations. Hatred seemed to take in just about
everybody.
          Sitting close to the Klan was the Law, the big, powerful state
troopers, not only close to them in presence but it seemed in spirit;
there was a communion there between the Kluxers and the troopers that
could not be missed. Once 

again the newsmen said contemptuously,
"Storm Troopers." Sitting to themselves were the County Prosecutor and
his Assistant and the Judge, proper gentlemen doing a painful duty,
and not happily.
          The third day was the worst when the defendant's lawyer, Matt
Murphy, began his wild tirade to sway the Jury. A massive man, he had
the same noble brow and handsome looks of all the famous aristocratic
Percys from Mississippi. His uncle and grandfather had been general
counsels for the steel mills and had been gentlemen and men of
integrity, and had both died of their own hands.
          But here was a descendant of the Percys, having descended into the
Pit and dragging all of the rest of us with him. He was unutterably
and unnaturally vile. He accused the poor, dead woman of the nastiest
sort of sex mania and the Negro boy of even worse. She had only come
South for purposes of sex, she was driving with the Negro boy for
purposes of sex, she was going out to park with the Negro boy with no
other purpose than sex. He piled vileness upon vileness until the
whole courtroom stank. And all in the name of "Southern Tradition and
pure white Southern Womanhood."
          The visiting reporters were not so polite that day. I was the only
example of pure, white and certainly southern womanhood they could
talk to and they made it plain that they did not think I was worth the
vileness that had taken place in my name and in the name of all "pure,
white southern womanhood." Since I am an old time grandmother I did
not get offended as I agreed with them; I, too, felt shame that such a
cesspool should have overflowed into the courtroom in the name of
"southern womanhood." I did not feel we women deserved it but then I
did not feel we protested enough against it, and still again I did not
think we were the real reason.
          Killing may be done in our name but the real reason is much deeper
and has been there forever, since the beginning of man, and that is
the desire of one man to keep another man in bondage to him, so he may
live at ease and the other man must do the hard work.
          Life is pleasant in Hayneville and in all the other little southern
towns; that is if you are white and have even a small amount of
money. You wake up in the morning to the sound of someone stirring in
the kitchen, and come in to a hot breakfast. During the middle of the
day, you sit on your porch and direct a black_man digging in the yard
while another black_woman cooks the dinner, cleans up the house,
washes and irons the clothes and, above all, looks after the
children. Cheap labor is one of the greatest luxuries of life, and to
give it up is one of the hardest things there is to do.
          And it is cheap labor and the power over cheap labor that is at the
heart of Bloody Lowndes. The men accused of killing Mrs. Liuzzo were
jobless steel workers.
          Many southern white_men have been brutalized and oppressed
themselves and given nothing to comfort their souls but that "they
were better than riggers." They feed their souls on it and when that
support is removed, they must face the fact that they are nothing but
"poor, white trash" with no one to look down on, but rather looked
down on from above with the same kind of contempt and disgust they
show Negroes.
          There in Hayneville, the white_men who own the county 

and control
it simply want to "keep the Negro in his place." They are determined
to do so and when the jury came with a mistrial I realized that even
this was better than I had hoped for. Matt Murphy had not won them
over with his mad cries of "race mixing." As the jurymen said for the
newsmen, "That guy must have thought we were awful ignorant." (But
they did not find the Ku Kluxer guilty. In a second trial, a jury
exonerated him. The defendant and other Ku Kluxers had taken delight
in their actions and were still proud of themselves after the first
trial was over, as they went to konclave after konclave to be
worshipped and admired.)
          I drove back by myself after the trial was over. Still alone in the
empty countryside, for the first time I became afraid, and for a
moment I had a feeling of terror such as I never had before. Just
halfway between Hayneville and the junction with No. 80, on. a
perfectly empty road with empty fields stretching on either side, I
saw a big red car coming behind me which must have been going at least
80 miles an hour, and I thought it was going to strike me deliberately
and knock me off the road. It came close but it did not strike, and I
saw those pale, fanatic, askew faces of the defendants, Matt Murphy
beside them as they roared off up the road. I stopped the car until I
could get my breath and my heart could stop beating so hard. I knew
killing would strike again. For the white_people of Hayneville had
condoned the killing whatever they might say; there was killing in the
air.
          And it did strike again. This time a young white Episcopalian
priest was killed by a white_man who comes from one of the "leading
families" of Lowndes County and a young Catholic priest lies at the
point of death from the same man. Bloody Lowndes is living up to its
reputation and this time it is not just "uppity riggers" they are
killing but "outside agitators" who come "meddling." I remember a
white_woman I knew from Hayneville who told me once, "I simply love
living there; it is all just like one big family." Of course she meant
the white_people, and they do all stick together; the idea that the
white_man who killed the Rev. Mr. Daniels would be convicted was
absurd.
          Matt Murphy was not at this trial. he had been killed in an
automobile wreck not long after the Liuzzo trial. But vileness was
there, and this time the charge was merely manslaughter, and the
verdict--not guilty.
          I cannot see that just the "right to vote" is going to change these
kinds of counties very much, and they are the dark heart of
Dixie. Lowndes County has a population of 81% Negro and 19% white, but
the white_people own almost all the land and practically all the
businesses. So the Negro people are economically entirely dependent on
the white community. Even if the federal_government does come in and
insist that they be registered and their right to vote protected, what
can the government do about giving them a living if they are fired?
After the Civil_War the federal army was down here to protect the
right of the Negroes to vote, but they never got the 40 acres and a
mule, and much good voting did them. As soon as the federal troops
were withdrawn, the Negroes were thrown back into bondage.
          Into these Black Counties have gone the SNCC kids, jeans, beards,
sandals and long haired girls, with courage that seems almost beyond
belief. They live in the Negro communities, work and eat there and
never walk alone, every minute in danger, and they know it. Suppose
they do get every Negro registered, what then? How are the Negroes in
Lowndes County going to make a living? The landowners were already
going from cotton to cattle to get rid of labor, and now they are
mechanizing as fast as they can to get rid of even more labor. Lincoln
said "a necessitous man is not a free man" and I see no way to make
them free until they have a way to make a living, and in Lowndes
County I don't see how they are going both to live and be free. Will
Bloody Lowndes live up to its name again and again before it gives the
Negroes life, freedom, and a living?
          
            (Editor's Note) In October 1965, the Southern Regional
Council published "Economics and a Murder Trial" in its journal New
South. The essay, a first-person account of the Hayneville, Alabama,
trial of a Klansman indicted for the murder of civil_rights worker
Viola Liuzzo, was one of several written in the mid-1960s by Virginia
Foster Durr under the pen name of Eliza Heard. At the time, Virginia
and her husband, attorney Clifford Durr, lived on a small farm near
Wetumpka, Alabama. (See the accompanying article in this issue of
Southern Change.)
            "I was the only Southern white_woman who went to the trial,"
Virginia Durr recalls. "I drove over by myself to Lowndes County every
day. And all the journalists--who had come from throughout the
world--wanted to take my picture. I said, 'You think you're doing me a
favor, but you 're just going to ruin me. All that will come out in
the papers, you'll be gone to the next story, and I'll be the one who
gets the late night phone calls and the threats. ' So they didn't run
the pictures.
            "For the same reason, when I wrote about the trial for Maggie Long
(editor of New South)--and I had to write about it because I was so
mad--I felt I couldn't sign my name.  Cliff and I were in enough
trouble already. So I thought of Eliza Foster--my great-grandmother on
my father's side--and Virginia Heard--my father's mother--and I signed
"Eliza Heard."
          
        
