Episode 3: Trial… and Error
Note: This transcript has been generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers. It may contain errors. Whenever possible, we strongly encourage you to listen to the Buried Truths audio.
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:17:59 | This is Buried Truths. I’m Hank Klibanoff. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:18:05 | Where are we in the story? Election day, 1948. It started with hope for the black community. Their choice for governor, Melvin Thompson, had lost. The heir apparent to the Talmadge dynasty, still echoing his father’s white supremacy, Herman Talmadge, would soon take office. For some of the black men who did vote despite warnings, there were dire consequences. John Harris, the handyman, returned home to find that his wife had nailed up the house with the kids inside. He joined them, fearful of what might happen next. Dover Carter, head of the NAACP, had been stopped on a winding road and severely beaten by two white men. His good friend Isaiah Nixon, the farmer, had been shot three times, was critically injured, and was fighting for his life at a hospital in Dublin, Georgia. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:19:04 | Dover Carter goes there, sees Nixon, and hears about his terrifying day. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:19:15 | Now, Dover Carter is faced with a decision: Head back home, back to his farm and his family, near Alston, or tell authorities what he’s heard. What authority would he tell? Dover Carter remained a man on a mission, but now, having seen Isaiah Nixon struggling to live, his mission had changed, dramatically. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:19:39 | Leaving Claxton Hospital, Dover Carter made a critical decision. He headed north, straight to Atlanta. There he went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:19:57 | By doing this, Dover Carter is not just leaving his family for a while. He’s taken a major risk. He’s been warned not to talk about his beating. Knowing what he now knows about Isaiah Nixon, he decides that he must. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:20:13 | He’s at the FBI, where he sits with a special agent and begins talking and telling. His conversations with the FBI, well they left a large paper trail, which gives a lot of detail, especially in regard to his severe beating on that winding road. Dover Carter’s statement is so vivid, that we’ve asked an actor to read some passages from it. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:20:46 | My name is Dover Carter. I live on a farm outside of Ailey, Georgia. On September 8th, 1948, I drove to Alston. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:20:55 | Up to now, what we’ve told you about Dover Carter’s beating comes from his family members. We found a lot of documents the family had never seen. We’ve got FBI interviews with Dover Carter, a deposition, stacks of memos, and other papers from the NAACP, including |
| letters he wrote, letters he received. In all, more than 500 pages. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:21:19 | In a couple of instances, for clarity, we’ve edited Dover Carter’s statement and his story. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:21:25 | On September 8th, 1948, I drove to Alston, to vote in the Georgia Democratic Primary. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:21:31 | On the morning of that election day, you may recall, Dover Carter and his wife nearly had a head on collision. That’s because the sheriff-elect, Claude Sharpe, had swerved his light blue Ford into their lane, several times. To avoid an accident, Dover Carter had to take evasive action. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:21:48 | I pulled my car onto the shoulder and kept going. When I arrived at the polls, Mr. Sharp also arrived, immediately afterward. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:21:56 | Dover Carter was at the polling place so that his wife could vote. The record shows he’d spend the day shuttling black voters to and from the polls. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:22:05 | The poll manager, Mr. Marvin McBride… |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:22:07 | McBride, a white man who is quietly organizing black voters to get them to the polls, he was rounding up those votes for governor Melvin Thompson, that is, against Herman Talmadge. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:22:19 | …Mr. Marvin McBride gave me a list of all the registered colored that had not voted, and requested me to get them to the polls, as quickly as possible. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:22:27 | That’s what he did. We’re not sure how many people he got to the polls, on election day. As the head of the NAACP in Montgomery County, we can guess it was as many as he could possibly get there. Later in the day, Dover Carter was driving on that winding road. He was driving a woman and her son away from the polls after she had voted. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:22:49 | That’s when two white men, Johnnie Johnson, and his brother-in-law, Thomas Wilson, accelerated past Dover Carter’s truck and blocked the road in front of him. The men got out of their car and approached. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:23:01 | Thomas Wilson continued to advance toward me, with his gun pointed on me, until he was close enough to point the gun through my right car door to my side. He demanded that I get out the car, stated that they were going to kill me. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:23:14 | Seeing this, the passengers in his truck quickly ran off. Johnnie Johnson yanked Dover Carter’s door open and |
| began striking him. It was a two-fisted assault. With each blow, Dover Carter noticed something. Johnnie Johnson was holding a weapon in each hand. | ||
| Actor Dover: | 01:23:31 | Mr. Johnnie Johnson continued to beat me with a piece of iron fastened to his arm and with fist knucks. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:23:38 | Fist knucks, you know, brass knuckles. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:23:40 | As they spoke to me, I could not answer both of them at the same time, because Mr. Johnnie Johnson was continuing to beat me, as fast as he could, with both hands, until he stopped to rest a moment. Then, he began attacking me again. He continued to beat me until my head was bloody and my hands were paralyzed. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:23:59 | According to Dover Carter’s statement to the FBI, a car passed during this incident. A light blue Ford, driven by sheriff-elect, Claude Sharpe. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:24:10 | At this time, I noted a blue Ford pass. Mr. Claude Sharpe was driving. Mr. Johnnie Johnson stopped long enough to see who was passing and laughed at Mr. Claude Sharpe. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:24:21 | Did you hear that? Johnnie Johnson, while beating Dover Carter, looks up to see who was passing by. He sees Claude Sharpe, and then, he laughs at Claude Sharpe.
Picture this, the two men, that’s the soon-to-be sheriff, Claude Sharpe, and the man who’s beating Dover Carter, Johnnie Johnson, are locking eyes with each other, and then … Let’s listen to what happens next. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:24:43 | Mr. Sharpe laughed back. Mr. Johnson continued beating me. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:24:54 | That beating continued for about 25 minutes. Eventually, the beating would stop. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:25:01 | They demanded that I turn my truck around, go home, and not haul anymore people to the polls, nor be caught at the polls anymore, and they’d better not hear me say anything about this. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:25:13 | And so here I got to pause to point out one really important fact: Had Dover Carter abided by this warning, had he just gone home and shut up, we wouldn’t know this story. Not just this incident on the road, we wouldn’t know about the warning that Claude Sharpe gave John Harris. We wouldn’t know the story of the shooting of Isaiah Nixon. All of that would of been lost to history. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:25:38 | So it’s fair to say that this entire podcast was built on the foundation of Dover Carter’s courage to tell his stories to federal authorities. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:25:53 | After the beating Dover Carter went home. Then, he went to a doctor and was treated for his severe injuries. The one thing he knew is that he’d better remain scarce. Knowing that his family was being taken care of in Alston, he stayed in Atlanta for a while. |
| Actor Dover: | 01:26:11 | The reason I came to Atlanta was that I feared that another attempt might of been made on my life. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:26:25 | All of this, everything he says, goes into the FBI memos, and soon, the memos will be on their way to the FBI office in Savannah, and to the FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC. Dover Carter also shares his stories with the largest black newspaper in the south, “The Atlanta Daily World.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:26:52 | Back in the Claxton Hospital, on September 10th, Isaiah Nixon died. With that, Daisy Davis lost her only child, Sally Nixon lost her husband, and six children lost their father.
Among those children, was one who had been born only 15 days earlier, a son, and they had named him, Isaiah Nixon Jr. The death of Isaiah Nixon makes the charges against Jim A. and Johnnie Johnson even more serious. This is not just a shooting. It’s a killing. As far as the current sheriff is concerned, Sheriff R. M. McCrimon, this is murder. Keep in mind, that Sheriff McCrimon is only in office for a couple more weeks. Claude Sharpe, who had defeated him a few weeks earlier in the election for sheriff, will soon take his place. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:28:07 | Since Sheriff McCrimon still has the power to act, he does. He arrests the two Johnson brothers. He does something else. He makes an important declaration. He says that Isaiah Nixon was shot because he had voted. That declaration from a white sheriff in South Georgia at a time like that was instant news. ” The Associated Press” picked it up, released it around the country, and a brief story even made it into “The New York Times.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:28:44 | What about Dover Carter? The sheriff made no arrests on that assault, even though Johnnie Johnson and Thomas Wilson wouldn’t deny that they’d beaten him. Instead, they’d claimed that Dover Carter tried to provoke them.
That he’d accelerated, nearly crashed into the back of their car. These men were going to claim self-defense. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:29:08 | Let’s stay on this for a second. The two white men, Johnnie Johnson and Thomas Wilson, are saying that Dover Carter, a quiet, prayerful man, a father of 10 children, with a woman and her son in his truck; Dover |
| Carter, who’s trying to go unnoticed all day as he shuttles voters to the polls; Dover Carter, who as head of the NAACP has been building to this day, decided to risk it all by provoking these two armed white men. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:29:39 | But wait, what about sheriff-elect, Claude Sharpe? You may remember that Dover Carter said he and his wife were nearly run off the road by him. These same FBI documents include a statement from Claude Sharpe. It reads: “At no time, during the day, did I see Dover Carter driving his car, and I did not, at any time, try to run him off of the road.” What about the part of the story that we just heard? That Claude Sharpe drove by and saw the white men beating Dover Carter and laughed? Claude Sharpe would claim he wasn’t even on that road that day. He was busy at the voting polls and didn’t have time to leave. He also said he wasn’t the sheriff at the time. Essentially, he didn’t have the authority to intervene. But, he added, “I did not pass by the place where the fight was taking place. If I had passed, I would of stopped to see what was going on.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:30:38 | I want to go back to Dover Carter’s conversation in Atlanta with the FBI agent. This is really important. As Carter is telling the story of what’s happened to him and to Isaiah Nixon, what’s the agent listening for? It’s simple. A reason to bring federal charges. Back then, it really wouldn’t of been much of a federal case just because Isaiah Nixon and Dover Carter were attacked for voting. But the good possibility that the morning attack on Dover Carter and the afternoon shooting of Isaiah Nixon might be part of a conspiracy to deny them their votes, their civil rights, now that was a different matter. Because conspiracy would be a federal crime. After taking Dover Carter’s statement, the FBI agent drafts a memo. He sends it by telex to the nation’s top cop, FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover. The agents writes that the beating and the shooting, quote, “Appear to be related and possibly part of an overall conspiracy.” Those magic words, part of an overall conspiracy, land on Hoover’s desk. Now, J. Edgar Hoover is well known, even in 1948, for believing that civil rights attacks belong with state and local prosecutors, not with the feds. Decisions over what crimes to prosecute and which ones to leave alone reside with his boss, the attorney general, but Hoover can influence those decisions, and he does. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:32:28 | He does so by sending a memo up the chain of command at the Justice Department, but with one glaring omission: He drops that magic word, conspiracy. Instead, Hoover writes to an assistant attorney general, “You may desire to consider these complaints together.” He closes by saying, “No investigation is contemplated, unless requested by you.” One person deeply concerned about the election day assaults, was Thurgood Marshall, special counsel to the |
| NAACP’s legal defense fund. This was nearly 20 years before he’d take a seat on the US Supreme court.
Thurgood Marshall sent a telegram straight to the governor of Georgia, Melvin Thompson, pushing him to do all he could to prosecute the men who beat Dover Carter and shot Isaiah Nixon on election day. |
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| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:33:29 | “Use your full authority,” he wrote. “Push vigorous prosecution. This type of intimidation, if permitted to go unpunished, will make our Constitution a farce.” Now Governor Melvin Thompson, who was still in office for just a few weeks more and would soon be replaced by Herman Talmadge, responded. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:33:50 | Melvin Thompson assured Thurgood Marshall that the Nixon killing is, “being pushed vigorously, by the prosecuting authorities.” Then, the Governor added something, and this is something Melvin Thompson didn’t really have to say, but he said it. “You may be assured of my willingness to do everything I can, as long as I am chief executive, to see that those violating the law are brought to justice.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:34:23 | Meanwhile, word that a black farmer in a small Georgia town had been killed, that might not make national news, but when the sheriff announced that Isaiah Nixon was killed for voting, that was different. It resonated in the newsroom of a weekly newspaper, “The Pittsburgh Courier.” The Courier was the most widely circulated black newspaper in America. That year, 1948, its circulation hit an astonishing 358,000 copies per week. It traveled from Pittsburgh by the busload to black communities, in every city, town, and crossroads in the south. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:35:09 | ” The Pittsburgh Courier” dispatched a reporter to Alston, Georgia, to investigate. His name: Alexander Rivera. |
| AlexanderRivera: | 01:35:10 | Hello? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:35:12 | As a black reporter covering race news during those days in the south, Alexander Rivera had accumulated a lot of fascinating stories – the Isaiah Nixon story, for one. In an interview more than 50 years later, Rivera told the story of that trip. He was seated at his office desk. |
| AlexanderRivera: | 01:35:29 | Something happened that had never happened before in my whole life. Something told me, I don’t know what the something was, to go dressed as a chauffer. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:35:41 | Rivera figured that anyone who saw him dressed as a chauffer would think that he worked for someone important. |
| AlexanderRivera: | 01:35:46 | It was easier traveling. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:35:48 | Easier traveling. He drove a conspicuous Buick Roadmaster. Once he arrived in Alston, he sat out to find the home of Isaiah Nixon. He turned to a local man to ask for directions. Something seemed wrong, so Alexander Rivera approached the man cautiously. |
| AlexanderRivera: | 01:36:06 | Let me ask you something.” You nervous?” “Yeah.” I asked him, I said, “Did you know Isaiah Nixon?” He started speaking real fast. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I knew him. Yeah.” I said, “You know where he lives?” He said, “Yeah.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:36:24 | Rivera offered him $5, the equivalent of about $50 today, by the way. This local man agreed to take Rivera out to the Nixon farmhouse. |
| AlexanderRivera: | 01:36:34 | I photographed the family and the kids, interviewed the wife. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:36:39 | The story of the killing of Isaiah Nixon would soon make its way to hundreds of thousands of “Pittsburgh Courier” readers. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:36:50 | At this point, I got to stress, that there were very few eyewitnesses to the shooting of Isaiah Nixon. There’s his daughter, Dorothy, of course, but there’s another. I sat with her, and some of her family members at a retirement home. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:37:03 | Look at them, two. Don’t they look like twins? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:37:08 | She’s petite. She has an easy smile. She’s 93 years old. It’s Isaiah Nixon’s wife, Sally Nixon. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:37:19 | It’s a privilege to meet all of you. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:37:22 | At the time of Isaiah Nixon’s death, he was 28, and Sally was 25. I was so happy to hear that she was still alive and so grateful for the opportunity to meet with her. I came with a lot of questions. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:37:38 | After you met him, was it long before you decided to get married? |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:37:42 | No. (Laughing) |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:37:46 | He was ready? Sounds like you were, too? |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:37:49 | He was a few years older than I was. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:37:53 | As we talked, Sally is totally delightful. She smiles as she tells me that her late husband was a nice enough fella. He wasn’t that tall. He was maybe 5’7″. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:38:03 | Okay. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:38:03 | Handsome. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:38:03 | Yeah, he was handsome. I’ve seen the pictures. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:38:07 | He was also cautious, on voting day in 1948, and he wouldn’t let her go to the polls. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:38:14 | I went with him everywhere he go. That day he wouldn’t let me go. He didn’t know whether he was going to make it back to the house or not. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:38:23 | For now, she’s happy to reflect and reminisce. We discuss an old photo of her husband. Well actually, it’s the only photo of her husband. I tell her that I really like that hat that he’s wearing. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:38:37 | He had bought the hat. I buried him in the suit. And I sold his shoes back to the store. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:38:46 | He had one suit, and she sold his shoes back to the store. We’ll talk again with Isaiah Nixon’s wife, Sally, and his daughter, Dorothy. We’ll find out what happened, now that two men had been arrested for killing Isaiah Nixon. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:39:02 | There are some powerful stories coming up. I hope you’ll stay with us. This is Buried Truths. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:39:18 | Now to the funeral of Isaiah Nixon. It took place at the Flipper New Hope AME Church in Uvalda, Georgia. The entire Nixon family was there, and that includes Isaiah Nixon’s six year old daughter, Dorothy, in a little, white dress. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 01:39:36 | I remember the funeral. I don’t remember leaving the house or nothing like that. I just remember getting to the church. I was sitting on the side, because I didn’t want to sit up there where my sisters and everybody was. They let me do it. I remember every time my oldest sister looked at the casket and my daddy, she would faint. She just kept fainting, over and over. I remember that. I don’t remember crying. I was just sitting there like numb, and even then, angry. Trying to understand, why would somebody kill my daddy? |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 01:40:25 | He was good. Why would they shoot him like that? I didn’t understand anything about voting, and black/white situations, and that kind of thing. I just knew it was my |
| daddy, and I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to be up there looking, so I just sat in the corner. I did a lot of corner sitting, for years, really. I was very angry. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:40:56 | Sitting in the corner, not sitting with her family, at the funeral. Sitting off to the side. This became Dorothy’s routine behavior. Her response to just about everything was to go hide and be alone. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 01:41:10 | On the day that they shot him, the same afternoon and night, they’d have to get me from behind the house and bring me in. Days that followed, I’d be under the house or behind the house. If somebody came up, I would run and I would hide. As I was growing up, I was very much alert and knew, I wasn’t mentally disturbed, but because I stayed to myself, they called me weird. I wasn’t as weird as they thought, I just could not trust people. I didn’t want to be around people. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:41:49 | Even after the funeral, the pain and anger of all she’s seen, just would not end. The nightmares would begin. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 01:41:59 | I saw it over and over again. One of the things that I saw all the time, was hiding behind the house, just shaking, which it did happen. I had nightmares about being behind the house. That was the center theme, most of the time, was hiding behind the house, when people came. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:42:22 | The funeral of Isaiah Nixon was well attended. Afterward, the family rode from the church and onto a dirt road, that went on and on, to the cemetery, deep in the woods of Montgomery County. This is not one of those sprawling cemeteries spread over rolling hills. It’s a clearing in the woods. From just about anywhere you stand, you can see every grave site and every headstone. It was here, in mid September 1948, that Isaiah Nixon was buried. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:43:08 | As Isaiah Nixon is being mourned and buried, state prosecutors are moving forward with the murder case against the Johnson brothers. Meanwhile, attorneys with the FBI and the Justice Department in Washington, Atlanta, and Savannah, they’re not quite sure what to do. They’ve got two incidents, the Dover Carter beating and the Isaiah Nixon killing, with an overlap of family members, and they’re being told out of Washington, this isn’t a conspiracy. How do they get a foothold on this case? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:43:38 | In Washington, lawyers in the Justice Department know that any case that they bring in rural Georgia might backfire. This is actual words from a federal attorney: “That it might inflame local sentiment and undermine the state’s murder case.” The feds decide to lay low and let the state go first. If needed, the feds can get involved, later. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:44:06 | The trial for the murder of Isaiah Nixon, the State versus Jim A. Johnson and Johnnie Johnson, took place on November 4th 1948, less than two months after his death. We’ve searched and found no record of the court proceeding. We’ve got copies of the indictment. We’ve got the handwritten names of those in the jury pool, those selected for the jury. Yes, all white, all men, none of whom we could find still alive. There are no records of the proceedings. No court reporter’s notes. No transcript. I should add that I always remain hopeful, that whoever was the court reporter at the trial, and took precise notes or maybe even recorded it, put the tapes or the notes in a closet or an attic that will some day be discovered and reveal what was said in the court room. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:45:04 | Now remember we have been able to pull together a few hundred pages, some records that provide a fairly authoritative account of what happened. But before we get to the trial, let’s have a quick recap as to what happened the day the Johnson brothers showed up at the Nixon farm. Jim A. and Johnnie Johnson asked Isaiah Nixon how he voted. When he told them that he voted for Melvin Thomson, that’s when they insisted that he go for a ride with them. Now I’ve read all this in the documents, but I really wanna hear this story from Sally Nixon, so I asked for her account of what she saw that day. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:45:43 | He said, “No, I’m not going with you, Jim A. You is a white man.” Oh, he just loved my family to death, this Jim A. and Johnnie. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:45:51 | What’s she mean by that? That Jim A Johnson loved Isaiah Nixon, her husband? Well, as it turns out, and this is sort of an old South cultural fact, that black and white could grow up together, that Jim A. Johnson and Isaiah Nixon grew up as kids, played with each other as kids, Jim A. Johnson even had dinner inside the Nixon home. So on this day Sally Nixon is recalling that time, that period, that atmosphere for us, and she remembered what Jim A. said next. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:46:22 | “Come on, go with us.” He said, “No, I’m not going with you.” “Well we want to just talk with you about what happened today.” He said, “Ain’t nothing happened, but I just voted.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:46:32 | Just voted. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:46:33 | “That’s all.” Well, if he’s not going with his best friend, shoot him. Bam, bam, bam. He voted because black people had never voted before. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:46:49 | Voted because black people had never voted before. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:46:52 | He said, “No I ain’t going with you.” “Well, you voted.” He said, “Yeah, I did that for my children.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:46:58 | Did that for my children. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:47:01 | Got them sitting right in front there. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:47:03 | Motioning to her daughter Dorothy. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:47:05 | She said, “Jim A., why you shoot our daddy?” And they ran. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:47:21 | Jim A. and Johnnie Johnson would say that they’d come to Isaiah Nixon’s farm house just to offer him a job. That’s all. They were there to do him a favor and give him some work, and then, get this, they said Isaiah Nixon pulled a knife on them. That’s right. At their trial they were going to claim self-defense. Now you’ve heard that alibi before in this episode, right? Remember the guys who beat up Dover Carter at gun point? They, too, claimed self-defense, saying that he nearly ran his truck into the car just to provoke them. Now, one of those same men, Johnnie Johnson, along with his brother, Jim A. Johnson are walking into court saying they were threatened a second time on the same day by another black man, Isaiah Nixon. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:48:11 | Self-defense. Let’s discuss this more. I started off this podcast walking on the Nixon farm where all this took place, asking a question, “Who were we? As a people who were we that we allowed this to happen?” Well, here’s who we were. In trial after trial, court room after court room across the South, whites accused of killing blacks could almost absolutely, without fail, win their freedom just by saying they acted in self-defense. It was as if white defendants, who were almost certain to face all white, all male juries, had a secret password that opened the door to freedom every time. But how and why did it work so automatically for white people? Why was this password, self-defense, a sure fire path to freedom? Because, and we white people in the South know this, because after decades of racist demagoguery, of myths about the primitive criminal behavior of black people, myths written into text books, into sermons, into racist jokes, into stories, even into bedtime stories, well, it didn’t take a whole lot to convince jurors that even a good man like Isaiah Nixon, even if he was being offered a job, would suddenly revert to some completely primal behavior, and pull out a knife. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:49:48 | I had mentioned in an earlier episode a story of a World War II vet, Maceo Snipes, who was shot and killed after he was the only black man to vote in Taylor County in 1946.
Now, the man who killed him claimed he’d gone to see Snipes merely to collect a $10 debt, and that Snipes had |
| pulled a knife, so he had to shoot him three times. Self- defense. Of course, it worked. You know, when word reached Atlanta that the Johnson brothers were claiming self-defense it was just too much for the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:50:28 | At the time, the newspaper was the largest in the Southeast, and in his column, in which he invoked the killing of Maceo Snipes, McGill wrote these words, “That has a familiar ring. We have heard it when a prisoner was killed in his cell. We heard it two years ago when a negro was called to his door and shot after voting, “in self- defense.”” Then Ralph McGill directly addressed the Johnson’s alibi, “A man doesn’t arm himself with a pistol when he goes to seek a hired hand.” Now that sounds logical. Still we had to ask someone who saw it, Isaiah Nixon’s daughter, Dorothy. I asked her about the Johnson brother’s alibi, and about what she saw that day her father was shot. — You know there’s different stories as to whether your dad had a gun or a knife that they would later make up this thing- |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 01:51:24 | Oh, he didn’t. He came ’cause he was in the back where my mother was. He came out. He had nothing in his hand. He knew better than that. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:51:41 | You’ve heard me suggest that the bombastic speeches of political leaders like the Talmadges provoked some whites to act out against blacks. These political leaders used heated language spiced with a lot of code words to try to appeal to the nativist instincts of the white supremacist population. So, I’d like you to listen one more time to this clip of Herman Talmadge on the campaign trail. Listen for the direct racial appeal. The part about traditions, about principles, about birthright. |
| Herman Talmadge: | 01:52:14 | The other candidates for governor are opposed to a white primary. They know that the loss of the white primary will destroy our Southern traditions and principles, yet these self-seeking politicians would sell out their birthright that our grandfathers fought for, for a few votes. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:52:37 | Well, that rhetoric that politicians used to push whites into a state of fear by appealing to their birthright, to their traditions, to their heritage, those code words worked their way into court rooms in defense of the Johnson brothers, and scores of others like them. Back to the trial of the Johnson brothers. The prosecution had lined up eight witnesses, including Isaiah Nixon’s wife, Sally, his mother, Daisy Davis, two family friends who had been at the farm and witnessed the shooting, and the sheriff who had said the Johnsons killed Nixon because he voted. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:53:24 | Now there’s no indication in available court records who, if anyone, testified for the defense. Now get this, just days before the trial, the prosecutor who was going to present evidence against the Johnson brothers had to be replaced. He was sick. So, the judge in the case, Eschol Graham, had to quickly pick a substitute prosecutor. He selected a local attorney named N.G. Reeves Jr. Of course, this only gave Reeves very limited time to prepare. Only three days. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:53:57 | We know little about the testimony that unfolded at the trial. We know all the prosecution witnesses were not called to testify. We know that Sally Nixon, when she took the stand, was on it for only 15 minutes. We know that the murder trial took about two hours, and jury deliberation took another two. We know, and this is surprising, that Judge Eschol Graham would later say that he didn’t remember the issue of voting ever coming up at the trial. Here was the verdict. Jim Atlas Johnson, he’s the man who shot Isaiah Nixon, not guilty. As for his brother Johnnie Johnson, a lesser known legal term was used, nolle prossed. Latin for we shall no longer prosecute. In other words, the entire case was over. Back in the retirement home with Sally Nixon, she knows everything I’ve just told you. She lived it, but one thing that still sticks with me is the nature of childhood friendships at that time and in that place. I grew up in the South, and I saw this. I saw black and white being friendly on the streets, but I had to ask her about that relationship between Jim A. Johnson and Isaiah Nixon. — It’s still hard to understand why two men who thought of themselves as friends would have killed Isaiah Nixon for voting. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:55:48 | It’s hard for you to understand. Because you’re not like that. Well just know, it wasn’t hard for us to understand. We know what kind of people they were. They had two faces, you know what that mean? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:56:06 | Tell me. |
| Sally Nixon: | 01:56:06 | A good face and…another face. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 01:56:12 | For the Nixon family, the shooting, the death, the verdict, it just changed their world; but stay with us, because things do get better for them. On the next episode, I’ll tell you how the Nixon family moves on, how they get support from across the country, how they move into a new home designed by a famous architect, and how Sally Nixon ends up on a popular TV show. This is Buried Truths. I’m Hank Klibanoff. |
| Announcer: | 01:56:53 | CREDITS: Hank Klibanoff is a former reporter, editor, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Race Beat. Today, he is a professor at Emory University. Buried Truths is produced by David Barasoain and Kate Sweeney, edited by John Haas, the executive producer is Christine Dempsey. Please subscribe to the show, and if you have a moment leave us a review in Apple Podcast. We’d love to hear what you think, and your review will help others find the show. If you have any information related to this case, you can write or send a voice memo to stories@buriedtruths.org. You can follow us on social media at buriedtruthspodcast where you’ll find photographs and documents related to the case. We appreciate the help we got today from the Southern Oral History Project and the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. They provided that interview with Alexander M. Rivera. We had help on this episode from the nearly 100 students who’ve taken the Civil Rights Code Case class that Hank Klibanoff teaches. Thanks to Professor Brett Gadsden who helped create and teach the course. Special thanks to two past students who have stayed close to this project, Ellie Studdard and Lucy Baker. Thanks to Emory University and its centers for digital scholarship and faculty excellence for their support. Finally, thanks to the actor David Atkins, who played the voice of Dover Carter. Buried Truths is a production of WABE Atlanta. |
