Episode 5: I Found It!
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: | 02:41:27 | This is Buried Truths. I’m Hank Klibanoff. Dorothy Nixon watched as her father was shot. She watched as her mother struggled to raise a family of six. As Dorothy Nixon grew into adulthood, she’d go on to college. She’d become a psychiatric nurse. She’d get a master’s degree, and she’d raise a family of her own. But she fought against sadness, against a tendency to pull away from others, and yes, anger. Today, in her 70s, the memory of what happened to her father is still vivid. It still haunts, and it still hurts. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 02:42:14 | I don’t remember crying. I was just sitting there, like, angry. Trying to understand, “Why would somebody kill my daddy?” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:42:21 | Now Dorothy would be a grown woman before realizing that all those years she belonged to a large community of black families who had lost fathers, mothers, other family members to racially motivated violence – families that never experienced one minute of justice. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:42:45 | Over the past 25, 30 years, many of those cases came to be known through the work of journalists. They investigated and published their findings, especially when it was clear that the Klan and other perpetrators got away with murder. This work led to some fresh criminal investigations and prosecutions. It also led to enough convictions that in 2006, the United States attorney general made an announcement. The FBI would systematically reopen and review unpunished racially motivated murders that fell between the 1940s and the late 1960s in the South. |
| Robert Mueller: | 02:43:27 | Good afternoon. The FBI and the Justice Department exist to bring justice to the oppressed and to bring truths to light. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:43:36 | It was the new FBI Civil Rights Cold Case Initiative. |
| Robert Mueller: | 02:43:40 | Many trails ran cold and many cases were effectively closed, but for the victims, the wounds are never closed. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:43:48 | That’s former FBI director Robert Mueller. Yes, that Robert Mueller. Now, some of these were very old cases, so he added a word of caution. |
| Robert Mueller: | 02:43:59 | We know that some memories may fade, some evidence may be lost, and some witnesses may pass away. We know that no matter how much work we devote to an investigation, we may not always get the result that we’re hoping for. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:44:12 | But Mueller was confident as he cited some of the previous work by the FBI and the Justice Department. |
| Robert Mueller: | 02:44:18 | In 2001, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted of murder for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In 2003, Ernest Avants was convicted for the 1966 murder of Ben Chester White. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killin was convicted for his role in the deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. |
| Robert Mueller: | 02:44:46 | These successes have restored our hope and renewed our resolve. Justice had been delayed, but we are determined that justice will not be denied. We’ll do everything we can to close these cases and to close this dark chapter in our nation’s history. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:45:07 | So the FBI partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center to help compile this list of cases to look into. For my class, I was looking at cases from Georgia, but you won’t see Isaiah Nixon on that list. I found him through a civil rights cold case project run out of Northeastern University’s law school in Boston. It had published a couple of court documents from the Isaiah Nixon case that had gotten me interested. This was in the fall of 2015 as we headed into an election year, and I thought a voting rights case might have some special relevance for my students. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:45:45 | To start, I submitted a freedom of information request to the FBI for documents related to the Isaiah Nixon case. The FBI responded that they had nothing, so I appealed. The FBI said it still had nothing, so I wrote to the National Archives. Now, this is all part of a little dance that researchers have to go through, and I found a very dedicated archivist who was able to find 165 pages on Isaiah Nixon. And of course, on Dover Carter, since he’s the one who had the courage to speak with the FBI way back in 1948. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:46:21 | Later the archivist called me back. He’d found 70 more pages, so in all, 235 pages. Every page un-redacted. So I asked the archivist, where did the paper’s come from? “Well,” he said, “from the FBI.” But I have to tell you, that even if the FBI had reopened the Isaiah Nixon case in 2006, they’d have closed it very quickly. Why? Because they would’ve discovered that the two men who killed him, Jim A. and Johnnie Johnson had died in the late 1970s.
The FBI’s not interested in reinvestigating a case in which the perpetrators are dead, but just because the Johnson brother can’t be prosecuted doesn’t mean they can’t be studied. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:47:16 | So where prosecutors lose interest is often exactly where historians and students of history reengage. To me, to my students, the fact that the men who killed Isaiah Nixon were dead, well, that didn’t matter. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:47:29 | So let’s turn to something that really interested us. This question. Why did Dover Carter never get his day in court? The FBI records that I obtained reveal the answer. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:47:49 | When the trial in the Isaiah Nixon case was over, the U.S. Justice Department turned its attention to the beating of Dover Carter. It even ordered an FBI investigation. Now, before we find out more that, let’s just recall Dover Carter’s account. He told the FBI that he was driving in his truck, driving a woman and her son to the polls, and that’s when Johnnie Johnson and his brother-in-law blocked the road with their car. So Dover Carter had to stop his truck. Now can you see this? Their car is blocking his truck. In any case, Dover Carter stopped, the men approached, and started beating him with brass knuckles and an iron tool. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:48:33 | They let him go only after he promised to quit driving blacks to the polls. But that’s not what the two men told the FBI. They portrayed themselves as the victims, forced to defend themselves. Here’s Johnnie Johnson’s version, which I found in the FBI records. It’s read here by an actor. |
| Actor Johnnie: | 02:48:53 | On the 8th of September, 1948 … the election day in Georgia … me and Thomas Wilson, my brother-in-law, started at Uvalda. We were getting some parts for a truck. About a mile out of town, a Chevrolet truck made a sudden stop in front of us. Almost causing us to have a wreck. We pulled up to the side of this truck, and I saw it was driven by a nigger known to me as Dover Carter. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:49:16 | Now let’s pause here for a second. Dover Carter was driving a woman and her son to the polls in his pickup truck, and he slammed on his brakes? And he provoked a fight with two white guys on a day he’d been looking forward to – election day? |
| Actor Johnnie: | 02:49:31 | I asked Dover why he stopped in front of us. He said, “I will stop where I damn please.” At this remark, I stepped out of the car, and I started toward Carter. He was sitting in his truck. Dover Carter began trying to get a shotgun which he had in the foot of his truck, but he was having trouble getting it, as it seemed to be caught in the clothing of a nigger woman who was sitting in the front seat of the truck with Dover Carter. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:49:55 | That woman and her son fled the scene as all of this started. |
| Actor Johnnie: | 02:50:00 | Now, as Dover Carter come up with the shotgun, I grabbed the barrel and took it away from him. During this time, I picked up an iron tire tool which was laying on the floor of Dover Carter’s truck and began hitting him on the arms and head, making him release the gun. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:50:16 | Let’s pause one more time. Johnnie Johnson is saying he was fully justified not just because Dover Carter stopped his truck abruptly, but also because Dover Carter said, “I will stop where I damn please.” By Johnnie Johnson’s reckoning, well, of course, a white man would be justified in attacking a black man for such impertinence. Johnnie Johnson admitted it as much. |
| Actor Johnnie: | 02:50:40 | There possibly would not have been any fight had Dover Carter not acted and said what he did. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:50:49 | So the FBI conducted a total of 16 interviews like this, all in regard to the Dover Carter beating, and when they were finished, the federal prosecutor who seems to have been running the investigation for the Justice Department down in Savannah, Assistant US Attorney Henry Durrence, summarized the findings and sent them up the chain of command. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:51:12 | In this summary, Henry Durrence made only passing reference … one sentence … to Dover Carter’s version of the events, and of these 16 interviews, Durrence cited only four. It happened to be the four that were the least supportive of Dover Carter’s account. Two of those interviews with the woman and her son who Dover Carter had been shuttling to the polls. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:51:37 | As we told you, they were frightened, and they had quickly fled the scene. The other two interviews that Henry Durrence summarized and sent to the attorney general for his final decision on what to do in this case were the interviews with the men accused of beating up Dover Carter. So it’s probably no surprise who Henry Durrence sided with. ” It appears,” Durrence wrote, “that the immediate cause of the altercation in which the victim was beating was the sudden stopping of the truck.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:52:14 | The sudden stopping of the truck was the reason for all of this? Well, that brings me to one of the other interviews. One of the 16 that the FBI conducted. Now, first, let’s just hear again from Johnnie Johnson. |
| Actor Johnnie: | 02:52:28 | During the fight, a car passed us, but I do not know who it was as he did not stop. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:52:34 | Well, we think we do know who it was. One of the interviews the FBI conducted was with the young white guy |
| who’d borrowed his father’s car that afternoon, and he corroborated a crucial detail of Dover Carter’s version. He told an FBI agent that when he drove by, Dover Carter’s truck was behind Johnnie Johnson’s car, just short of hitting hit, which means Dover Carter’s truck was never in front of Johnnie Johnson’s car. In other words, Dover Carter did not slam on his brakes, nor did he try to provoke them. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:53:15 | But that contradiction of Johnnie Johnson’s statement by a young white man didn’t merit a mention in Henry Durrence’s letter to the U.S. attorney general. Instead, Henry Durrence wrote that he believed Dover Carter further provoked the white men by reaching under his seat and searching for a weapon. Reading this in the FBI records, I thought of something Dover Carter’s son, David, said to me a few months ago. Now David Carter was 14 at the time he saw his father with a battered body, a bloodied head, and a broken wrist. When I told him of Johnnie Johnson’s account, David Carter shook his head, and said, “Now, who would believe that?” Well, it appears that Henry Durrence believed Johnnie Johnson’s version of the events, or at least that’s what he told the attorney general in a letter. We’ve asked someone to read a portion of it here. |
| Actor Henry: | 02:54:18 | No further investigation is warranted. Authority to close this file without prosecution is therefore, respectfully requested. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:54:27 | The attorney general’s office granted the request and the Dover Carter file was closed. Remember me telling you in an earlier episode about a type of secret password that white people used when they were accused of attacking or even killing black people? Well, that phrase, self-defense, had worked again. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:55:06 | In my cold cases class that I teach at Emory University, I encourage my students to be curious. So in the fall of 2015, we started digging for information about the Isaiah Nixon case. Now the students had read and absorbed the FBI records, then they’d found hundreds of NAACP papers and they came up with information about Gene Talmadge and his efforts to suppress voter turnout. They’d even scored every article in the Pittsburgh Courier, the Atlanta newspapers, and plenty more. They’d read books from the period and they’d done legal, genealogical and archival research online and in person, all for the sake of learning more. So it was no surprise when the students located Dorothy Nixon. She was living in Jacksonville, Florida, so we reached out to her. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:55:59 | By now in this podcast we’ve gotten to know Dorothy Nixon pretty well. But back then, when I first reached out, I frankly |
| wasn’t sure she’d be interested in talking. Many folks in this situation haven’t discussed it in decades and they’re not gonna start now. Certainly not with a stranger. But Dorothy? Dorothy showed a true willingness to open this chapter of her life. And she also said, without hesitation, that she was willing to help my students in any way she could. So we called her. | ||
| Dorothy Nixon: | 02:56:31 | I do remember sitting on the steps and it was two of us sitting on the steps as I recall. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:56:38 | But none of that research, nor the call, had the impact that Dorothy Nixon, by then Dorothy Nixon-Williams, would have when she walked into my classroom in November of 2015. My students were mesmerized by her. She was an eye witness to a shooting, a killing they’d been reading about, studying, trying to put into context, and here’s someone who’d lived it all, lived through it all. Dorothy, in turn, came to see that the students had gathered more history about the case, more documents than she knew existed. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:57:21 | Indeed, that same day, unbeknownst to Dorothy, I had received a copy of an important document that I knew she had never seen. The document made me excited but nervous, overjoyed to have, but sad to read. When would be the appropriate time to give it to her? I put it inside my coat pocket, I waited until after class, then after dinner, then after I dropped her off at her hotel, and finally I handed it to her. It was a copy of her father’s death certificate. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:58:07 | After Dorothy came to visit, my students were hooked. Three of them, Lucy Baker, Emily Gaines and Ellie Studdard came up to me quickly after class with wide- eyed, possessed looks. “We’re going to Alston.” One of them said. Okay, so I try to make field trips a part of the course, but hadn’t worked that out quite yet, and Montgomery County’s a three hour drive from Atlanta. “Yeah, we’re going to Alston. We just wanted you to know,” said another. I hesitated. Their instinct was absolutely right. So suddenly I’m thinking, “How can I arrange a van? How can I send out a notice and get all the class involved?,” when one of them chimed in, “We’re going Friday.” Well that was two days away. “Okay.” I said. “I’ll drive.” |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:58:58 | Forty-eight hours later, I picked the three of them up, and we were off, headed south to the Montgomery County courthouse in Mt. Vernon, Georgia. On a two-lane country road, we whipped past a sign. It signified that we’d crossed into Montgomery County and we couldn’t help but notice that the sign was riddled with bullet holes. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 02:59:25 | Now, inside the red brick courthouse, we went to the clerk’s office to begin our search for any trial records from 1948. We were directed to a stack of old legal documents, sort of the shape of ammo boxes, towering all the way to the ceiling, probably 16 feet high. Lucy, the water polo star, climbed fearlessly up a shaky ladder, stepped onto one set of filing cabinets, then over to another to gain a higher position. She reached well above her head and her fingertips coaxed a box away from the wall. She handed it down, we opened it. Bingo! The very first box contained the papers showing the indictment of the Johnson brothers. The language was full of adverbial flourishes. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:00:13 | “Jim A. Johnson and Johnnie Johnson unlawfully, feloniously, and of his malice of forethought, did kill and murder, by shooting the said Isaiah Nixon with a certain pistol, the same being a weapon likely to produce death in the way and manner used at said time and place.” Well, you get the message. We kept looking. We saw a massive and unwieldy hard-bound book that listed many criminal cases, and we found several things, among them, the handwritten names of possible jurors. |
| Lucy Baker: | 03:00:45 | Let’s see, we have Van Braddy, T.A. Blocker, R.L. McAlllister, D.A. McCrae, Jr., B.S. Warnock. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:00:58 | What we were looking for is hard to say. Sometimes you just gotta start digging. Sometimes we weren’t always sure what we had. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:01:05 | There is this book here called Evidence Record. Montgomery County Superior Court, Book number 9. This covers the years 1947… |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:01:19 | Remember the trial we’re interested in was in November 1948. And of course, our greatest hope is to find the transcript of the trial. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:01:29 | And then it jumps to 1949 is the next case. So there are no cases in here from 1948, and yet the numbers across the top are consistent. ’42, ’43, ’44, ’45, ’46, ’47, ’48, ’49, then you jump to … |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:01:46 | In other words, the pages are consecutively numbered, so nothing’s been torn out or removed from the record. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:02:03 | … ’51. So why there’s no transcript of the trial of Jim A. and Johnnie Johnson for the killing of Isaiah Nixon? I don’t know. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:02:03 | Actually, I might know why there’s no transcript. This was a criminal trial and the defendant was found not guilty. The government can’t appeal Jim A Johnson’s acquittal. You |
| know, you can’t be tried twice for the same crime. So there was no need for the court reporter to produce a transcript. Now, as you’ve heard me say, that doesn’t mean the court reporter during the trial didn’t take notes or punch a stenographic tape or make a recording. And maybe, maybe these notes are stored somewhere, in a closet or an attic. Actually, I’m pretty serious about that. If you know someone who might have it, let us know. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:02:41 | Let’s see. It says that the polling precincts are Mt. Vernon, Alston, Uvalda, Kibbee, Ailey, Tarrytown and Higgston.
They will each have voting booths … |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:02:54 | The initial trip to Montgomery County stands out for many reasons, but one incredible discovery awaited us. We’ll tell you about it after the break. This is Buried Truths. I’m Hank Klibanoff. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:03:13 | Okay, so we’ll live without a transcript. We may never know what happened at the state trial. But what about at the federal level? I want to tell you what those hundreds of pages of FBI records revealed about how the feds handled the Isaiah Nixon case. Just to remind you, the feds had been interested in pursuing the Isaiah Nixon case before the state trial, but they decided to lay low and let the state go first. If justice wasn’t achieved, well, they might then want to bring their own case. So they were waiting to hear the outcome of the state trial from their colleagues down in Savannah, which they got 45 days after the trial ended. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:03:58 | And guess who it was in the Savannah office who sent that notification? Henry Durrence. Yes, the same federal prosecutor who had insisted that the Dover Carter case should be closed. Now he’s at it again in the Isaiah Nixon case. His notification added this bombshell: |
| Actor Henry: | 03:04:18 | This office is of the opinion that further investigation into this matter is not warranted. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:04:23 | But the attorney general’s office in Washington basically says, “Whoa, wait a minute. There’s nothing in the records to show if the trial was legitimate or whether it was more or less a matter of form.” Please let me interpret that. The attorney general’s office is asking if the white judge and the white jurors, in finding the white defendants not guilty, were simply acting with the routine reflexes of almost all juries in the white supremacist south. There’s something else the attorney general’s office wants to know. Where are the statements from eye witnesses, or anyone else that would help determine if there was a conspiracy? Conspiracy?
Remember that magic word? Just about the only way the feds can bring a criminal case is if they can show that the men who beat Dover Carter and who killed Isaiah Nixon, |
| had conspired to deny the two men their basic civil rights. Their voting rights. But the attorney general’s office rejected the suggestion by Henry Durrence to close the case. They ordered the Savannah branch of the FBI to investigate whether the state trial was legitimate, fair and just. But the attorney general’s office added these words, “This inquiry may be limited.” In fact, the letter specifies that if the FBI only wants to interview two people, the prosecutor and Isaiah Nixon’s widow Sally, they’ll be satisfied in Washington. It becomes clear that this was not going to be a very deep or thorough investigation. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:06:16 | Let’s take a look at that FBI investigation. There’s no evidence the FBI asked for a transcript of the trial. Now, their responsibility is to determine if the trial was legitimate. Yet, nobody wants to read the transcript? When it was only a two hour trial, the transcript couldn’t have been that long or costly to produce. And hey, those court reporter’s notes? You remember the ones my students and I were looking for in the clerk’s office? They would have been available soon after the trial. Wouldn’t that have answered most of the questions about whether the trial was legitimate? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:06:54 | Here’s something else the feds didn’t ask about: the jury. I told you before that Jim A. and Johnnie Johnson were tried by an all white jury. But this trial took place 13 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that keeping blacks off juries because of their race was flat-out unconstitutional. But Georgia and other states had shrugged at that and managed to keep their juries all white. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:07:25 | You know, when you think about why the right to vote was so critically important to black citizens, you may think it was for the very obvious reason, they wanted to vote. But it’s much bigger than that. See, if whites could keep blacks from registering to vote, they’d also keep them from the pools from which jurors are selected. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:07:49 | Another critical thing: agents interviewed the widow, Sally Nixon, and she told them that Isaiah and his mother had voted. But there’s no indication that the FBI asked her if she thought the shooting was related to the decision to vote. Now, she’d have said yes, it was. The FBI also interviewed the judge in the Isaiah Nixon case. Eshcol Graham. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:08:11 | Now he says he thought the verdict could have gone either way. To the best of his recollection, he says, there was no evidence presented by either side pertaining to the question of Isaiah Nixon voting. Did you get that? The judge, Eshcol Graham, was presiding over a case in which the sheriff arrests two men and says they killed Isaiah Nixon because he voted and the sheriff is even listed as a |
| prosecution witness, and the judge says he doesn’t recall voting even coming up at the trial? Remember when the Justice Department told the FBI to take a look at the Isaiah Nixon case, it did so with this important caveat, ” This inquiry may be limited.” And it’s quite clear now, reading all the records, it was. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:09:14 | I want to go back to the judge, Eschol Graham for a moment. Here’s one thing we found that caught our attention. As the FBI is still examining the legitimacy and the fairness of the trial, Henry Durrence weighs in yet again. Remember, he’s the Assistant US Attorney at Savannah who seems to be overseeing the investigation. And this time, apparently unsolicited, Henry Durrence decides his bosses up north need to know his opinion of the presiding judge, Eschol Graham. Here’s what he wrote: |
| Actor Henry: | 03:09:50 | I am personally acquainted with the Honorable Eschol Graham and I know that he is not only an able lawyer and judge, but that he is also an honest, conscientious and courageous man and that he would not countenance anything that would tend to further an injustice in this trial. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:10:07 | Ultimately, the federal investigation into the trial of Isaiah Nixon’s killers was closed. And while the feds were satisfied there was nothing questionable about the trial,or the judge, my class was not satisfied. We wanted to know more about Judge Graham. |
| Announcer: | 03:10:27 | I introduce Judge Graham and ask him to say a few words for us. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:10:33 | Let’s start with this rally. It’s actually a victory celebration for Herman Talmadge in Telfair County, his home county, and here are the announcers running through the names of politicians and dignitaries. Eschol Graham was about to speak and, hey, Claude Sharpe was there. |
| Announcer: | 03:10:50 | We have Sheriff Claude Sharpe from Montgomery County. |
| Audience: | 03:10:53 | Woo! Yeah! |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:10:56 | Before we get to what Eschol Graham said here, let’s tell you what we found, because it leads us to question whether the presiding judge and therefore the trial, could have been fair and impartial. We found out that in Gene Talmadge’s early terms as governor, Eschol Graham was part of his inner circle of unofficial advisors. His so-called Kitchen Cabinet. We also found out that while he was a judge, Eschol Graham wasn’t shy about showing up at Talmadge campaign rallies and victory parties such as this one and speaking about the Talmadges, Gene and in this case, Herman. |
| Eschol Graham: | 03:11:32 | My friends, I’d love to talk about this boy. I knew him almost since he was born. He used to live right next door to me. He’s the son of his daddy. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:11:46 | One more example. We found that a couple of days after Herman Talmadge won the 1948 Democratic Party Primary, Judge Eschol Graham showed up in Herman Talmadge’s hometown to join the celebration. He spoke there too, and he used that moment to criticize the Georgia Supreme Court for removing Talmadge as interim governor the year before during the Three Governor’s Controversy. So why is this speech important? Because Judge Eschol Graham spoke in celebration of Herman Talmadge only a few weeks before he would preside over the trial of the two men who killed Isaiah Nixon. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:12:26 | You know, as I read the memos about the FBI examination of the trial, I’m left with some lingering questions. Beyond the questions I’ve already asked about why the Justice Department limited the inquiry, why the FBI didn’t get the trial transcript, why agents didn’t question how the jury turned out to be all white men, I wanted to add this question: Why, in a case in which the sheriff said Isaiah Nixon was killed because he voted, and voted against Herman Talmadge, why didn’t the FBI look into whether the judge might have brought some long-established bias into the courtroom? Shouldn’t FBI agents or Justice Department lawyers have concluded that Eschol Graham could not have been an impartial judge? |
| Eschol Graham: | 03:13:13 | Who knows on which side the nigger’s bread is buttered? |
| Audience: | 03:13:16 | Yeah! Yeah! Right! |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:13:19 | But there’s one more clip from Judge Eschol Graham that I want to play you. It captures as purely as any recording I’ve heard how middle class and ruling class white supremacists felt about black-white relations in the south. |
| Eschol Graham: | 03:13:32 | Herman Talmadge is a friend to the nigger. The southern people are friends to the nigger. If they would let us alone and let us handle the situation, the nigger would be satisfied and we wouldn’t be so much annoyed. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:13:52 | We wouldn’t be so much annoyed? Was that the problem? That word annoyed shows up a lot in history and for the next 20 years from whites who felt that the Civil Rights upheaval was just too much, too fast and a threat to their supremacy. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:14:20 | You never know what you’ll find unless you look and that’s what the three students and I are doing now, driving from the Montgomery County courthouse to the cemetery where |
| Isaiah Nixon was buried. We start 17 miles out of town, headed to the Old Salem Cemetery. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:14:41 | So here we are now at this clearing in the woods. It was student impulses that brought us here today and I decided to join them. In 67 years since Isaiah Nixon was buried here, no one has found his grave site. His mother, some of his children have died not knowing where he rests. |
| James Harris: | 03:15:02 | That’s his headstone. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:15:04 | Right. Your brother’s. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:15:06 | We’ve been guided to this cemetery by John Harris’ son, James. The students and I, we just want to be here. We just want to share the air, the space, the time, with a man we’ve studied closely, Isaiah Nixon. And when we get out of our car, the students start drifting slowly through the headstones. I know that James Harris’ parents are buried here, so I ask him to show me where they are and we start walking. Now, I don’t know why, but instinct leads me to turn on the video camera on my cellphone and then one of my students, Ellie Studdard, yells out something. Now I wasn’t completely sure what she was saying, or what she meant, and I didn’t want to disturb James Harris as he’s walking to his parent’s gravesite. But Ellie’s words changed everything. Now you have to listen carefully past the sound of footsteps, but here is the moment. |
| Ellie Studdard: | 03:16:16 | I found it! |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:16:17 | I found it. That’s right. Ellie Studdard had found the grave site of Isaiah Nixon and her discovery was about to change the world of Dorothy Nixon. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:16:30 | It says what? |
| Ellie Studdard: | 03:16:31 | Isaiah Nixon. It was covered in mud, so now I’m covered in mud. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:16:36 | There is an Isaiah Nixon? |
| Ellie Studdard: | 03:16:37 | Yeah. That’s what I was … So I saw something that said Isaiah, so I uncovered the date. It said … |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:16:39 | When Ellie came to find me, her hands were covered in mud. She’d used them to brush away leaves and underneath that, she’d found a half-inch of mud and she started clearing that. And when she got to the date he’d died, September 10, 1948, she was confident enough to call out to us. |
| Ellie Studdard: | 03:16:55 | Yeah. That what I was … So I saw something that said |
| Isaiah, so I uncovered the date. It said September 10th. | ||
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:01 | The gravesite had a headstone, but no words had ever been carved on it either the front or the back. |
| Lucy Baker: | 03:17:09 | Hi, Isaiah. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:09 | Seeing no name on either side of the headstone, there was no way for anyone to know that this was the final resting place of Isaiah Nixon. |
| Ellie Studdard: | 03:17:20 | Oh, something else is there. Oh, cool, yeah. I think like, the tombstone must have, or this whole slab must have cracked. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:27 | This was news we couldn’t keep to ourselves. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:17:31 | Hello? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:32 | Hi, Mrs. Williams. It’s Hank Klibanoff. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:17:34 | How’re you? |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:36 | Oh, I’m doing wonderfully. I’m here with my students and Mr. Harris. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:17:42 | Mm-hmm (affirmative). |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:42 | And we’re at Old Salem. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:17:45 | Okay. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:45 | And we have discovered something. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:17:49 | Okay. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:50 | We have discovered a gravesite with your father’s name on it. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:17:57 | Wow. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:17:59 | It is- |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:18:00 | We looked and looked. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:02 | It is a stone that says, “Father.” And then on the slab, the cement slab, someone has carved into what was then wet cement, his name Isaiah Nixon and it gives his date of birth and the date of his death. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:19 | We asked Dorothy if she could FaceTime with us and soon we were connected. |
| Dorothy Nixon: Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:24
03:18:25 |
I see you.
Okay. Well, you’re about to see something else here, which is- |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:18:30 | Wow. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:31 | See Isaiah, and there’s Nixon. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:18:36 | Yeah. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:38 | And then it says April and then you see September? |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:18:44 | Well I see the S-E-P really well. I see the Isaiah pretty well. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:49 | Right. That’s 1948. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:18:54 | Yes. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:55 | Okay. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:18:56 | While this might be the initial way she’d see her father’s grave, clearly it was not the best way and that was about to change. |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:19:05 | So anyway, I just wanted to share the moment with you. |
| Dorothy Nixon: | 03:19:14 | Oh, this is an awesome one, I’ll tell you. I’m walking out because my daughter is coming in… |
| Hank Klibanoff: | 03:19:24 | On the final episode of Buried Truths, Dorothy Nixon- Williams visits the grave of her father for the first time in decades, and then an unexpected email arrives. Reading it gives me pause. “I am the nephew of Jim A. and Johnnie Johnson. I would love an opportunity to speak with you.” We’ll tell you all about it on the next episode of Buried Truths. I’m Hank Klibanoff. |
| Announcer: | 03:20:04 | CREDITS: Buried Truths is produced by David Barasoain and Kate Sweeney, edited by John Haas and the executive producer is Christine Dempsey. Our production team would love to hear from you. There are a couple of ways you can reach out to us. On Apple Podcasts, you can rate us and leave us a review. That literally helps more people find the show. And if you have questions about the case or want to share your own stories about how this podcast has affected you, send us an email at stories@buriedtruths. org. Please also follow us on social media at Buried Truths Podcast, where you’ll find photographs and documents related to the case. Hank Klibanoff is a former newspaper reporter and editor. He’s co-author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Race Beat, and today he’s a professor at Emory University. On this episode, we had help from the nearly 100 students who’ve taken the Civil Rights Cold Cases class that Hank Klibanoff teaches, and thanks to Professor Brett Gadsden who helped create and teach the course. Special thanks to two past students who you heard from in this episode, Ellie Studdard and Lucy Baker, for staying really close to the project. Thanks to Emory University and its Centers for Digital Scholarship and Faculty Excellence for their support. And we had additional help with archive recordings from the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies at the University of Georgia. Thanks to Brian Davis who played the voice of Johnnie Johnson and Tom Maples, who voiced the letters of Henry Durrence. Buried Truths is a production of WABE Atlanta. |
