A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [54]
He told reporters, “The indictments came because blacks have gotten too well organized for political empowerment in the Black Belt of Alabama. They didn’t spend a million dollars because they think a few old folks’ ballots were changed.” Now he was to be tried for voting fraud in a courtroom whose large windows opened to a view of the very Edmund Pettus Bridge he had crossed to secure blacks’ right to vote in the first place.
Judge Emmett R. Cox, a Reagan appointee from Cottonwood, Alabama, presided over the case. Though the voting had occurred in Perry County, just outside Selma, Judge Cox empaneled a jury in Mobile and bused them several hours north to the location of the trial—a move, we felt, intended to put more whites on the jury than would have resulted from using the local pool of potential jurors. During the trial, Judge Cox had dinner occasionally with the lead prosecutor, a conservative firebrand named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. The whole thing felt too cozy.
Lani Guinier was an exceptionally talented voting rights expert on the LDF staff, revered by junior and senior lawyers alike. She and I worked with a team of lawyers in Alabama to represent the defendants. Soon we felt as though we were really defending an entire community of black residents, mostly sharecroppers. In Perry County alone, more than fifty FBI agents sought out fifteen hundred black families, many in remote corners of the countryside; some of them couldn’t read or write. The agents’ tactics spread fear and intimidation. For many, it recalled the reign of terror they had experienced just twenty years earlier.
Our defense team, by day, prepared motions, did legal research, and filed pleadings; by night, we visited potential witnesses and those individuals whose votes were allegedly tampered with. It was hard, nerve-racking work. We drove around on unlit, unmarked dirt roads, searching for addresses by asking at the rare house where we saw lights. When we found the right home, we had to win the confidence of the occupants, most of whom were afraid to get involved. We were often followed by FBI agents, or so we presumed when we saw their familiar black Crown Victorias, covered in the same red clay dust that covered everything in the hot Perry County summers. They would follow just far enough back so that we couldn’t see into the car and would wait with engines idling when we went into someone’s home. The next morning, an agent would appear at the house we had visited or show up in the field or shop where the witness worked and ask what we had talked about the night before. It all had its intended chilling effect.
It was tough to get people to open up to us. We were from out of town, unfamiliar in both appearance and dialect. We were lawyers. Most of the people we met did not know whom to trust anymore. The FBI had led them to believe that they themselves had done something wrong by letting Turner and his colleagues help them with their absentee ballots. Any confidence they may once have had about working together to change the political landscape in Perry County had vanished in the wake of the FBI’s intimidating tactics.
Spencer Hogue knew that he would have to ask his neighbors to trust us so we could mount his defense. He called a meeting at a church one night, a tiny, one-room wooden structure on stilts, with no insulation but with a woodstove in the corner and plenty of solid wooden pews. Spencer was a tall, dark-skinned man with dark eyes and massive callused hands—working hands. He was not very talkative and not very articulate when he did speak. He was married to a