Chris Joyner - The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson: A Battle for Racial Justice at the Dawn of the Civil Rights Era

Copyright 2022 Chris Joyner

Cover 2022 Abrams

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The .38 Special police revolver the state claimed fired the shots that killed Buddy Stevens. (Photograph by the author)

Fulton County Crime Lab director Dr. Herman Jones (right) oversees the collection of tire track evidence at a crime scene prior to the Stevens murder. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Dan Duke, at the time a prosecutor for the Fulton County Solicitors Office, angrily shakes a barbed Ku Klux Klan whip in the face of Governor Eugene Talmadge during a 1941 clemency hearing the governor held for Klan members convicted in the beating death of a man the prior year. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill was known as the conscience of the South for his moderate views on race, but he also was an ardent anti-Communist and used his daily column to harass Communists and their fellow travelers. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

The historic Carroll County Courthouse in Carrollton, Georgia. The trials of Clarence Henderson were conducted in its massive courtroom. (Photograph by the author)

A prosecution exhibit used to compare the bullet extracted from Stevenss leg with test bullets fired from the .38 revolver. (Photograph by the author)

Communist Party organizer Homer B. Chase (left) with a deputy sheriff in Cartersville, Georgia. Chase was jailed in June 1949 when he refused to post a $5,000 peace bond for allegedly threatening a would-be Communist recruit. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Carl Buddy Stevenss grave marker in the city cemetery in Carrollton, Georgia. (Photograph by the author)

Sheriff B. B. Bunt Kilgore (right) in a photo taken soon after the murder of Buddy Stevens. The handling of investigation by state and local police became a sore issue in the case. (Times-Georgian)

Carrollton Presbyterian Church, where Buddy Stevens picked up Nan Turner for a date on October 31, 1948. (Photograph by the author)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934987

ISBN: 978-1-4197-5636-8

eISBN: 978-1-64700-387-6

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For my father

The story of the death of Buddy Stevens and the trials of Clarence Henderson has been part of my life for almost my entire career as a journalist. In fact, this story got its hooks in me before I even knew I had a career.

In the fall of 1998, I had been working in newspapers for two years, starting as a general assignment reporter for the Times-Georgian, a small daily in Carrollton, a college town about sixty miles west of Atlanta, and working my way up to features editor. That I had risen so quickly should give an impression about the size of the paper rather than the size of my ambition. I had walked through the doors of the Times-Georgian in 1996 never having written a single newspaper article. My high school had no paper, and I never considered writing for either my undergraduate or graduate school papers. Interviewing for a vacant position in the cozy newsroom, I brought my masters thesis in history as my writing sample, a clueless move that elicited raised eyebrows and grins from the papers editors.

Likely I would not have gotten the job were it not for the recommendation of a friend from my days at the University of West Georgia, a four-year state college that defines much of life in Carrollton. Fortunately, the editors thought enough of the recommendation (and my willingness to work for the near-poverty wage they offered) to offer me the job and later the promotion.

That happy circumstance was why I was in the positionacting on a tip from my fatherto pull down the very first bound volume of the Carroll County Georgian, from 1948. Carefully turning the yellowed pages, I found the edition for Thursday, November 4, and the headline: One Suspect Held, No New Clues as Stevens Murderer Is Sought. My father, Van Joyner Jr., had attended what was then called West Georgia College in 1944 and knew Carl Buddy Stevens Jr. in passing. Buddy was a Carrollton boy, a townie about the same age as my father, and when he was gunned down on a dark, rainy night in 1948, word spread among my fathers classmates. Dad remembered the murder, but not a lot else. By the time of the murder and the mad search for Buddys killer, Dad had already served in the Navy, graduated from the University of Georgia, and was back in Atlanta, newly married to my mother. But the death was big news at the time, he recalled.

You should look into that, Dad advised. I dont think they ever figured out who killed him.

From the start, I was engrossedfirst by the murder mystery, then by the dramatic legal battles that followed. I progressed from photocopying a few broadsheet pages to spending many memorable hours tracking the twists and turns of the Stevens case in the university library with microfilmed rolls of the Georgian and its competition, the TimesFree Press. Ive always been the talker in the newsroomthe reporter who would hang up the phone and turn to his colleague to say, Hey, you wont believe this! Fortunately, my friends at the Times-Georgian were patient and encouraging as I prattled on about my latest find. So was Stanley Parkman, the statesmanlike former publisher, who spent a few hours every week tucked away in a back office, working on his weekly column. Parkman sold the Times-Georgian and the other newspapers in his West Georgia chain years earlier to a Kentucky-based chain, but he stayed on as a columnist and publisher emeritus.

The more I dug into back issues of the Georgian and the TimesFree Press, the more I became convinced the story of Buddy Stevenss murder said something about postWorld War II America. From race relations to fear of Communism to the ambition and paranoia of the postwar generation, it all played out in miniature in Carrollton. And Carrolltons version of the fractured postwar American psyche was just as high stakes as anywhere elselife and death in the case of Buddy and the man accused of killing him. And the deeper I got, the more I realized how strong the themes of the episode still echoed in the news of the day.

When I finally decided to seek out the court records associated with the case, I walked into the Carroll County Superior Court Clerks office anticipating a struggle. Finding half-century-old county records is a scattershot proposition. Fires, burst pipes, and plain negligence can quickly turn a good story into a dead end.