Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned - By John A. Farrell Page 0,214

brains, but I rarely meet the latter,” he explained. And then there were the “impossible” ones—the type “who thinks she has brains, and hasn’t.” Such women were “natural reformers,” he said. “It is as much a part of them as clothes. They don’t know how to enjoy life.”

But Gomon wasn’t like that. “You belong to a small group of women that a man can talk to and love too,” he told her. Gomon blushed and Darrow chuckled. It was long past midnight when they sat down in a restaurant at the Michigan Central station in Detroit. Even at that hour, well-wishers gathered around. Darrow told a few stories, then caught a late train for Chicago.

Gomon admired Darrow, and was flattered and confused by his attention. “It is not only embarrassing—it is most annoying—even humiliating to have intellectual interest and conversation continually fall back onto the personal,” she told her diary. “Some of my lady purists would call Darrow an old reprobate because of his harmless and perhaps senile flirtations.”

Darrow was pressing her to come visit him in Chicago. As unlikely was the notion of a love affair, she knew that she could hold hands for only so long. “I am no infant, and to go on playing the part is not going to always save me from embarrassing situations,” she wrote. “The obtrusion of sex on interesting social life can be somewhat circumvented by ignoring the fact—but not entirely.” Recognizing this, she was drawn to Darrow nonetheless. “Behind [his] commonplace advances there stands always discernible the giant intellect and compelling personality.” Ruby had seen this act before and recognized what was happening with her gallant cavalier. When Darrow returned to Detroit she politely, but obviously, made sure she was around when Gomon was present.

“Mrs. Darrow doesn’t like me,” Gomon told Darrow after Ruby had canceled a social engagement.

“You can’t blame her, can you?” Darrow replied. “You know what I think of you.”25

THE RETRIAL WAS scheduled for April with several changes in the cast. Darrow was back, and so were Judge Murphy and Toms. But Hays was busy in New York, and at Darrow’s urging the NAACP hired Thomas Chawke, a top-notch criminal defense lawyer in Detroit. Chawke insisted on $7,500 and a guarantee that the defense would conduct the kind of investigation into the backgrounds of the potential jurors that Darrow had not had in the first trial.26

The most significant change, however, was the identity of the defendant. Instead of trying all eleven black men, Toms had singled out Henry Sweet, who had confessed to the police that he fired a rifle from an upstairs window. Darrow was content; both he and Toms wanted a clear-cut victory and attributed the November mistrial to the jury’s inability to allot guilt or innocence among so many potential culprits.

The trial got under way on April 19. “In examining the prospective jurors, Darrow and Chawke probed pretty thoroughly into their lives,” the Free Press reported. Armed with information gathered by Chawke’s investigators, he and Darrow took five days, methodically working their way through 197 candidates, before settling on a jury.

Toms had no surprise witnesses; he stuck with the roster that he used in November. “I am not prepared to show who fired the shot that killed Breiner … there is no way to find out,” he told the jury in his opening statement. “Either Henry Sweet did, or he aided and abetted the man who did. We will show that Henry Sweet fired shots.”

The testimony followed the pattern set in the first case. By the end of the week, the defense had “succeeded … in drawing from witnesses admissions that a crowd had gathered in the vicinity, that stones were hurled at the Sweet residence prior to the shooting, and that people in the neighborhood were opposed to the presence of Negroes,” the Free Press reported. Darrow and Chawke were helped by the failure of several prosecution witnesses to remember and repeat the stories they told in the first trial, leaving them vulnerable on cross-examination.

One new feature from the second trial was the admission by a prosecution witness named Andrews, under tenacious questioning by Darrow, that speakers at the Waterworks Park meeting had urged residents in the neighborhood to use violence, if necessary, to keep the blacks out.

Q: “Did the speaker talk about legal means?”

A: “I admitted to you that the man was radical.”

Q: “Answer my question. Did he talk about legal means?”

A: “No.”

Q: “He talked about driving them out, didn’t he?”

A: “Yes, he