was radical, I admit that …”
Q: “In what way was he radical?”
A: “Well I don’t—I myself do not believe in violence.”
Q: “I didn’t ask you what you believed in. I said in what way was he radical … You did not rise in that meeting and say, ‘I myself don’t believe in violence,’ did you?”
A: “No, I’d had a fine chance with 600 people there.”
Q: “What? You would have caught it, yourself, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t have dared to do it at that meeting …”
A: “I object to violence.”
Q: “Did anybody—did anybody in that audience of 600 people protest against advocating violence against colored people who moved into the neighborhood?” A: “I don’t know.” Q: “You didn’t hear any protest?”
A: “No.”
Q: “You only heard applause … You heard nobody utter any protest, and all the manifestation you heard was applause at what he said?”
A: “Yes, that is all.”
Toms tried to perform some repairs under redirect examination but only made things worse.
“Did he advocate violence?” Toms asked.
“I said this man was radical,” the witness replied.
“I know you did. Did he advocate violence?”
“Yes,” the witness said.
Darrow said later that his pinning of Andrews was just a matter of chance. Lawyers flail around on cross-examination, he said, and sometimes they find a prize.
The journalistic chorus had changed. White was replaced by James Johnson. And Lilienthal’s part was sung by Marcet Haldeman-Julius, who, like her predecessor, left a vivid account of a trial that, because the defendants were black, did not command the attention of white newspaper editors.27
Marcet was struck by the African Americans who came to court each day. “There were toil-bent people and successful-looking businessmen; artists stamped with modernity, and a wistful, wrinkled little woman whom Judge Murphy thoughtfully decreed should always be admitted and safely seated. But however they varied, those faces … there was in them all the same vigilant anxiety,” she wrote. “All hung on Darrow’s every word and marked well Judge Murphy’s every ruling. Only occasionally allowing themselves a low contemptuous laugh at some too flagrant prevarication or an approving murmur at a quick and just retort, they listened for the most part silently.”
CHAWKE PROVED MORE than able. His staccato questioning forced a flustered police lieutenant who had initially denied that there were an unusual number of cars cruising the neighborhood on the night of the shooting to admit that the police closed off the street because, as the officer finally, and glumly, acknowledged, “there was a considerable amount of traffic.”
Though Chawke had viewed the case as just another murder trial, and taken it largely for the fee and the publicity, he told Marcet that his heart was touched, as the trial proceeded, by the plight of the black defendants. “He became, once he got into it, more and more deeply interested in all its implications; more and more concerned for the issues involved,” she wrote. It showed in Chawke’s closing address, which preceded Darrow’s, on May 10. “I arise to present this man’s defense to you,” Chawke told the jury. “I appreciate the high honor which he has done me in selecting me to assist in a defense in the charge of a crime which is made, not only against him, but against ten others of his race.”
DARROW BEGAN THE next morning in a relaxed, conversational manner. “There is nothing but prejudice in this case,” he told the jury. “If it was reversed, and eleven white men had shot and killed a black while protecting their home and their lives against a mob of blacks, nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted … They would have been given medals instead.…
“That is all there is to this case,” he said. “Take the hatred away and you have nothing.”
To meet the demand of those who wanted to hear Darrow speak, dozens of folding chairs had been brought into the courtroom, and filled every inch of space. “The serried rows of colored faces that packed the courtroom from the rail to the back wall, watching and waiting, were like so many tragic masks,” Johnson wrote. “The rugged face of Clarence Darrow, more haggard and lined by the anxious days, with the deep, brooding eyes, heightened the intense effect of the whole.”
“His voice went on and on, always interesting, always fascinating, always holding the attention of judge, jurors and audience,” Gomon told her diary. Sometimes he spoke with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up in a characteristic shrug. He would point a finger, or throw his arms out