to shoot folks.” According to Hirsch this was sheer bluster intended to rattle Rubin’s opponents. The article also brought up an incident in Harlem where a group of bottle-wielding boys got into it with a building superintendent, which ended with one of the boys, a fifteen-year-old, getting shot and killed by an off-duty police lieutenant. A friend told Gross that Rubin had said at the time, “Let’s get guns and go up there and get us some of those police. I know I can get four or five before they get me. How many can you get?” That sealed Rubin’s image as the face of black militancy in America, two years before the triple murder at the Lafayette.
Rubin knew Humphreys would cross-examine him relentlessly about his criminal record and the outlandish things he said to the press and in his own book. But Myron and I were convinced that not only could Rubin survive his cross-examination, but it would give him the opportunity to show the jury that he was a person of real substance, a writer as well as a boxer, a self-educated thinker, and street philosopher rather than a racist killer, and that writing and doing were two totally different things.
“You have left the prosecution case in tatters,” Rubin said by way of explaining why he saw no reason to take the stand. “If the jury sees Humphreys cross-examine me, they will see a white man and a black man going toe-to-toe, and they will convict me.”
No matter what Myron and I said, Carter held firm. “Racial revenge is the problem,” he said. “Without me, Humphreys has nothing to go on. If I take the stand, he will try to use me to make up what he doesn’t have.”
“You won’t let him,” I argued. “It’s our only chance.”
Rubin sidestepped my frustration with him. “It’s their system,” he said. “They were supposed to prove me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and they haven’t proved me guilty at all.”
Myron and I each had two hours for our summations. We divided up the areas of proof and methodically led the jury through the weaknesses of the state’s case, how witnesses had been manipulated along with evidence, and still the prosecution’s case was implausible. We attacked the racial revenge theory and asked the jurors not to use it as a substitute for hard evidence.
Burrell Ives Humphreys took only two hours to sum up. Race was his trump card, and he played it with abandon.
“None of us like to admit that things like race prejudice and anger and hate for people because of the different color of their skin exist in this world,” he slyly told the jury. “We teach our children the contrary. We support civil rights. We bear in mind the words of Reverend King, in which he had a dream of a day where people would judge his children by the quality of their character, not the color of their skin.
“But, ladies and gentlemen,” Humphreys warned, having thus affirmed for the jurors their inherent goodness, “we didn’t live in that world in 1966. It was a world filled with people who hate. As much as you might want to look away, as much as you might want to say it couldn’t have happened for that reason, it did happen for that reason. What other reason could it have happened for? Coincidence?” Humphreys asked, again reminding the jury about the supposed link between the Waltz Inn and Lafayette Bar and Grill killings. “We like to think so, but the facts don’t add up to a coincidence. They don’t add up to a coincidence at all.”
Humphreys continued, pandering to individual members of the jury. To our Greek juror’s prejudices, he dangled the image of Greeks and Turks massacring one another. Leopizzi rebuked me for objecting to that. Eyeing our Irish immigrant juror, Humphreys said, “We see hate and anger and revenge, and we see people fighting in Ireland because of religion.” Then Humphreys went in for the kill. Adopting Bello’s discarded “in the bar” four-man version of the crime, ignoring the two-man version he told the jury, Humphreys implicated the third man who had been in the car with Rubin and John—John Royster—and the Nite Spot bartender, Ed Rawls, saying that they may have been in on the killings. Without a shred of proof, he spun a tale of Rubin and John stopping off at Rawls’s house after the crime, dropping off their guns, and changing clothes. Out of nowhere there appeared