MARTINSVILLE — It began with seven rapes, one after another, as a 32-year-old woman struggled with her attackers in the light of a pale moon.
Then seven verdicts, one after another, as the black defendants were convicted by all-white juries in a tense Martinsville courtroom.
Then seven executions, one after another, as the condemned men were led to the electric chair in Virginia’s largest mass execution.
Fifty years later, the story of the Martinsville Seven is more than just a painful memory for this small Southern city.
It is a part of legal history that some say should play a role in today’s debate on capital punishment.
The appeals of the seven men marked the first time in the United States that civil rights lawyers used statistical evidence to argue that blacks are treated unfairly by the criminal justice system, according to Eric Rise, a University of Delaware criminology professor who wrote a book on the case.
At the time, the attorneys pointed out, 45 men had been executed by the state of Virginia for the crime of rape. All of them were black. All of their victims, like the one in Martinsville, were white.
Instead of being saved by statistics, the Martinsville Seven became one.
On the morning of Feb. 2, 1951, Joe Henry Hampton, Howard Hairston, Booker Millner and Frank Hairston Jr. died strapped to the oak electric chair in the basement of the state penitentiary in Richmond. The following Monday, Feb. 5, John Taylor, James Hairston and Francis Grayson died the same way.
Although much has changed in the past half-century – rape alone is no longer punishable by death – some elements of the case remain timely.
Several bills affecting capital punishment are pending in the General Assembly. While most bills have been defeated, one measure still remaining would impose a moratorium for all death sentences pending a legislative study of the system’s fairness.
Advocates for reform seem motivated mostly by the fear of executing an innocent person – something Virginia came within nine days of doing in the case of Earl Washington Jr., who was cleared by DNA of a rape and murder in Culpeper County. Yet race remains a factor in the debate.
Blacks make up 20 percent of the state population, but account for half of the state’s executions since 1982.
A study last year found that black offenders who rape and kill white victims in Virginia are more than four times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who rape and kill black victims.
Since the state resumed executions in 1982, just two of the 81 men put to death were convicted of killing blacks.
“Sadly, the patterns we see today are not that different from what we saw in 1951,” said Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.
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The afternoon of Jan. 8, 1949, was sunny and mild.
A housewife who lived on Bob Gregory Road decided to collect $6 a woman owed her for a secondhand set of clothing. She left her home and crossed U.S. 58, which at the time was the dividing line between the black and white sections of Martinsville.
This is what happened next, as told from court transcripts brittle with age:
The woman stopped to ask directions from Dan Gilmer, who was building a henhouse. Gilmer took a nail and scratched out a crude map in the dirt. But he advised her to turn back, noting that it was getting dark and “the people like to celebrate and have a good time” on Saturday nights.
The woman insisted on continuing, and 11-year-old Charlie Martin agreed to show her the way.
As they walked down the railroad tracks, they passed four young men – Hampton, Millner, Frank and Howard Hairston – who were loitering on the tracks, drinking from bottles of apricot brandy.
Sometime later, as the woman and boy returned, they encountered the men at the same spot.
Hampton blocked her path and then “he grabbed me from behind and he pushed me on the railroad tracks,” the woman testified. “He said: ‘Don’t you scream.'”
“He put his hand over my mouth to keep me from hollering. By that time, these others coming on behind had got up to where we were and they began pulling my clothes off. … They had their hands on me, holding me down.”
As a terrified Charlie Martin stood nearby, the men dragged the woman into the woods. “They said it was too public on the railroad tracks,” she testified. “And I told them they might could get me out of sight, but not out of sight of Almighty God.”
Hampton raped her first, the woman said. Then the Hairstons and Millner took turns. At some point, she said, others joined in the attack. “Just how many I do not know.”
The rape went on for hours. “Dusk turned to darkness; a penetrating cold settled in; a pale moon shone on the savage scene in the woods by the railroad tracks,” former Roanoke Times & World-News reporter Ozzie Osborne wrote.
Within 30 hours, police had made seven arrests.
All seven suspects gave incriminating statements, although not all admitted to rape.
From the start, police were mindful of the case’s sensitivity: Seven black men from poor families charged with the rape of a prominent member of Martinsville’s white society.
The suspects were moved to jails in Patrick County and Roanoke. Yet the unrest authorities feared never happened.
“We didn’t have any howling, screaming mobs around the courthouse in Martinsville,” said Eric Monday, former president of the Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society. “That was pretty unusual for that era in a small Southern town.”
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The cases proceeded to trial with lightning speed, at least by today’s standards for capital murder trials.
On April 21, 1949, a large crowd filled the courtroom for the trial of Joe Henry Hampton, the first defendant to face a jury. Virginia Windle, who worked downstairs in the county treasurer’s office, slipped out whenever she could to watch.
“That was a scary time,” she recalled recently. “Everybody was so nervous, because the blacks, you didn’t know what to expect. … There was a black element that just thought: ‘That’s the whites out to get us.'”
Judge Kennon Whittle made it clear he did not want the trials to disrupt the city’s relatively peaceful race relations.
“We have in our community a Negro population of splendid citizens and these good Negro citizens deplore this unfortunate alleged happening as much, or more, than do the citizens of the white race,” he told attorneys.
“I here and now admonish you that this case must and will be tried in such a way as not to disturb the kindly feeling now locally existing between the races. It must be tried as though both parties were members of the same race. I will not have it otherwise.”
Yet the realities of justice in 1949 – a time when there was no such thing as Miranda warnings, DNA testing, or court-ordered integration – soon betrayed the judge’s words.
Whenever a black was called to the witness stand, the court reporter typed the word “colored” in parentheses following his or her name.
The few blacks called for jury duty were quickly excused. William Muse was one of them. “All of them knew I was involved with the NAACP,” said Muse, who at the time was president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “It was a done deal.”
All six trials (Taylor and James Hairston agreed to be tried together) were finished in 11 days.
Although there were no glaring procedural errors by the judge or attorneys, the pace of the trials was disturbing, said Rise, author of the book “The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape and Capital Punishment.”
“Once the second or third death sentence came down, there probably was a chain reaction that began to happen,” Rise said. Because prosecutors put on their strongest case against Hampton first, he said, the defendants who were possibly the least culpable were the most affected by the cumulative cloud of guilt that seemed to hang over all seven men.
“I’m fairly confident, given the historical record, that had the defendants been white, they would not all have received the death sentence,” Rise said.
R.M. Simmons, a Martinsville resident who served as a juror in the second trial, was uncomfortable talking about the cases.
“It’s difficult for me being on the jury to comment now on something that happened so long ago,” he said. “If I commented now, it would have to be from a contemporary viewpoint and my present-day viewpoint.”
“It’s done. I’m not really ashamed of it, but it was another time and another place.”
Simmons said jurors were deeply affected by what he called “the worst case of horrible criminality.”
“But should they have gotten the death sentence? Everybody wrestles with that.”
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Among the small army of attorneys that fought on both sides of the Martinsville Seven trial, only one is living today.
Oliver Hill, a prominent civil rights lawyer who was part of a team of NAACP lawyers who handled the appeals, said in a telephone interview from his Richmond home that he still believes in the fundamental argument – that at the time, the death sentence was reserved for blacks in rape cases.
“There’s no doubt about that,” Hill said.
The fact that only blacks had been executed for rape since 1908, when the state took over executions from local jurisdictions, was prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination, the argument went.
News of the case quickly spread around the world. More than 15,000 letters and telegrams, some from as far away as Russia and many critical of the death sentences, poured into the office of then-Gov. John Battle.
In its March 13, 1950, decision upholding the convictions, the Virginia Supreme Court found “not a scintilla of evidence” to support the theory of racial prejudice. Any chance of a precedent-setting, life-saving decision died on the doorstep of the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the appeal.
Even today, when reviewing criminal cases, courts are loath to consider broad arguments of racial bias. In 1987, when it upheld the death sentence for a black convicted of killing a white police officer, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race was only relevant if there was a showing of overt bias in the way the law was written or enforced.
“The criminal courts have been the part of American society least affected by the civil rights movement,” said Bright, of the Southern Center for Human Rights. “I think you could say that the courts put blinders on and don’t look beyond the individual cases before them.”
As well they should, others say. After all, the blindfold on the figure who holds the scales of justice signifies equal treatment for everyone – regardless of skin color or social class.
Because the courts are designed to guard against procedural errors in specific cases, capital punishment opponents consider the legislative branch the better battleground on which to fight the death penalty.
In Virginia, legislators are waiting on the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which has begun a yearlong study that will examine, among other things, the role race plays in capital punishment.
Last year, a study done for the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union found that between 1978 and 1997, the ultimate punishment was imposed in 70 percent of the rape-murders involving blacks on whites, but in just 15 percent of the same crime involving blacks on blacks.
The study also found that during the same period, blacks accounted for 41 percent of the victims of capital crimes. Yet only 19 percent of the death sentences were for crimes that claimed black victims.
But Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a California organization that supports capital punishment, said it is “junk social science” to use raw numbers to claim the system writes off black victims and railroads black defendants.
Those who say the system devalues black victims ignore the fact that most of their killers are also blacks who do not receive the death sentence, Rushford said. And that, he said, is evidence of a larger problem in black communities.
“If you want a crack dealer, you’re not going to get a lot of Irish people,” he said. “Police are going to go after the people firing the guns. … It doesn’t mean anyone is racist. It means we have a big problem in minority communities.”
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The red brick courthouse where seven death sentences were pronounced in the spring of 1949 stands silent now. It was closed five years ago and leased to the local historical society.
There has been talk of turning the building into a museum and creating a display for the Martinsville Seven, arguably the most historic case tried there. Those plans have gone nowhere, as it seems that many in the community would rather forget what happened.
“I think it was kind of a hush-hush thing in Martinsville for many years,” said the Rev. Thurman Echols, president of the local NAACP. “People just didn’t want to talk about it.”
Although some relatives of the seven remain in town, they declined to discuss the case, saying it would stir up too much pain. Bruce Dallas, a member of Martinsville City Council and the state NAACP board, also declined to comment.
“I just don’t talk about it,” he said curtly.
Occasionally, though, someone mentions the case – often in the same breath used to denounce the court system.
“They say: ‘You see what happened then, it’s going to happen now,'” said Martinsville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joan Ziglar.
Ziglar said the Martinsville Seven were mentioned during her prosecution of Alfred Martin, who escaped from a jail work crew 25 years ago. Martin lived a crime-free life until he was captured in Detroit and returned to Martinsville to face escape charges and an unfinished term on a minor drug conviction.
There could soon be more talk of the Martinsville Seven. Capital murder charges against three black men are pending in Martinsville, a city that has not sent someone to death row since Virginia reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
Ziglar, a black woman elected four years ago, is one person willing to talk about the case.
“It’s an ugly part of history that we don’t like to deal with, just as the Holocaust is history,” Ziglar said. “But history is just that. It’s a part of our past, but it can also shape the future.
“Because if we don’t pay attention to the past, it may repeat itself.”
– Correction – A story Sunday about the Martinsville Seven included incorrect information about executions in Virginia. Since the state resumed executions in 1982, two of the 81 men put to death were whites convicted of killing blacks.