COLD CASES - Key Persons
Harrison Powell, who worked at the local black funeral home, told the NAACP field secretary, Amos Holmes, that he saw a knife when he arrived at the scene to assist with the ambulance. He later told investigators he noticed a knife on the side of Countryman's body when it was on the ambulance cot. Powell said he saw an officer pick up the knife, which was, including both the blade and the handle, about six inches long-half the size of the knife the coroner's jury saw.[7]
When investigators later asked Cherry to produce the knife he had claimed Countryman wielded, Cherry said he could not find it. He told investigators he "must have left it at home." He also could not give investigators the cap cover that he said Countryman had cut because, he said, he had had it cleaned. The Dawson law enforcement officer, who by nature of his profession should have known basic investigative procedures, said he "guessed he should have left it as it was in order that they could have seen the dirt on the cover."[8]
The black men and women who had known Countryman had other reasons to doubt the officers' story. Countryman did not seem like the kind of man to attack a police officer without provocation, they said. Friends called Countryman a "steady worker and a well respected, quiet man in that community,"[9] with a good reputation among both whites and blacks. He had never been involved in civil rights activity. Even Police Chief Lee, in his own white supremacist vernacular, found a way to say nice things about the victim. Countryman had "only been arrested twice before," Lee said, and "seemed to be a good nigger."[10]
Countryman had also not been known to be a heavy drinker. Leaner Williams, Countryman's neighbor, told FBI agents that Countryman "would take a drink but to her knowledge he had never been drunk."[11] His grandmother, Cornelia Countryman, later told investigators she had been with Countryman before she saw him go to bed that night and she had only seen him drink water. [12] Neighbors said there had been no suspicious noises in the neighborhood that night. They noted to investigators that the yard where Countryman lived had only two trees-a peach and a pecan tree-neither of which was large enough for a grown man to hide behind.[13]
Brett Gadsden, founding co-teacher of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University, is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Emory and a historian of twentieth century United States and African American history. His first book, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) chronicles the three-decades-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism, education reform, and white reaction. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History and the Journal of Urban History. He is also the recipient of fellowships and grants from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Libraries, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, American Historical Association, Hagley Museum and Library, and Delaware Heritage Commission. His manuscript-in-progress, titled "From Protest to Politics: The Making of a "Second Black Cabinet,'" explores the set of historical circumstances that brought African Americans into consultative relationships with presidential candidates and later into key cabinet, sub-cabinet, and other important positions in the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations and opened to them unprecedented access to centers of power in the federal government.
Job Titles:
- AUTHOR of at the DARK END of the STREET. SPRING 2012.
- Professor at Wayne State University
Job Titles:
- Civil Rights Activist and the Founder
Dr. Thomas H. Brewer was Columbus's most prominent civil rights activist and the founder of the city's NAACP chapter. He was instrumental in supporting Primus King in the King v. Chapman litigation that led federal courts to strike down Georgia's all-white primary. He was also a practicing physician, with an office sharing a building with the F&B Department store. Brewer and Luico Flowers, the owner of the department store, both witnessed a police officer beating a black man outside of their building. The two men apparently argued about the incident: Brewer thought the officer had used excessive force, but Flowers disagreed. Flowers informed the local police that Brewer had threatened him. A week later, on February 18, 1956, Flowers shot Brewer seven times inside the department store, in what Flowers said was self defense. A local grand jury accepted Flowers' argument and declined to indict him. A year later under mysterious circumstances, Flowers was found dead from gunshot wounds in what investigators ruled a suicide. Dr. Brewer's death at 61 years old decimated local Columbus black political leadership and caused many black professionals to flee the city.
Hank Klibanoff serves as director and co-teacher of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory University, where he is the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism. A native of Alabama, Klibanoff joined Emory after more than 30 years as a reporter and editor at print and online newspapers in Mississippi and at The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Klibanoff and co-author Gene Roberts won a Pulitzer Prize in history in 2007 for The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Knopf).
Klibanoff also works with professional journalists on the broader Civil Rights Cold Case Project (www.coldcases.org), which uses investigative reporting to dig out the truth behind unsolved racial murders that took place during the civil rights era across the South. He is on the John Chancellor Excellence in Journalism Award Committee at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the advisory board of the National Press Foundation, the Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Fellowships Advisory Board, and the advisory board of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. He serves as chairman of the advisory board of VOX Teen Communications, an Atlanta non-profit youth development organization.
Klibanoff earned his bachelors degree at Washington University in St. Louis and his masters degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Both universities have honored him as a distinguished alumnus.
Hosie Miller, a farmer in Baker County, was shot in the back by a neighboring farmer, Cal Hall, Jr. Some of Hall's cows had wandered onto Miller's property. According to the results of an FBI investigation, Hall tried to take one of Miller's cows and Miller objected. Hall then fatally shot Miller in front of three witnesses on March 25, 1965. An all-white jury refused to indict Hall. After a second unsuccessful attempt to bring murder charges against Hall, the Miller family enlisted Albany civil rights lawyer C.B. King, who had partnered with Atlanta attorney Donald Hollowell on the James Brazier suit, to file an ultimately unsuccessful wrongful death lawsuit against Hall. This case regained prominence in 2010 when Miller's daughter, Shirley Sherrod, was controversially terminated from her position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture when a conservative blogger posted a tampered video that misrepresented her views and made her appear racist. Shirley Sherrod is married to Charles Sherrod, who in the 1960s was leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in southwest Georgia; he focused considerable attention on voter registration in Terrell County.
Chief Lee defended Cherry in the Brazier and Countryman cases, noting that his "nigger informants" had told him that Countryman had sworn revenge against Cherry for the death of Brazier. Police believed-despite testimony from black acquaintances and relatives to the contrary-that Brazier and Countryman were first cousins since "all the niggers are kin up there."
Job Titles:
- Louisiana Editor, Speaks to Class Joined by Leland Boyd, Son of a Ku Klux Klansman, by Skype. Spring 2012.
On one very special day, when we hosted Stanley Nelson, we used Skype to bring in Leland Boyd, whose father was head of a Ku Klux Klan offshoot, the Silver Dollar Group, in Vidalia-Ferriday, Louisiana, in the 1960s. Leland Boyd, who has helped Nelson learn more about that era, discussed what life was like inside a Klan household. On that day, we combined our class with a Creative Writing poetry class taught by Jake Adam York, the late, brilliant writer whose signature work is about unsolved civil rights murders. The highlight of that class came when Jake pulled out a poem he had written just for the occasion, about the case that Stanley Nelson and Leland Boyd had been working on: the 1964 arson that took the life of black businessman Frank Morris in Ferriday. The students have tapped a substantial number of local repositories, including the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory, the Woodruff Library at Emory, the Emory Law School Library, the National Archives Atlanta, the Atlanta History Center, the Georgia State Archives, the Auburn Avenue Research Library, the Richard B. Russell Library at the University of Georgia, the Atlanta University Center Archives Research Center, and municipal libraries in Dawson and Columbus, Georgia. They have benefitted from many books, journals, newspaper and magazine articles on microfilm and online, online databases, and documents gathered under the federal Freedom of Information Act and the Georgia Open Records Act.