Sick race-based case in Va. helped put end to practice
AS THE SUN set on an unusually mild Saturday in January 1949, a housewife named Ruby Floyd crossed Highway 58, the racial Rubicon of Martinsville, Va., to collect a $6 debt. Floyd, a 32-year-old white woman, was a familiar face in the black Cherry Town neighborhood. A Jehovah’s Witness, she was known as the Watchtower Lady for her threshold evangelism there.
She also peddled used clothing — the origin of her debt-collection errand. Charlie Martin, an 11-year-old black boy, agreed to accompany Floyd to the home of her customer.
Along the way, they asked directions from four young men lazing along railroad tracks, passing around bottles of muscatel wine and apricot brandy.
As Floyd and the boy walked away, Joe Hampton, 19, told his pals the woman “looked good enough to hug.” He vowed to “catch the woman” on her return.
When Floyd passed 10 minutes later, Hampton stalked up and bear-hugged her when she tried to run. He flicked a quarter to the escort boy to get lost, then wrestled the woman into the woods.
For 90 minutes the men took turns raping Floyd, and they were joined by others drawn by her cries.
At 7:30 that evening, the victim — supported by two Cherry Town Samaritans — stumbled into a shop. Most of her clothing was missing, her legs and arms were scraped raw, and her hair was a tangle of twigs and pine needles.
She said that she had been raped at least 13 times.
Floyd’s husband, a local store manager, said she was “pretty much torn up.” She would spend weeks hospitalized for physical and emotional trauma.
Cops rounded up seven suspects, including the four bottle-swiggers: Hampton, half-brothers Howard and Frank Hairston, both 18, and Booker Millner, 20. Also arrested were James Hairston, 20, no relation to the half-brothers, John Taylor, 21, and Frank DeSales Grayson, 36. All were employed, and only one had a criminal record.
Prosecutors said each man confessed, generally blaming booze. They were secreted away to a remote jail to prevent lynching.
As they huddled behind bars to gauge their jeopardy, suspect Taylor said, he warned “the other boys that that was a Christian woman and it would cause us some trouble.” He added, “If she was a drunk we might get by with it but I could tell from the way that she talked that she was a good woman.”
“Some trouble” was an understatement.
The Martinsville Seven were charged with rape. At the time, Virginia was one of 18 states, most in the South and West, that sanctioned the death penalty for sexual assault. It was applied almost exclusively in black-on-white rapes.
In Virginia, 45 men had died in the electric chair for rape since 1906. Every one was a black man convicted of raping a white woman.
In his book about the case, Eric Rise wrote that the Old Dominion setting “evoked images of southern courts that avenged the desecration of white southern womanly virtue without regard for due process or equal justice.” But Martinsville, then a prosperous furniture manufacturing center of 17,500, regarded itself as less racist than the Deep South.
Before the trials, Judge Kennon Whittle summoned the attorneys involved for a racial pep talk. “We have in our community a negro population of splendid citizens,” Whittle said. “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.”
That racial harmony did not translate to jury selection. All 72 jurors seated in April 1949 during a series of six one-day, assembly-line trials were white men.
Ruby Floyd testified six times, giving wrenching accounts of her assault and facing attorneys’ suggestive questions about her judgment and motivations. Most defendants also spoke.
“I know I was wrong to have gone with the woman,” Frank Hairston testified. “Maybe if I hadn’t been drinking I wouldn’t have done what I did . ... If you give me another chance I promise to be a better boy, never to get into nothing else as long as I live.”
But jurors gave no second chances. The Martinsville Seven were convicted and sentenced to die.
The racial dimension of rape condemnations seemed to make the cases strong candidates for appeals, based on constitutional equal-protection provisions.
But a unanimous Virginia Supreme Court upheld the sentences. Ignoring the statistics, Justice Edward Hudgins wrote there was not “a scintilla of evidence” of racism in rape sentencing.
He added, “One can hardly conceive of a more atrocious, a more beastly crime.”
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the cases as unworthy of consideration, and Virginia warmed up its electric chair.
Telegrams to the governor and more than a dozen NAACP-staged protests in Harlem, at the White House and elsewhere were fruitless.
The Martinsville Seven were dispatched in two shifts in 1951 — four on Feb. 2 and three on Feb. 5. As his life ended, Booker Millner prayed for forgiveness for “the men who are doing this to us.”
Twenty-six years later, in Georgia v. Coker, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that execution was a “grossly disproportionate” penalty for rape. Even then, the justices failed to acknowledge the laws’ racial roots.