Unanimous Verdict Historical Links
Unanimous Verdict is intended first to be an entertaining narrative about some very difficult and ugly times in American history. The web links and books below include interesting and educational information related to the times and issues addressed in Unanimous Verdict, including about race, the South, Washington, D.C. and the Brown decision at the Supreme Court. Unlike Unanimous Verdict, the information in these sources is intended to be entirely factual. Some of the sources helped inform the non-fictional history in Unanimous Verdict. You can find most of these books for sale at Amazon.com by clicking on the Store link in the navigation bar or right here.
Lynching: A compilation of information about Lynchings in America by the B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library at C.W. Post University. An organization called Spartacus Educational has a relatively brief history of lynching with links to sources here. Statistics on lynching (probably understated; many lynchings were not reported as such, if reported at all) and an interesting account prepared at the University of Missouri at Kansas City of the trial of Chattanooga, TN Sheriff Joseph Shipp for permitting the lynching of a man convicted of rape after the Supreme Court ordered his execution delayed is here. Linked to the UM-KC site, and directly available at Without Sancturary, and at the Store here, you can view a narrated slide show of photos and postcard images of lynchings from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century. Warning: The pictures are disturbing, even more so when one realizes that many white people actually viewed lynchings as a form of community entertainment.
Brown and the Supreme Court: The best and most thorough history of Brown v. Board of Education and the precedents leading up to Brown is Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger. The paperback version of the book is still in print and available on any general on-line book store, including here. A brief on-line description of the case prepared by the Columbia University Law School can be found clicking here. The decision itself can be found here. Recollections by lawyers who were clerks for the justices at the time of Brown were compiled for the St. Johns University Law Review.
Associate Justice Harold Burton’s congratulatory note to Chief Justice Earl Warren on the occasion of delivering Brown is here.
There are several biographies of Warren in print plus his memoirs. A website called “Great Norwegians” contains a short biography of “the Chief”, as he is called in Unanimous Verdict. A complete biography is available at this site's Book Store. You can find a decent short summary of the life and legal philosophy of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter here. A search of Amazon.com suggests that Justice Frankfurter lacks any recent biography. Frustrated lawyers with a yen to write? Here's a good idea.
A biography and other materials about Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson is found here. Looking for information about Hugo Black? A place to start is here. There are thorough biographies in book form available for Warren, Jackson and Black listed in the Unanimous Verdict Store.
Washington, D.C.: Clayton Van Dyke graduated from Dunbar High School in Washington. Long after writing Unanimous Verdict, while preparing this web site, the author found a Washington Post commentary about the high school which reflects some of the issues that troubled Mrs. Van Dyke all of her life. Mr. Van Dyke was a professor at Howard University Law School, long an incubator of talent for the civil rights movement. DC natives past a certain age will easily recall the street car system. Here is a map of the system as of 1958, several years after the line Neil Endicott took to visit his parents along Connecticut Avenue had been discontinued in favor of buses.
For a flavorful, funny, always offensive, and highly stylized description of Washington in 1950, you can find on-line a copy of Washington Confidential by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published in 1951 and long out of print. Not at all coincidentally, the book reflects virtually every racist, homophobic, sexist and other prejudice of the least thoughtful white men of the day as these two reporters from the New York Hearst newspapers affect an attitude of hard-boiled out-of-town reporters digging into “confidential” DC. A far more informed, respectful history of African-Americans in Washington, accompanied by interesting photographs, is The Black Washingtonians, The Anacostia Museum Illustrated Chronology (2005), in the Book Store. An interesting history of jazz in Washington can be found here.
South Carolina: The mansion at River’s Edge is modeled on Redcliffe Plantation on the Savannah River between Aiken and Barnwell, S.C. It is now a state park. The characters in Unanimous Verdict are not based on the Hammond family, which owned the property for 12 decades from before the Civil War. The Farwells are based solely on the author’s imagination, informed by the general history of the period and place. A book of Hammond family correspondence edited by Carol Bleser is still available, The Hammonds of Redcliffe (1981, Oxford University Press). It's also available in the Book Store.
The political murder of Negro rights after Reconstruction in South Carolina is recounted in brief by Michael Trinkley at SCIway.net. It concludes with an excerpt of a chilling speech delivered by Senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman on the Senate floor in 1900. A longer excerpt can be found at George Mason University's website on history matters. A timeline of the history of the African-American in South Carolina, offering more positive news than the Tillman speech, is here.
Other Relevant Websites: There are, of course, hundreds more web sites and books on the subject of race relations in the United States and the courtroom fights to advance the cause of civil rights. But here are some web sites that readers of Unanimous Verdict might find interesting related to other events in the book:
Cotton Picking: Ezra Lowell in Unanimous Verdict was one of many thousands of slaves, freedmen and even whites who picked cotton for a living. You can read about the economics of cotton picking in the 1920s here and a fascinating first person account of picking cotton by Ammon Hennacy, identified by Wickipedia as a pacificst, anarchist, Wobbly, a member of the Catholic worker movement and white, here.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – The NAACP: Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the oldest of the African-American civil rights groups. It has variously been accused of anarchy and black supremacy, and of excess caution and being “Uncle Tom”. It needed some populist prodding at times, but the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund have done more for the African-American over a longer period than any other civil rights group. A Library of Congress exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown highlights some significant legal decisions before the NAACP was established and some of the many victories it caused since. Click here. Click here for a brief history of the NAACP in Georgia, and in South Carolina, click here.
A number of books about the NAACP can be purchased at the Store on this site, including Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle Against Racism, 1909-1969, by Gilbert Jonas and NAACP: Celebrating a Century -- 100 Years in Pictures, by the NAACP.
Segregation in the Military: Ezra Lowell, Clayton Van Dyke, Neil Endicott and Neil’s brother and father all served in the U.S. military in wartime. The experiences of veterans like them surely had an affect on racial views. An excellent history of racial segregation (and, later, integration) in the military for the years 1940-1965 was written by Morris J. MacGregor, Jr. in 1985 for the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee. The Preface and the Table of Contents, which links to different chapters, can be found by clicking here. All 635-plus pages are available on line.
Railroads and Ridin’ the Rails: Lou King and Ezra Lowell knew what they were talking about when they refused to take the railroad south from Washington. “Black travelers had to endure the humiliations of segregation on American railroads from the 1930s until the 1960s,” writes Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., a professor emeritus at San Diego State University in “Historical Sketches: Jim Crow Cars.” But riding a Jim Crow car was a lot better than catching a ride as a teen-age hobo. The website for Errol Lincoln Uys’s Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression, describes the harrowing travels of young men and women hitching rides on freight trains in the depression. Uys’s book and several others on the subject are available at the Unanimous Verdict Book Store.
Do you have favorite sources, books or on the web, for subjects in Unanimous Verdict? E-mail the author at the address on the Contact page and they may be posted here.
