"It Sure Was Pretty"

The trial was probably the biggest prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan since reconstruction days. In Birmingham, Ala., 18 men had been indicted for the brutal wave of floggings, cross-burnings and intimidation that swept Alabama's hill country last summer.

The atmosphere was informal. In the corridors of Jefferson County's big stone courthouse, the gossip and laughter were loud. There were strike-idled coal miners and old men who shave only once every three days and carry canes. Klansmen posed for pictures smiling broadly, friend-ly-like. Inside the courtroom, mild old Judge Robert J. Wheeler fingered his speckled white mustache. Occasionally he spat delicately into his cuspidor.

The judge was tolerant. He interrupted the proceedings to point out a chair for a late-arriving spectator; he didn't mind when plump George Rogers, attorney for the defense, propped his leg or rump on the table during crossexamination.

On the Front Porch. First defendant to go to trial was self-assured, balding Coleman A. ("Brownie") Lollar. Lollar operated a scuttle-sized coal mine. He had also been a special deputy sherriff.

His accuser was Mrs. Hugh McDanal, 42, wife of a night truck driver. One night last June a gang of robed Klansmen broke into her house, accused her of "dancing nude on her front porch," renting rooms to unmarried couples, and selling whisky. They hit her a couple of times, then hustled her outside in her nightgown to watch a cross burn on her front lawn. ("It sure was pretty," testified a neighbor.)

Mrs. McDanal snatched at the Klansmen's hoods, tore off several. One of them was Lollar, she said.

Boyd Killingsworth, a gangly youth, admitted that the raid had originated at a meeting of the Adamsville klavern presided over by Brownie's brother. "We stopped by the highway and robed up," said Killingsworth. At the McDanal house, "I helped direct traffic."

Before the grand jury, Killingsworth had testified under oath that Brownie Lollar was there, too. But on the stand, he could not remember saying that--not even when it was read back to him.

Another witness declared that she recognized Lollar's voice among a hooded mob that had hauled her mother, her sister and herself, together with three men visitors, into the woods and whipped the three of them with a rope after a preacher had prayed over them. A man whipped by the Klan testified: "I recognized Brownie Lollar when he laughed at me."

"I'll Take Four." But Brownie was confident. He admitted that he had once been a member of the K.K.K., but swore that he had resigned. When was that? Well, the end of June (three weeks after the McDanal raid). Anyway, the night of the raid he was at a ball game, and he had three witnesses to prove it.

The defense also paraded 14 witnesses who said that they would not believe Mrs. McDanal under oath, and also produced what it claimed were pictures of Mrs. McDanal posing nude in a cornfield. The judge refused to admit them, but the defense waved them around carelessly and later, quite a few men came up to look more closely. Said one: "I'll take four copies of that one." Everybody laughed.

The jury took slightly more than an hour to decide that Brownie Lollar was not guilty. The courtroom broke into applause. Seventeen others were still to be tried, among them a high-school coach, a minister and a police chief. Lollar himself had four other charges of flogging to meet. Said County Solicitor Emmett Perry wearily: "Someone once said that it takes a hundred years to do anything worth doing. We hope at least to better that."

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