Charge to the Jury

Alabama's Circuit Judge James A. Hare, 58, was born on a plantation and has never been able to forget it. "These bleeding hearts who dash down here -- all they've done is read the Declaration of Independence and think they can solve this problem," he once said. As he sees it, the racial conflict in Selma stems from the fact that most of the town's "Nigras" are Ebos and Angols, which he believes are the two most backward tribes of the six from which all U.S. Negroes are descended (the others, according to Hare: Burburs, Kaffirs, Gullas and Guineas). The judge is convinced that Ebos and Angols are genetically incapable of achieving IQs beyond 65. "They're like white riff raff and river rats," he said recently.

Last week Judge Hare addressed an allwhite, 18-member Selma grand jury investigating the March 9 murder of Boston's Rev. James J. Reeb. After the jury heard testimony from ten witnesses, Hare began his charge by reviewing Selma's problems for the past two years and attributing them all to the fact that a cabal of civil rights groups, the Justice Department and the Department of the Army had "selected Selma for assassination back in the fall of 1963."

Since then, said Hare, "we have been subjected to something fantastic and terroristic. Many self-anointed saints took it upon themselves to come here to help us solve our problems. Many of the ministers of the Gospel who came here would do well to stack their picket signs and get back in the pulpit." Integration, he said, "will solve no social problems; it will probably create them. It is just one of those things we have got to live through. It may be pretty rough living." But rough as it had been, he sighed, Selma's whites had "shown unbelievable restraint."

Despite the judge's 40-minute oration, the jury returned murder indictments against three men: O'Neal Hoggle, 30; his brother, William Stanley Hoggle, 36; and Elmer L. Cook, 41, who has a record of 26 arrests since 1948 and has been fined at least 13 times on an assortment of assault and battery convictions. A fourth man, R. B. Kelley, 30, who was arrested with the others after Reeb was fatally clubbed and signed a statement for police, was not indicted. The others are expected to be tried in October. Hearing the case, in all likelihood, will be Circuit Judge James Hare.

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