Integrating the Jury

One of the last weapons of white supremacists in the South is the all-white jury, and it has nowhere been employed more blatantly than in Ala bama's Lowndes County. In the slave-built county courthouse at Hayneville last fall, separate trials only weeks apart resulted in acquittals for Special Deputy Tom Coleman, charged with the shot gun slaying of Episcopal Seminarian Jonathan Daniels, and Ku Klux Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins, accused of murdering Viola Liuzzo, another northern civil rights worker.

After the Coleman verdict, five Lowndes Negroes led by Mrs. Gardenia White filed suit in federal court charging that County Jury Commissioner Bruce Crook, two associates, and Mrs. Kelley Coleman, clerk of the local circuit court (and Tom's cousin by marriage) had violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection and due process clauses. Last week the three-judge court in Montgomery upheld the Negroes' complaint, found Lowndes County guilty of "gross, systematic exclusion of members of the Negro race from jury duty." Though 80.7% of the county's 15,417 population is Negro, the court noted, "no Negro has ever served on a civil or criminal petit jury in Lowndes County."

The tribunal ordered Lowndes officials to throw out the county's present jury list, prepare a new one within 30 days containing names of at least 1,000 persons "who meet the qualifications prescribed by law and no other." For good measure, the judges also found unconstitutional an Alabama law barring women from juries. And in a separate ruling by Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., Lowndes County was ordered to desegregate its school system within two years, close 24 one-teacher Negro schools as unfit, and institute remedial programs to "eliminate the effects of past discrimination."

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