Amid Long Gruesome History Of Southern Violence, Attack On Handyman Stands Out
One of the most despicable and savagely brutal acts of terror in Alabama’s sordid racist history involved a particularly bloodthirsty offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan led by a writer who later penned the novel which was made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood.
The incident was part of a broad, violent effort to counter attempts by the Rev. F. L. Shuttlesworth to desegregate Birmingham schools. Shuttleworth was targeted but manged to escape unharmed after his home was destroyed by a bomb on Christmas night, 1956. Shuttlesworth and his wife, Ruby, attempted to enroll their children in John Herbert Phillips High School, a previously all-white public school in Birmingham in the summer of 1957. A mob of Klansmen attacked and beat Shuttlesworth with “chains, baseball bats and brass knuckles, and his wife was stabbed in the hips.” The assailants included Bobby Frank Cherry, who six years later was involved in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing that killed four girls and injured between 14 and 22 other people.
But the bombings and the mob attacks paled in ferocity to an incident that transpired on Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 2, 1957. The victim was Judge Edward Aaron, a 34-year-old, mildly developmentally disabled war veteran and handyman.
According to an unsuccessful appeal to the state superior court, a group of six white men had gathered to elect a “captain” who would have to “prove” his leadership. The group decided to go out and “grab a negro,” or “grab a negro and scare hell out of him.” Driving around, apparently at random, the group came upon Aaron walking along the Huffman-Tarrant City road, accompanied by Cora Parker.
Aaron was forced into one of the cars and made to lie upon the rear floor. The six members of a newly formed offshoot of the KKK, Bart Floyd, Joseph Pritchett, James N. Griffin, William Miller, Jesse Mabry, and Grover McCollough, took Aaron to their small dirt-floor house outside of Clarkesville, Ala. Under the glow of lamplight, the group castrated Aaron with a razor and poured turpentine on the wound, supervised by Exalted Cyclops Joe Pritchett, who wore a red-trimmed Klan robe. The scrotum was preserved as a souvenir.
Before the castration, the group beat Aaron with an iron bar and carved the letters “KKK” into his chest. They hid Aaron’s bleeding nearly dead body in a trunk before dumping him on a road side near Springdale, Ala., where he was later discovered by a motorist and taken to a hospital. Aaron survived and lived until age 68.
In April 1956, members of the same group attacked singer Nat King Cole while performing on stage at a Birmingham, Ala., concert.
Two of the six Klansmen who attacked Aaron turned state’s evidence and received five-year sentences in exchange for testifying against the other four men. The others were were convicted on charges of mayhem and sentenced to 20 years. In 1963, a parole board appointed by Alabama Gov. George Wallace, commuted their sentences. At the time, the ringleader of the Klan group, Asa Earl Carter, was employed as a speech writer for Wallace.
The two who had turned state’s evidence were not pardoned and Wallace gave no explanation.
Aaron was born in Barbour County, Ala., and grew up in Batesville. He was interviewed in 1965 about the abduction and attack and his story was recounted in the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning” although his name was given as Homer Wilkes.
The ringleader of the group was 32-year-old Asa Earl Carter, a virulent segregationist political activist, KKK organizer, and later Western novelist. He co-wrote Wallace’s well-known pro-segregation line of 1963, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Carter ran in the 1970 Democratic primary for governor of Alabama on a white supremacist ticket. He finished last and Wallace narrowly won. After losing the election, Carter relocated to Abilene, Texas, where he renamed himself as a Cherokee writer, Forrest Carter, and began a new literary career.
In 1972, Carter penned the first of his five books, “The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales.” The Western novel was made into a movie in 1976 film featuring Clint Eastwood. At the time, Eastwood knew nothing of Carter’s past as a Klansman and rabid segregationist.
The book and film involve Wales, a Missouri farmer, who joins a band of Confederate guerillas to seek vengeance when his family is murdered by a gang of Unionists during the Civil War. The film was adopted into the National Film Registry. Carter also wrote “The Education of Little Tree” a 1976, best-selling book which was marketed as a memoir but which turned out to be fiction.
In 1976, after the success of “The Rebel Outlaw,” The New York Times revealed that Forrest Carter was actually the racist segregationist Asa Carter. Despite the revelations, in 1991 Carter’s bogus memoir was re-issued in paperback, and topped the Times paperback best-seller lists in non-fiction and fiction and won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award.
Oprah Winfrey endorsed the “Little Tree” book in 1994 but , subsequently removed it from her list of recommended book titles.
“There’s a part of me that said, ‘Well, OK, if a person has two sides of them and can write this wonderful story and also write the segregation forever speech, maybe that’s OK.’ But I couldn’t — I couldn’t live with that,” Winfrey said.
Before turning to writing, Carter was a fixture in Alabama politics where he had a syndicated segregationist radio show. He also was a speech writer for Wallace.
Carter was involved with the White Citizens Council but found the group to be too moderate in its sentiments on anti-Semitism. As a result, in the late 1950s, Carter formed the independent, North Alabama Citizens Council (NACC). He also organized the militant and violent group he called “Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy.” Carter wrote a monthly publication titled “The Southerner” which spread white supremacist and anti-communist rhetoric. The two organizations dissolved sometime in early 1958.
The White Citizens’ Councils, formed in 1954, had about 60,000 members across the south. The councils were an associated network of white supremacist, segregationist organizations concentrated in the South and created as part of a white backlash against the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which outlawed segregation in public schools.
A Navy veteran, Carter worked at station WILD in Birmingham, from 1953 to 1955. The broadcasts, sponsored by the American States Rights Association, were syndicated to more than 20 radio stations before the show was cancelled. Carter was fired after he refused to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric, while the Citizens’ Council focused more narrowly on preserving racial segregation.
Carter’s ragtag group had a particular hatred of the burgeoning, rock and roll genre. In March 1956, Carter said the NAACP had “infiltrated” Southern white teenagers with “immoral” rock and roll records. Carter called for jukebox owners to purge all records by black performers from jukeboxes.
On April 10, 1956, Nat King Cole was performing to an all-white audience of 4,000 people at the Birmingham municipal auditorium. Birmingham Mayor Jimmy Morgan had welcomed Cole to the state and the Ted Heath Orchestra were only on their third song when seven club-wielding members of the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy rushed the stage.
The police were able to clear the stage. Cole returned to a lengthy standing ovation after the attack but told the audience he needed to get checked out at the hospital.
Four of the assailants were sentenced to 180 days in jail and a $100 fine and three others were fined for conspiracy and weapons charges.
That same year, Rear Adm. John Crommelin, an outspoken white supremacist from Montgomery, Ala., had introduced Carter to John Kasper, who had organized the Seabord White Citizens Council. Kasper, a friend of the anti-Semitic poet Ezra Pound, campaigned against racial integration in the south, calling it a Jewish plot.
In August and September 1956, the Seabord group and Carter’s group went to Clinton, Tenn., to prevent the court ordered integration of Clinton High School. Kasper was arrested for inciting a riot and vagrancy, but released the next day for lack of evidence.
Carter gave an inflammatory anti-integration speech at the school which had enrolled 12 black students. The speech triggered a mob of 200 white men who stopped black drivers passing through, “ripping out hood ornaments and smashing windows.” Mobs attacked black motorists, shots were fired at the court house, and a dynamite blast was reported in the black section of nearby Oliver Springs.
Crommelin was a prominent naval officer and later a frequent political candidate who championed white supremacy. He was described as a racist, segregationist and anti-Semite. In 1983, the USS Crommelin was commissioned and named after Crommelin and his four brothers. Crommelin retired from active duty with the rank of Rear Admiral in May 1950, after 30 years of service. He went on to operate a part of his family plantation, named Harrogate Springs, in Elmore County, raising a variety of crops.
Carter died in Abilene on June 7, 1979. The reported cause of death was heart failure allegedly suffered after a fistfight with his son.