© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.
MP3 file derived from WAV preservation master, which was derived from original analog cassettes.
The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South.
An audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.
The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.
The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines.
Original grammar and spelling have been preserved.
All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "
All em dashes are encoded as —
Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0366, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Daniel Duke was born in Palmetto, Georgia, in 1915, where his family had deep historical roots predating the Civil War as a landowning family. In the 1930s, Duke attended Oglethorpe University and Emory Law School. In the late 1930s, he became the solicitor general (the equivalent of an assistant district attorney) of Fulton County, Georgia. In this capacity, Duke presided over a prominent case against the Ku Klux Klan. In 1940, the flogging and subsequent death of Ike Gaston prompted an investigation into the Klan and its history of flogging. Duke helped to build the case against the Klan. Here, he explains how he was able to garner confessions and information from Klan members. Ultimately, Duke was responsible for the conviction of thirteen Klan members for the flogging of several people. In describing this process, Duke sheds light on the nature of the Klan in that area during the 1930s and 1940s. Although he acknowledges racial motivations often prompted the Klan's actions, this specific case primarily involved the flogging of whites. Through Duke's description, the Klan emerges as an organization that not only persecuted African Americans, but also as one that punished whites who failed to live up to the Klan's conception of morality. Duke also describes the Georgia gubernatorial election of 1945, his tenure as the assistant attorney general of Georgia from 1944 to 1946, and his reaction to the lynching of four African Americans in Monroe, Georgia.
Daniel Duke was born in Palmetto, Georgia, in 1915 and became a lawyer during the 1930s. As the solicitor general of Fulton County in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Duke presided over a case against the Ku Klux Klan and their use of flogging as a terror tactic against both African Americans and whites.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Properties that my great-grandfather owned . . . he was what they called a hard-shelled Baptist preacher. The old home sits over yonder on the corner of Fayette County, now Fulton County, and Coweta County.
And it's still there, the house?
The old house has been patched up and all that and the road runs right close to it now because at one time the old Campbell County which was merged with Fulton County, the three counties converged there and part of the house was in each county. Somewhere and I don't know exactly when they moved the county line about 300 feet South so now the old house sits in a place. There's a burial ground up there where they use rocks or cedar trees for the markers. There are a few people left in there. There was a little old fence around it. I've been over there.
Are some of your people buried there?
Yes, some of them. There was a family, my grandmother's mother was named Head. There's some Heads way back in here now. I don't know them. My father was named Waymond Head Duke.
This is your growing up place.
This was part of the property. Now, after the Civil War a family of black
people named Shropshire, pretty smart people, came into this part. I
don't know exactly where they
I came into possession of this property in this manner.
A fellow named Frank Jones and his wife Lizzie Arnold Jones—Frank was a
very mean, illiterate, warped minded man—Lizzie Arnold came from the
Arnold black people that lived over on another place, their own land.
Lizzie was a smart woman. He bought this from one of the Shropshire.
They sold it to him and he paid the first note on a time basis. He had
lived here about three or four years without paying any of the yearly
notes or interest.
This would have been about when?
Twenty-eight or twenty-nine years ago, before I got on the bench, of course. Lizzie came over there with her uncle whose name was Wright Knox. I had a big farm over in Fulton County and I had about 200 plus acres with a lake. It was a cattle farm which I later sold. She came over I remember on Sunday morning driving an old pick-up truck. She and Wright got out and she said, Frank needed somebody to represent him and he over there in Fayette County in jail. So I knew immediately Fayette County didn't have many blacks in it and those that they did didn't have much say so in anything. It would be a tough case to fool with even if he was justified in the murder. Being a black man a jury would say you ought to have some time.
I told her that. I said, "I don't see from what you tell me, Frank's in
jail over there, they'll indict him for murder and I don't believe that
he will be able to get freed." I said, "it will have to be a monumental
case of self-defense." From what she told me it was not altogether
justified. I'm not too sure it wasn't a cold-bloodied murder even today.
I said, "what have
I did check into it and it happened that a lawyer—he became a municipal
judge in the General Ordinance Court—he was a pretty nice fellow. A
black lawyer and he represented this lady. I called her and she said to
refer it to him. I referred to him and I said, "listen, what do ya'll
want for this place? Will you discount it any? Will you cut out some of
that cost and the interest? He said, "let me call you back." He did and
he said, "yes, we will cut off about three hundred dollars on the
interest and we'll absorb the advertising cost if you want to buy it." I
said, "well, I'm representing this man and I'll talk to his wife
So I told them and I gave the fellow a check for the total amount owed and took the deeds from Frank and his wife. I've still got them over there. Just before the sale went off he accused me. In fact, the landowners around here were over there waiting for him to put it up in front of the courthouse door to buy it. They stood around and when they came out to make the public sales they didn't put that up. They went in and wanted to know what was up. They were told that the notes had been paid off and these people dismissed the foreclosure and they sold it to somebody. Well, they checked the records to see and I put it on record. They went to a lawyer and wanted to know what they could do because I had prevented a public sale. The lawyer said that I paid the note off which satisfied it and they couldn't sell something that they had already sold. That just stopped the sale and there's not anything that can be done about it. Just because they run an ad in the paper doesn't mean that they got to sell it if somebody satisfies the debt prior to the sale and that's what happened. That's the way I got the land.
Later, one of them, it was a big landowner, called me and wanted to know
what I'd take for it. He knew, he had found out about what I had in it.
He exaggerated, I didn't have quite as much out of pocket cash in the
land as he thought. He just took the surface angle. I told him, I said
well . . . I had a big farm over yonder about three hundred acres back
over there. I said, "I'm not trying to sell it, I'll just hold it
there." They
I later sold my other farm and some gamblers were in here one night and burned up the house. It wasn't anything to it. I fenced it and I had a few cattle here up till two years ago. I still have a horse or two out there.
So that's how you came to end up back here so close . . . Were you actually born close to around here?
I was born over here over at Palmetto which is about four or five miles from here.
You went to Oglethorpe?
I graduated there with second honors.
Then you went to the Atlanta law school.
I went to Emory Law School and got a Juris Doctorate Degree.
But, did you go earlier to . . .
I did. I passed the Georgia Bar before I finished law school and resigned the job as auditor with the telephone company and started practicing law. Young people have a lot of nerve. I didn't care about the other kind of life. I took the bar examination thinking there would be so many people flunking it that I'd take it first to know what it was like.
You passed it.
I passed it and then I went to work as the Assistant District Attorney. It was called Solicitor General then.
In Fulton County?
In Fulton County, John Boykin, I was the youngest man in the office. I practiced about a year and a half and went through the campaign when Roosevelt tried to defeat Walter Judge for the Senate and Lawrence Camp . . .
That was in '38 wasn't it?
Yes, Lawrence Camp was my good friend. I used to caddy for him on the golf course.
Lawrence Camp was the one who ran against George?
That's the one Roosevelt picked to run. Talmadge ran too and Talmadge almost got elected and it's very likely that Talmadge was really elected. It was very close and there were a few counties, and there were a lot of questions about it.
That was a three way primary race?
That's right and that's what Talmadge wanted. You voted under the old unit system. Counties had a unit system which was undemocratic and Fulton County with about a half million people had six votes and Fayette at that time had about twelve thousand and two. And Statesville, Georgia, down on the line, had two and they didn't have but about 1,500 people in that whole county.
If Talmadge had gotten elected then he would have gone to the US Senate instead of ever being governor. He probably never would have been governor, would he?
Wouldn't have been, no, but he ran. You see, that was at the time they talked about John K. Rascob and the Liberty League or something in New York.
Of course Talmadge had already been governor once before that. For a couple of terms.
Yes, he had a big group of people, very partisan people.
But he lost the Senate race so then he ran again for governor.
That's right, then he ran later for governor and was re-elected and died before he took office.
That was a horrible mess, wasn't it?
Ellis Arnall was from down here at Newnan, and I knew him. When I was in college he would drive up the road there to Highway 29 and he'd pick me up there once in a while. He was, Ellis was a young lawyer, now he's about 85 or 86 years old now. But I was fearless and of course I was for Lawrence Camp. Lawrence Camp was a good fellow. He was a U.S. District Attorney here, he'd always been my friend and of course I was not too deep into the issues involved. I was always anti-Talmadge. I personally liked Gene Talmadge and Herman too, but I never was allied to that group, that was a very partisan group.
Well, let me just keep you on that subject for a minute because I noticed that you were quoted in that article that I told you I saw saying that Gene Talmadge was not as wild as he'd been painted and that he was basically a pretty level-headed sensible man.
He was, yes.
I would never get that impression reading the stuff that the man said and the things that he did. Was it just for show or what?
A lot of it was for show. I'll give you another example. They've got a man now, he's recently had to resign from the Georgia bar because he's about 90 years old and he's senile. Named James R. Venable. The old Venable people own Stone Mountain and Jimmy still owns a lot of land out there. Jimmy was always a close friend of mine and there are things that he did to assist me that I will never reveal. He was a member of the Klu Klux Klan at that time. After we prosecuted, I was a prosecutor, we put deputy sheriffs, and people like that in the penitentiary. I alienated a lot of people even some of my own relatives, all in here, because they were pretty thick back in here. They were flogging people.
Wasn't just a racial thing. They would take a white man out here and do it.
The only ones we prosecuted them on except for one were white. Blacks,
some of them came in and said, "We were flogged." But most of them
wouldn't come in because they thought we were tied up with them. But the
white people, we got them and they were flogging people. It magnifies
the danger in that type of operation. They took a man named P.S. Tony
who lived out in Scottdale, Georgia, and worked in the mill but he was a
good man. He was in a church conflict with a man named Guffin who was a
big Klan member out there. Tony was for moving the church and
This would have been in the forties?
Yes, about the early forties.
During the war?
No, before the war. We had prosecuted him when I went to the Marine Corps after the war started. We had already prosecuted him and it had been in the Court of Appeals. That picture was made just before I went into the Marine Corps. Some of them said I shook it under his nose but the pictures didn't give him a complete . . . In the picture he was seated up there and I was way back here.
They went out then on that information, which was false, Tony didn't know anything about labor union or anything else, didn't care about it. But that's what they told the Klan and their committee met and they had to get after him so they went out with a fake warrant. They told him he was under arrest. They handcuffed his wrists to his ankles and carried him across the county lines out to East Point and flogged him. They almost killed him. Tony was a good unoffensive man, he exuded that, a loving type fellow to his family. So he came in, we indicted them all on his case along with several others.
He came to you and told you this story.
Well, the way it was now, my father-in-law was city editor or editor or
associate editor of the old Atlanta Georgia.
Tarleton Collier.
That's right.
That's your father-in-law?
That's right.
Lord have mercy.
I married his only child. And Ralph McGill. Well, they talked to each other, I think. They said Ike Gaston was found dead out there where they flogged him. He was a white barber. Now the papers . . . I don't know what his people do. His nephew was sheriff over here in Carroll County, but the last account of it said he was a black barber. It, of course, was untrue. Ike was a drinker and he drank and he didn't look after his family but was a likeable fellow. The committee decided to discipline him for not looking after his family. So they carried him out there on March 3, 1940, I think. So the next morning they found his body partially frozen, it was cold, with this big whip with the Klan thing carved on it with cleats on it. When that happened Ralph McGill and Tarleton Collier, no doubt they talked, because Mr. Collier, they had run one or two hard articles on him.
Mr. Boykin, who was a good man, the last account said he had been a
member of the Klan. He might have been but he was not a Klan man
mentally or spiritually by any means just like a lot of others that got
caught in that thing. He called me in and I remember he was a very stern
fellow but I loved Mr. Boykin. He
Boykin was the district attorney?
That's right and a good man and a powerful man.
What was his first name?
John A. Boykin. So Ernest and I and then he got a Captain Jordan on the county police force. He knew who to pick, he picked good people, Captain Jordan and a detective named John Carter. He said, "Captain Jordan and John Carter are going to help you. I want you to go down and call Paul Donahue who was the coroner. Paul was going to have a hearing down there in to the death of Ike Gaston. Mr. Boykin said, "I've called Paul Donahue and we don't have any right to go in there as a lawyer and ask questions. He said he'll let you come in there and let you ask some questions." There wasn't anything illegal about it. He said, "I want you to go down there and do that."
Of course, the press and all the papers were there. The
Constitution and The Journal were separate
papers then and The Atlanta Georgian. They had their
cameras and they had everything there. Donahue put out a call that
anybody that had been flogged to come to that hearing. Two or three
people showed up. A fellow named Young, I'll always remember him because
I was asking the questions and of course, they had the evidence of the
KKK with the whip there and the pictures of Ike Gaston where they
The next day the papers . . . I did this, I remember Mr. Boykin said, "now, by gosh you told them this and it's put me on the spot and you'd better make this thing stick." I came out and we had two or three people and I said to the press—I was a young fellow and I didn't know what the hell I was doing and don't know if I would do any better now, I probably would do worse because I just let it flow out—I told them we had enough to get some indictments right then. Well, hell, we really didn't have it. I was affronted by what I saw and heard. I think it then that Mr. Boykin put Ernest Brewer with me and the police officers. I think up to that time the press hid it.
I also made a statement that the press quoted inviting anybody that had any information about floggings to come to a certain place at the courthouse and report it to me. Well, they came in, a few blacks came but most of them were white. Several whites came and they would be almost defiant and they'd say, "we don't believe you're going to do anything, we've done been down here."
One fellow in back of them was flogged over a girlfriend. He and his wife
were divorced and he was living in a boarding house
This is big doings in Fulton County, wasn't it?
Oh, yes, it was rough. They gave me a pistol. I never used it. I put it on the mantel. My home was up in Fairburn and I was later mayor of Fairburn. I wasn't mayor then, I was city attorney, I think, because you hold those kind of jobs, you can't do it now by statue. I still don't know if there's any great conflict of interest because all I did was advise a number of things. There wasn't much to it.
So, I hit the road and we'd investigate. I moved in on them pretty
heavy. I finally got a doctor in Atlanta who had a brother who was a
barber. He never had come there much but he was a pretty good fellow.
Said his brother was not sleeping at night and was worried. He said he
had been in some of these floggings. He didn't do any hitting but he
went along. He's just worried to
Like a neon light?
That's right. They would go in all these towns. Down here around Fairburn and all like that. There were a lot of people that resented the hell out of it. They didn't realize how much, even in Fairburn where there were a lot of them, sympathized with them. They thought they were going to keep the blacks in their place and were going to fight labor unions. We grabbed all the information from them. Without a warrant, I didn't ever go to the trouble to get warrants to search, I just sent them out and said get this and hell they got it.
Now, they'd probably want to put me in the penitentiary for violating Civil Rights. So we grabbed the records of the Imperial Wizard's palace. And by God, it showed that the Ford Motor Company had been subsidizing them, giving them money to fight unionization.
Well, that's a good place for me to ask you a question. Here you are a young man, an attorney, taking on an organization that has a certain power in the community . . .
Politically they gave me hell. I ran for district attorney, ran a hell of a good race, but all through my home section I lost it.
And it was for that reason?
Why, of course the hell it was. Now those people would give me hell. Some of them today would say they'd never vote for me for anything. I put their cousin in the penitentiary, something like that. But, when they got in a jam many of them would come and hire me as their lawyer. They would say, "hire that damn fellow, he'll fight for you." That was the way it was.
In your opinion was the Ku Klux Klan a poor man's organization or was it a bunch of poor men doing rich people's bidding? Who was the real power of it?
I guess we can't be completely objective about anything. I can't be. People claim they are, but that's not true. I sat on the bench for many, many years and we tried to obtain objectivity and I think with training you do reach a certain degree of objectivity. But, when you come right down to it there are many subjective factors involved that we may not detect. Filtered through our intelligence are all of our social, political, emotional background, cultural background and that reflects itself in our judgments. And so trying to obtain complete objectivity, I doubt that has ever been done by anybody.
I'll agree with that.
It's like what Oscar Wilde said, "each painter of a portrait, if he has feeling in the sitter, he reflects his own image." I think that's true of us.
I didn't do this completely alone. I had a lot of help. A lot of people
would secretly come and give me information and express their feelings
about this kind of conduct. Bill
You agreed to protect his name?
I sure did and I did. I didn't even tell Mr. Boykin. I later told him who
it was and Boykin said that was a smart move. I said, "if you rely on me
I'll tell you." He never was mentioned. I would take that thing and then
I would call them in. I wore them out pretty well. I did things that the
Federal Government today would say was wrong. I remember a little fellow
named Bishop. I studied him. Bishop had an invalid son. He worked in the
mill. Tall, pretty nice looking old fellow, some age. He lived over in a
certain section of Eastpoint. He was poor but he kept his house. He
looked after his boy and he loved his boy. About the only outlet he had
was going to the Klan. He would go up when they had their meetings and
he'd have fellowship with these people. Some of the neighbors of him
said that Bishop's been mixed up in that thing and they'd seen him
going
Practically beat them to death.
That's right. The Holiness preacher that was preaching to loud, they
flogged him for preaching too loud and he said he prayed. We used as a
witness, he was a pretty good fellow. He said he prayed and that was all
that saved him. He put on a pretty good show for us. Grady Kent, he was
a good man, but narrow minded, very, very prejudiced fellow according to
my likes. It was all real to him. I'd bring them in one at a time and
finally I documented all of this. I knew that one of the fellows had
some money named Henry Cawthon. I had been telling
I can see how you'd really put it on them.
I wasn't making any progress and I took that statement that this other fellow had given me and had somebody to sign—we never used this, there was never any intention to use it—but I created a fake confession. It had the details right but the name. We then had to sign Cawthon's name to this thing. I said, "now, I'm going to have Bishop in here and I'm going to read it over again. I would read it over to him; you were seated in such and such a place in the car. So and so was driving it. Henry Cawthon was driving the front car. The whips were in there and so and so was here. That's pretty powerful stuff for the fellow and then he'd say, "no, I don't know anything about it." So then I told him, "some of these fellows are going to get by and you'll be left holding the sack." We had that name signed on there. I said, "ya'll go out and call me and I'll leave the thing where he can read it." I would go out for fifteen or twenty minutes. Tell him to wait on me that I got a call. I'll get back and see what effect it has. So I did that.
He got over there and looked at it.
He looked at it and he saw Henry Cawthon's name on it. Of course, I
immediately tore up the whole thing after that I had the other copies
but not with the name on it. I destroyed that. Finally, he popped and he
said yes. We got that confession.
Then I got two others. A fellow named Floyd Lee and we didn't promise Floyd Lee anything. And a fellow named Luke Trimble. Luke was a pretty good highly respected man. Bishop, of course, I told Bishop that we'd prosecute him but we'd see that he didn't go to the penitentiary if he was cooperative. We were dealing with a conspiracy. They'd take this blood oath and hell, I don't know how you break through a thing like that unless you trick them or something. You get it open and once it opens then it begins to fall in place.
How did you manage to use these confessions without having the individuals come forward? Didn't the other side say, "I want to be confronted by my accusers?"
We had the individuals. We indicted Cawthon on eighteen counts and he was convicted on only two. There were a lot of people who we tried as best as we could to keep any Klan members off of the jury. But, they had such an oath, they'd lie about it. And too, they flogged a lot of sorry people, you see, in the viewpoint of a community where they believe in respect for parental rights, duties. So there were a lot of people, not the most wholesome people in the world. We got convictions in the Kent case, he was the preacher that they flogged. The Tony case, that was an egregious thing, and we got convictions in . . .
What about the man that was killed?
We never were able to break that. I had that one cornered with a fellow
and I can't think of his name. He lived
On Hawthorne we had eighteen counts and eighteen different floggings and the jury convicted on two and he went to the penitentiary. He was convicted in the Kent case and in the Tony case.
How many people altogether got prison terms out of all these?
Thirteen.
Thirteen people. From your perspective who were these people? Were they like your neighbors?
The people who did the flogging?
Yes, who were the powers in the Klan? Were they rich or poor folks? I don't mean rich but middle class.
Let me put this in its proper perspective. There was a family, a good family of people, one of them is my neighbor up here. He didn't live in here then. He is the son of some of them. He's a fine man.
Some of them were young fellows just on a lark having a big time. They
were people whose income was above the average.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
He was a deputy sheriff. He served in the courtroom. He was watching every move that was made. A fellow named Mont Aldridge was sheriff and we got him to move Scarborough. Finally, Scarborough had to resign. We didn't ever indict Scarborough because they couldn't every put him right in the middle. He tolerated this type thing. He had that viewpoint. He was a strict man, went to church on Sunday, paid his debts. He had a fine upstanding family. He believed that if a fellow would neglect his family it was better to go out here and give him a good beating and tell him to straighten up than it was to prosecute him or do something.
Out of this Scotch-Irish tradition of internal enforcement of morality they saw this almost as a religious . . .
I wouldn't go quite that far but there were one or two of the older
people in it that tolerated it and all, that had that viewpoint. See,
Warren Scarborough that I was talking about, was a man that I would
believe him on almost anything. He paid his debts, he was an efficient
man, he had a fine family, many of them still living here. This thing
forced him out, he got out, they made him do it. There were others that
I could name. They didn't sit down and direct these people. Somebody
told them they could do it. It probably started out with flogging a few
people that didn't live up to the moral code and then they saw the
opportunity to wreak private vengeance on people. That's one of the
evils of the thing. It's evil anytime
And certainly when it got to be a racial thing it got out of hand.
Racial thing had a lot to do with it.
They had one old man named Allen. We convicted them on him. Allen today would be classified as having Alzheimer's Disease. He had a wife who was a vigorous woman and pretty smart and he had three or four daughters. He lived off over there somewhere and they were very poor because they had to fend for themselves. Old man Allen was not a bad fellow. He would sit outside in the sun. So these daughters were entertaining men, going in and out. Some of the neighbors said they were about like prostitutes. I don't know that they were, but in other words the neighbors said there was too much going on.
So they went over there and told old man Allen that he better stop that stuff and so, and so, and so. Allen was like a child. His daughters dominated him. He was passive. So they went over there and got that old fellow and almost killed him. It really made his wife mad. She took out after them. Of course, we couldn't use him except we used the family to show and we had a confession but he was too far gone to testify. The wife, I remember by george, she would come to every trial and she was really after them and his daughters were mad. But they [KKK] almost killed him.
They accused a black man of insulting a white female. My God, he was a
dead lead pipe cinch, you know. We figured out that there were, I think
one time I figured as best we could find out through the records, you
see, we grabbed all the records out there. We didn't have much but you
did have about Mr. Guffin going over to tell them about Tony. We were
able to put that in and show it was a damned lie, which helped enrage
people. Ralph McGill was really hitting it. Furthermore, I think the old
Atlanta Georgian merged with the Atlanta Journal about that time. My father-in-law went to—I
don't know where he was—he was, the Courier
Journal.
In Louisville.
That's right. Ralph McGill wrote, he was really burnt it up. I remember Ralph would call me and he'd say, "What have you got?" Mr. Boykin said, "Don't talk to the press." You know he didn't want anybody talking to the press. But I recognized immediately the value of a fellow like McGill ringing that bell and frightening them to death. Ralph would call me and he'd say, "What have you got?" So after that I said "Well, I've got more than one confession." I'm not talking about that one that I got from the man whose name I wouldn't disclose. That had been torn up and I had a copy of it which outlined the facts but I've got two. But I said, "Now listen, don't you let Mr. Boykin know it, he'd get mad."
So they had Ralph down before the grand jury to know where he got his
information cause he had a damn headline, editorial to back it up.
Course they didn't realize it, but that's what
Old man Bishop, and Luke Tremple never did go. Bishop was a tall man, the papers had put his picture in the paper, it was really comical in a way. The old fellow, he looked after his child. You see, he was that type fellow. He would go to church on Sunday. It was a duality about a lot of these people.
Now there is another group, as I say the young bucks, having a big time and convincing themselves that they are doing a lot of good for the community. Then, you had another group, the Bishop crowd. Bishop as I said was a very poor man. He had no social outlet and he found a group of kindred souls and he could associate with these fellows if he put on a high economic and social plane. So he went along on that.
When it came time to do the whipping, they would always find those poor guys they could put the whip in the hands of and the ones that were in the higher position, they could always if push came to shove, they could say, "Well, I didn't do the whipping."
That's right. You know, I've often wondered under the law today but we
didn't do that. We could have indicted some of these people for
kidnapping. They went out to see this fellow
People left the Klan, many of them. I remember the chief of police for
the county police force came in there one day to see me and he said,
"Listen, you've got something here." He said, "Let me tell you what
happened. They used to put the heat on us to join. So I joined that
thing one time and the first meeting after I went they had us all around
a burning thing and they were giving all these lectures that were
terrible. The old Koran they called it had these lectures in it. They
were fiery as they
Let me move you to just a different point in time here. After that successful prosecution, the war started and you went into the military. You came out and Ellis Arnall was governor. He got elected while you were in the service, I guess.
No, just before I went in the service.
In '42 or '41?
I was very strong for him and most of the people in the courthouse were for Talmadge. He beat Eugene Talmadge. I was for Arnall, of course.
Was that in the fall of '41 or of '42. That would have been '41 wouldn't it? And he took office in '42 that Arnall got elected.
I don't know.
Well, I can check that.
I know that I went in the Marine Corps in September '41.
And he won in that primary.
Yes, he won. And Ellis called me and said, "Listen, I'm gonna be governor, so what do you want?" I said, "Well, Ellis is not anything that you can give me because I'm going to the Marine Corps." I said, however, "There is a good friend of mine who is an investigator down there, John Boykin, he's a young lawyer. His name is Bill Spence. He would make you a hell of a good man as head of the bureau of investigation for the state." I had carried Bill to see Ellis during the campaign before he was elected. Bill was from up around Alpharetta, the north end of the county, he worked for Ellis and Ellis knew it. So I said, "I would like to see you do something." Well, he appointed Bill Spence to be director of the GBI. And he went on and during the Arnall administration and he finally became the head of the whole bureau.
When I came back, I wasn't successful in the Marine Corps. I'd been thrown from a horse and under the intense training they'd given me, I had developed blood in my kidney. They would send me out there to the officer school and they'd take me over to the hospital. Finally, they'd let me out on a Form Y, as they called it. So I was in there about four months.
So you came back to Atlanta.
That's right, I came back and Ellis gave me a job with Gene Cook. I went over to help Gene for a while and Grady Head went to Supreme Court and Gene Cook was made Attorney General and of course Gene swore me in right after that as assistant attorney general.
And you stayed in that job all the way through the administration?
Well, about two years because two years had expired by that time.
I see, this would have been about '43 or so and you stayed until the end of his term.
That's right. Talmadge got elected by beating Jimmy Carmichael on the old unit system. Jimmy got 40,000 more votes than Talmadge but in the unit system Talmadge won it. I knew my days were numbered there. I had the first office as you come in. Talmadge was not a bad fellow. Where did you read that? I never saw anything like that?
It was in the journal in 1981. It must have been about the time that you
retired. There was a fairly long story about you, I saw a clipping of it
in the Historical Society. That's where I saw it
yesterday.
Well, I've always said that Talmadge appealed to a certain group, but I was telling you about Venable who was the head of it. Venable the lawyer. His public image is that he would have liked to seen the Jews burned and tortured and all that. There is not a kindlier fellow in the world than Jimmy Venable. He represented black people for nothing. My God, but he would let them meet. He organized one of the very splinter groups. We took their [the Klan's] national charter, Ellis Arnall and I led that thing. So that meant they didn't have a national charter. Well, David Duke, who when Alabama was over one of them.
Not any kin to you is he?
Not any relation of mine. I kid my boys, you know that Paul Duke is on
the air and Dr. Redd Duke on that thing, and David Duke. I said, "Damn
if the Duke boys aren't taking over." I said, "There is your cousin Paul
and cousin Redd and your cousin David." No, not any of them kin to me.
You took the main boys and even in the . . .
Dr. Evans, they called him. Ya'll fought him all through that administration one way or another it seemed like.
Well, yes, and I'll tell you something else. One night Tarleton Collier,
that was right after this Ku Klux thing started, and when they flogged
them and put me in charge of it. My wife and I were attending a dance or
something at the old Henry Grady Hotel. Collier got the tipoff that the
Klan was going to march that night and do this, that and the other. They
were feeling their oats then. We had just started this, you see. So he
called down there and had me come to the phone. He said, "when ya'll get
out of that thing somebody will pick ya'll up. The Klan is going to be
down there and they could be trying to pull something. I just don't want
to see ya'll hurt." So they marched but they weren't going to do
anything to me, I knew that. I would be the last one in the world they
could affort to . . . but anyway, that's about the last march they had.
They came on down the street putting on this display.
You were already married to his daughter by then?
Oh, yeah, I had been married, we married right after I finished college. Hell, yes, we had been married several years.
When you were assistant attorney general and Arnall was still the governor but it was towards the end of his term when all that trouble, you know, when Herman was going to run . . .
Well, he didn't run. His daddy won the race and died in Jacksonville before he could take office.
That's right. Then Herman decided that he was the heir attorney.
See, they knew old man Gene was in dying condition. They called Telfair County where he lived and they had a bunch of votes for Herman on the ballot. That was the wedge that they could get this thing before the legislature to elect him.
In other words, they created a candidacy for him.
They had it. They claimed he got six or seven hundred votes, write-in
votes for governor. On that basis, they said that since his daddy was
dead he would be the governor. Well, of course, the lieutenant governor
thing, that was the first election they had. The constitution had been
changed for the lieutenant governor to take over because of the
governor's disability. But it didn't say anything about what happened if
the governor died between the time he was elected and time he took
office. So they got in between that hoping that they could say that
Talmadge had the votes and therefore his son . . . Well, the legislature
went along with that and they put him in—the legislature—said that
Herman was the Governor. They came
Ellis was still official.
Oh, yes, he was the governor then.
Until the inauguration, that's right. I remember that day because I was
somewhere at Emory University for something and that night Mrs. Fellows,
who was secretary for the governor, said, "we want you to be over here.
The governor is in his office and he is not going to leave and we think
there is going to be trouble. These people are coming in from all over
the state, what we call the wool hat boys. They are out in the halls
cussing and raising Cain." Ellis had told them he wasn't going to give
it over. He turned the governorship over to Thompson. She said, "we want
you, we've called several people. We would like to have you over here to
be around." So I left and came and I remember as I came up the steps and
came into the rotunda of the capitol there were a bunch of these
fellows. Some of them said, "there's that Duke son of a bitch." I went
on in the governor's office. The word came down from the legislature
that they had elected Herman. The way it was, they framed this thing
was, the highest two people would have to run it out in the legislature.
So the way they got Herman in before the thing was to say he got these
few votes in Telfair County. They later said that a lot of names were
taken off of people that had been buried. Anyway, the legislature on
that basis elected him. They came down to claim the office. I remember
Roy Harris was Speaker of the House. I was in the front office. They had
a tree that
This would have been in 1945 if I'm not mistaken.
That's probably right.
What time of year would it have been?
It was January. I would not be an assistant attorney general I knew after that day. I was in there and they came in there and they had this battering ram but they didn't do it. Somebody knew how to take the things off the hinges. They knocked that door down and they poured in there. They went in there and they didn't assault Ellis Arnall but they moved him out of his desk and put Herman in. Ellis went out in the rotunda and said he would preside as governor there and that he had the duty to stay on as governor until Thompson took the oath or the court said for him to move out. So Herman went in and moved into the Governor's Mansion and stayed in there about ninety days. Of course, the case was already framed, they knew what to do.
Arnold moved out of the mansion, too.
Oh, yes, he had moved out two or three days before because he knew he was gone. Anyway, the mansion was empty. They didn't have to throw anybody out.
Is that building still there on the Prado?
No, I think it's some condos over there now. See, old man Talmadge when
he was Governor moved a cow up there to graze it in the front yard.
Who was that?
Bill Hartsfield.
The mayor did?
The mayor called John Boykin and he said, "send that young fellow over there. Tell him to take those whips and keep them wrapped, and at the right moment, show Talmadge." So Boykin called me in and said do that. So I wrapped them.
Hartsfield was a master of publicity, he knew how to do it. So, I am sure
he called the press and said, "be set because they're gonna shake those
whips at the governor." So they were ready for them. A lot of people
thought that was staged by me and all that and I think some fellow in a
little old newspaper said that I set all that up there. That's a bunch
of crap, I didn't even have any understanding about it and didn't care
anything about it. I'm sure Hartsfield and Boykin decided that that
would be it. Boykin knew it would be powerful that way, but Hartsby
understood the publicity value of it. Talmadge didn't do
Venable would have these meetings. He started up a little Klan and had his own group. He would have a yearly meeting out there at Stone Mountain where they would burn a cross up until a year or two ago. They would come from North Carolina, Alabama. They would have their own private Klan, but they would come here to that thing. He built a little old building down in his pasture. Venable would talk big about the Jews and all that crap. You would think he was a bloodthirsty man and he was a gentle fellow if I ever saw one.
But this facade they put on and Venable—I was in Paris with my wife after the thing was over, of course many years after that Venable had been up in Ohio. There was a Klansman making a speech about what they ought to do to the Jews. He was after the Jews and the blacks. Just raising hell. That stuff in print looked like he was advocating a bloodthirsty orgy of some kind.
When I picked up The Herald Tribune, which I would get
every morning, published in Paris, pretty good paper. I looked in there
and on one side about three columns there was Venable and aThe
Atlanta Daily World and Pittsburgh Courier or
some of them and The Chicago Defender. But I said he
probably didn't even get mentioned in there." I said, "I'm going to
write somebody and tell them to get those back issues and save them for
me because I want to see. People over here reading this and think the
country is fixing to blow up with racial tension and turmoil. And it's
just as calm and placid as you please."
Sure enough, that's the way it was. With Venable, to know him and to see him, I've had in my court, I like the guy. He helped me during the Klan thing. He belonged, you see. He didn't like this thing, beating people, and he wasn't that kind of fellow. He carries the name today, some of the Jewish people in Atlanta just shutter when you mention his name.
I know a Jewish lawyer, a woman lawyer, she's a millionairess, she talks
to me all the time, she's eighty some years old, a nice lady. She just
shakes when you mention Venable's name and I say, "Mildred, Venable is
good-hearted. He
I guess that part of the reason for that is just say, for example, if you were black and you lived in Monroe, for example, you'd never get it out of your mind about that time they lynched those four people over there.
Well, certainly not. The indignity of branding someone. It's an insensitive thing. It shows you the bifurcation, you might it, the attitude of many people, not only in the South. I found this out that it's up in Michigan and places like that. There are people, a lot of them are these fundamentalist Christians. They go to church on Sunday, they give money to charity, they go out if somebody dies, if somebody is poor they help them. And yet they stigmatize people that are a little different than they are. It's hard to explain all of that.
My son by my second wife—my first, Tarleton Collier's daughter, died when
I was about forty-seven years old—I remarried a very much younger person
and she was from down in here. She's got a brother. She's a bright woman
and we were together and had three children right quick. After about
eight or nine years I was so much older and had nothing in common with
her we divorced. It was friendly in a way and then she remarried a
fellow and went to Michigan. I didn't like that, I tried to keep my kids
here and of course, they came to me as soon as they could. In fact, I
got a note from her today. My brother died and she sent a card. She's
got a brother whose a chief
My son, the oldest one, is fixing to marry this girl who went to Allegheny College and in England, she's an underwriter here. My son is supervisor of Equivax, claims department. Well, he's assistant manager now. They just promoted him. He's a pretty liberal fellow, of course, a college man. He and Beth were over to see their grandmother, who's a friend with me, my wife's parents. Wayne is a pretty good fellow. So they were talking to Wayne and Wayne said, "hell he wasn't going to vote for Andy Young." Beth, Dan's friend, said she was going to vote for Andy Young. Daniel and she voted for him.
I didn't vote for him because I didn't think he had a chance and I didn't think it was good for Georgia at this particular time knowing how these rural counties are. It would have been a lot of turmoil here. That's an aspect of it that a lot of people feel like I felt. My real reason, I think Andy Young was probably a more capable man than the man they got but I didn't think he would have been good at this time.
Beth said that she was going to vote for Andy Young. Daniel kept quiet and Wayne said this, and Daniel got mad and told him off and got after him real strong. Wayne said he was a nigger lover. Oh, God, that made Daniel, Jr., mad.
He came home telling me about it and I said, "well, hell, I wouldn't
have
Venable puts on that act and he had made a speech in Ohio that made the
front page of The Herald Tribune and everybody in
Europe thought we were fixing to blow up over here.
Were you still in the Attorney General's office when that quadruple lynching happened over there in Monroe?
Yes, I was.
Can you tell me some of the background of that?
I don't know any of the background of it. See, we had no jurisdiction in a thing like that. Old man John Boykin, I remember, was living. Just before he died he called me. Bill Spence was head of the state patrol, both of us worked for him. He said, "ya'll get him over there on that thing and go after them." I didn't argue with him but I knew we couldn't.
But I did this. The people over there thought we had some legal authority
in the matter. I would get in the office early in the morning. At that
time the Attorney General's office, Gene Cook was a nice fellow but he
drank a lot of liquor. I was first assistant and we had a lot of people
that were appointed and they didn't come to work on time. We had two or
three that were work horses. I would get in about eight o'clock every
morning to get the work lined up and get busy. I remember that I had
just gotten in the office and a telephone call came in from Monroe.
Said, "ya'll better get over here and get to doing something. They have
killed four people down here." They went on to say how
I picked up the phone and by that time I was beginning to realize what a
powerful thing the press is when they open things up. So, I called The Journal cuase I knew The
Constitution, the morning paper . . . I called The
Journal and I got the managing editor, Jones, and I said, "this
is Daniel Duke, Assistant Attorney General and I'm going to give ya'll a
tip but I'm not telling you that because we're involved," I said, "the
Attorney General doesn't have any jurisdiction in this matter. The state
patrol may have if the sheriff of the county and some of them call on
the governor to put them in there." But I said, "we don't have any
jurisdiction, I purely giving this as a friend. Ya'll may want to get
somebody over to Monroe right quick." He said, "what is it?" I said,
"well, they brutally killed four people over there and it's a racially
motivated thing. I just got a call from Monroe and I'm letting you know
it." So he picked up and sent somebody over there and hell they had a
headline big and that really blew it.
The Journal people for many years were thankful to me
for giving them that tip. They didn't say I had reported it because I
told them, I said, "this is not an official thing but it's been a hell
of note, it's probably a hell of a story over there." I had studied
journalism in college and I had worked kind of as an extra man. Talmadge
put the state under martial law.
On that occasion?
No, this was way before that. That was my newspaper experience. They had a fellow over there that wanted to . . . everybody knew what he was going to do. They had their uniforms all laid out, they were going to throw the director of the highway board out. They gave me two or three dollars a day to watch it and that was as near as I ever came to being a news reporter. One of the reporters couldn't be in two or three places at one time. So later that day, by God, it happened. They put on their uniforms and went in there and took him out, threw him out. I didn't get to report it because by that time Talmadge had issued the order . . .
But on this occasion, though, the state attorney general had no jurisdiction to investigate?
No, the attorney general represents the executive offices of the state. As a matter of courtesy he gave legal opinions to the counties in Georgia but he didn't have really any responsibility. He represented the state of Georgia in appeals on capital cases. I remember I used to write for, from all over state. He had no jurisdiction and doesn't to this glad hour. That's a local proposition. The GBI, Georgia Bureau of Investigation, now has broader powers. They can go in, but then they have to get a request for something. You see, if you have a murder in a country the attorney general doesn't have anything to do with it. Now, in some states I think they do, but not in Georgia.
In that particular case the investigation was done by the local district attorney and then the US Justice Department came into it.
I never knew anything about what it was. Marshall Pollock was the solicitor general district attorney. He was a nice fellow.
Is he still living?
I doubt it. Marshall has been out of office for a long time. I don't know whether he was the district attorney. I think a fellow named West, who later became judge, was the district attorney, what would be the district attorney at that time.
I do remember some time later they had a big fracas and I represented a
black man over there that they accused of burning a bunch of churches.
They had him indicted for murder. He threw gas on his stepdaddy they
said and set him on fire, named Grimes and he was nut. And hell, he did
it. But they were about to lynch him or something over there. I went
over there to try to save his life and I did. Some of the black people
in Atlanta raised funds and paid me. I went over there and Marshall
Pollock was a very reasonable man. I remember the crowd, the mob, was
out there and they hit me in the chest when I went in the courthouse. I
raised the issue, no blacks in the grand jury and I was able by raising
that issue . . . It never went up because I talked to Marshall and I
said, "well, Marshall, we're own our way and it will take us two or
three years." He said, "yes, it will be very expensive." I said, "now,
what can we do? Can we
In this other case, though, they never did . . .
I don't think they did. They never could find out. But I asked Marshall, "Marshall, did ya'll ever get any real information on who killed these people?" I think he told me and I'm not sure about this and I don't want to be quoted this. I think he said, "well, it's generally knownts over here, they think they know who did it." They never were able to get sufficient information to indict them and prosecute. So that was the end of that.
I don't even remember today what they claimed these people did, how they offended the public's attitude toward the thing. I know it was right after Talmadge had won the election. He used the racial thing pretty heavy and it created a climate of opinion that justified this type of conduct. I remember I was in New York with a group up there. The press interviewed me and I stated, "that nobody would say that Talmadge was personally involved in these killings but the way he conducted campaign created a climate of opinion that justified it." Old man, some of the Talmadge people resented the hell out of that.
He had a fellow that drove for him and he was a pretty good friend of
mine. He died after that. But they were in Texas and this little fellow
that drove for him. He and his brother killed
A pretty good friend of mine, Ed, I think, told me that Talmadge read that in a San Antonio paper. Talmadge told him, said, "you know, this thing is going to get worse and worse about this racial thing. Look here, look what this young man has said." Ed told me that he didn't say anything and didn't argue with the old man because the old fellow didn't like him. He said I was exactly right, they created the climate on the pendulum.
END OF INTERVIEW