It took Virginia 70 years to clear the names of seven young Black men who were put to death for a Jim Crow-era rape conviction in which their skin color put a fair trial and a measured sentence out of their reach.
It was done by a governor born eight years after Francis DeSales Grayson, Frank Hairston Jr., Howard Lee Hairston, James Luther Hairston, Joe Henry Hampton, Booker T. Millner and John Clabon Taylor died in Virginia’s electric chair.
Gov. Ralph Northam signed the pardons on the last day of August in a cavernous room in the building housing his office while some of the men’s descendants sat nearby watching, some of them softly weeping.
It was a measure of justice and mercy nowhere to be found in 1951 – not from the all-White jurors in Martinsville who found them guilty of raping a White woman, not from a White judge who sentenced the men to death, not from Virginia’s White appeals courts or its governor at the time, and not from President Harry Truman despite demonstrations outside the White House that implored him to halt the executions.
Virginia’s criminal justice system in the late 1940s and early 1950s failed the Martinsville Seven, Northam said in signing the orders clearing the men of the stain their memories had borne for seven decades. He stopped short of saying unequivocally that the men were innocent, something we are now unlikely to ever fully prove or disprove.
“They did not receive due process,” the Democratic governor said. “Their punishment did not fit the crime.”
That much we can confidently say, and thank you, governor, for saying it. That took empathy and moral clarity.
In that time – before Rosa Parks, Emmett Till and Medgar Evers; before the Birmingham church bombing, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his compelling March on Washington; before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act – Black Americans had no reason to believe the closing clause of the Pledge of Allegiance: “ … with liberty and justice for all.”
Through the first seven decades of the 20th century, Black men were put to death in Virginia at a rate nearly six times that of Whites, according to research by the Death Penalty Information Center. From 1900 through 1969, 46 Whites were executed, all for murder convictions. During that same period, 258 African Americans were put to death, 73 of them for the crimes of rape, attempted rape or armed robbery – offenses for which no White convict paid with his life.