Klansmen, Communists, and Civil Liberties
worker | January 23, 2016 | 8:31 pm | About the CPUSA, Analysis, Party Voices, political struggle
Vol. CXIX, No. 3 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January 2016

Klansmen, Communists, and Civil Liberties

in Dallas, 1931

By Dick J. Reavis*

* Dick J. Reavis is a retired Texas journalist and author, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and

a former professor at North Carolina State University.



About 8:20 p.m. on the night of Wednesday, March 4, 1931,

three Dallas men—an attorney and two Communist clients—were

kidnapped at gunpoint as they emerged from the Dallas jail, located

in the city hall. Even though their abductors, fourteen men in four

cars, wore neither robes nor hoods, they were presumed to be members

of the Ku Klux Klan. The controversies that ensued over the next few

weeks provide a good example of how racism in the Jim Crow era helped

blind many white Dallasites to gross violations of civil liberties. The abduction

was far from a perfect crime. Because it was staged on the steps of

the jail and coincided with the unannounced release of the Reds, police

complicity was suspected. And in taking attorney George Clifton Edwards

the kidnappers snatched a man whose disappearance was bound to be

noteworthy.

Edwards, then in his mid-fifties, was as much a pillar of his community

as any man of his opinions could have been. Most civic leaders knew

his background because they read about him in newspapers two or three

times a year. He had grown up in Dallas, the son of a prominent attorney,

earned a master’s degree from Harvard, studied for the Episcopal ministry,

then changed his mind and dedicated himself to teaching. He founded

a night school for textile workers in South Dallas, taught Latin and

algebra in the public schools, served as both a football coach and a debate

coach, and became the principal of Oak Cliff High School. In 1906 he

had been the gubernatorial candidate of the Socialist Party, and a year

later he was elected to the commission that wrote the Dallas city charter.

After that, Edwards became a lawyer. He made his debut as a criminalcourts

barrister in a trial that went badly awry on March 3, 1910. Edwards

had been appointed to defend Allen Brooks, an elderly and demented

African American who a week earlier had been accused of raping a threeyear-

old white girl. As Edwards was interviewing his client in a vacant jury

room on the second floor of the county courthouse, some 500 men from

a crowd outside stormed past sheriff’s officers, broke into the jury room,

put a rope around the defendant’s neck, and pushed him out of a window.

Brooks landed on his head, eyewitnesses reported, “with a thud that could

be heard above the shouting of the mob.” The crowd then dragged him

several blocks to a telephone pole near the Elks’ Arch, which stood on

Akard Street, where someone hoisted his corpse for all to behold. In later

reminiscences about the affair, Edwards observed that “the Court House

is directly across the street from the Sheriff’s office, and the ‘Elks’ Arch’

less than a block from the then Dallas Police headquarters. The sheriff’s

office and the police could not have been unaware of the whole business

but not one officer did one thing.” His conclusion no doubt colored his

handling of the 1931 abduction.

Not without misgivings, Edwards had undertaken the defense of the

two Reds only days before. “I am not a Communist. I regard the Communists

as a misguided and ignorant and almost foolish set of doctrinaires,”

he said at the time.4 His clients were not natives of Dallas or men of any

distinction. Although both, like him, were white, they were newcomers

who in a month’s time had become infamous as troublemakers.

We cannot be sure who they were. In those days, before most Americans

drove cars, before the Social Security system, and before the national

security state, people could assume identities almost as easily as they

could adopt dogs. By the thousands, immigrants had assumed Anglicized

names—and sometimes, entirely new names—and members of the Communist

Party, especially those who were on the organization’s payrolls in

the South, frequently adopted what were called “Party names.”

Charles J. Coder, age thirty or perhaps thirty-four, sometimes said that

he was from Robertson County, Texas, had been a farmer, and was a veteran

of the Thirty-eighth infantry. He told comrades in San Antonio that

he was from Waco, in McLennan County. But neither census nor military

records bear out any of his claims.5 According to files of the Communist

Party’s Central Control Commission—the best available records for him—

Coder, a Texan, had joined the Party under the name Carl Miller during

the fall of 1930 in Philadelphia. He had quickly “gained some confidence

when he was arrested at Camden, N.J., together with other comrades,”

but soon in Trenton, the records say, “he got hold of about $75 of organization

funds, which he then took for himself and disappeared.” Miller

was expelled. Reverting to or adopting the name Coder, he afterward

turned up in Kansas City, the Party’s District 10 headquarters.6 Records of

the American Communist Party preserved in Moscow by the Communist

International (Comintern) show that in early 1931 District 10, which ran

south to Laredo, north to Omaha, east to Houston, and west to El Paso,

claimed only 210 members, 50 of them in Texas. Coder and his partner,

Lewis Edward Hurst, had been sent to Dallas to organize a campaign of

recruitment through contacts and colonization; Coder was apparently the

first of the duo to take up residence there.

Comrade Hurst, 21, is more easily traced. He was born in or near Marshall,

Texas, on June 23, 1909. According to the 1930 U.S. Census, he was

working at odd jobs in rural Brown County and was living with his parents

as late as April 3, 1930; his father’s occupation was listed as “general farming.”

The date and place of the census report make it unlikely that Hurst

had been an active Party member for very long.

However, the Communists were not without a Dallas presence, small

though it may have been, even before Coder and Hurst came onto the

scene. On January 17, the Southern Worker, an underground Party weekly

published in Birmingham and Chattanooga, carried an article entitled

“Long Hours, Low Pay,” by “a Worker Correspondent”—a phrase that

often in its pages was a euphemism for Party membership. The brief

article complained that male shellers at the Squirrel Pecan Company in

Dallas were earning some $2.50 per day, and women, only about $1.50.

“Some Mexican girls are walking thirty-five blocks to work and back again

at night,” the article said. According to the Southern Worker’s January 31

edition, Dallas was also home to a branch of the International Workers

Order (IWO). As everywhere, the Party in District 10 sought to promote

its growth not only in its own name, but also through front organizations,

the most important of which in the South were the International Labor

Defense (ILD), the Party’s civil liberties arm; the Trade Union Unity

League (TUUL), its labor organization; and the IWO, a mutual insurance

association that catered to wage workers and small businesses.10

In a letter written to the headquarters of the TUUL on March 4, the

day before the kidnapping, Coder said that he and Hurst began their Dallas

agitation on February 5. In that missive, he listed Harold Sunshine,

64, a Dallas grocery clerk, and an “unemployed” or retired 72-year-old

William Grove—Grive by other accounts—as comrades. Sunshine, a Russian

immigrant, was Party secretary and probably Coder and Hurst’s initial

contact in the city.

These three and perhaps others were also in touch with the city’s “Mexicans”:

the lexicon of Anglo Texans did not distinguish between immigrants

and Mexican Americans in those days. Even by reports in the mainstream

press, at least a few residents of the city’s Little Mexico neighborhood

were early, enthusiastic, and important contacts. The leaflets that

the Party distributed, Coder’s letter said, were printed by “Mexicans.” At

the request of the Mexican consul, who was interested in Communist activity

by his country’s expatriots, Police Chief Claude Trammell interviewed

two employees of a Little Mexico printshop, but released them because

“I determined that they were simply employees and that neither was the

individual whom I really wanted to talk to.” Within days, however, the

Daily Worker, the Party’s official national organ, noted that immigration

agents had deported Rafael Zetnia, a member of the ILD, to Mexico.

The Communist grouplet’s first goal in Dallas was to answer a coast-to coast

call for February 10 demonstrations of the unemployed to demand

cash relief and to collect signatures on a Party-authored proposal, the

Workers Unemployment and Social Insurance Bill, arguably a predecessor

to the measure that in 1935 became the Social Security Act.13

According to the Dallas Times-Herald, on the morning of February

10, Coder for about two hours “addressed a curious crowd of 1,000 idle

negroes and whites from the steps of the city hall.” Only two arrests were

made, that of a bystander and of George Clifton Edwards, whom the

police detained when he intervened on the bystander’s behalf. Coder

went untouched. The turnout had caught the comrades unprepared. In

his letter to the TUUL, Coder reported that “we didn’t even have a copy of

the Daily Worker, let alone Labor Unity”—TUUL’s monthly—“and

application blanks. However, we signed applicants on ordinary writing paper,

backs of envelopes, etc.”

The Dallas Communists were not alone in Texas that day. Comrades

also staged rallies in Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, where, the Morning

News reported, “Ranger Captain Frank A. Hamer”—three years before

his Bonnie and Clyde renown—“confiscated placards reading ‘Equality

for the Negro Masses.’” It also noted that “One speaker urged the opening

of Federal and State buildings at night to give shelter to the unemployed.”

The Dallas Reds probably did not face arrest on February 10 in part

because the authorities did not believe that their advocacy would draw

many supporters. In a February 11 story, the Times-Herald reported that

“Police and Fire Commissioner W. G. Graves announced . . . [that Coder]

may speak as often and as loudly as he pleases for the establishment of a

Soviet Union in America, so long as he doesn’t preach sedition or violation

of the Jim Crow laws and so long as he and his followers don’t become

disorderly or block traffic.” He also proclaimed: that “Our people, white

and black, are native-born Americans who are too fond of the blessings of

liberty as they have been handed down to us from our forefathers to pay

any attention to the misguided efforts of Russian agitators.”

This nonchalant attiude toward communist agitation was likely a result

of Dallas’s relative insulation from the dire economic conditions elsewhere

in the United States. The notion that the nation had entered a depression

of long duration was only dawning in Texas. As historian Donald

Whisenhunt pointed out, “The depression descended so gradually that

most Texans did not realize its existence until it was already serious.”

Although prices for agricultural products had been in a slump since the

end of World War I, as Dorothy De Moss noted in a 1973 collection, “During

the early years of the Great Depression most Dallasites were spared the

severe suffering, hardship, and desperation common to many people in

urban centers of the North and East. Because Dallas had historically keyed

her economic life to trade and service functions, major industrial unemployment,

such as haunted New York, Chicago, and Detroit during these

years, did not occur.” The great East Texas oil boom had begun in October

1930, and city boosters had attracted its financial and supply offices to

Dallas, contributing to a record value of building permits. Unemployment

for 1930 averaged only 4.7 percent. But portents of hard times were evident

by late that year. In December 1930, when the post office post office

advertised for 300 temporary workers to handle its Christmas rush, a thousand

people had applied. By the end of 1931, the construction industry

had suffered a 25 percent decline. Wage cuts hit the building trades in

1932.

Despite their indifferent reaction to Coder’s address on February

10, the authorities decided to take action a couple of weeks laters—for

a reason that they calculated would win widespread approval. On the

morning of February 25 policemen under the orders of Commissioner

Graves broke up a gathering of “several hundred unemployed whites and

negroes” who had congregated in front of Fair Park to conduct or watch

a parade or demonstration. The Morning News reported that five would-be

demonstrators were arrested, while the Times-Herald put the number at

nine. Both dailies noted that paddy wagons had made three trips from

the fairgrounds to the jail. It appears that both newspapers reported only

those arrests that resulted in court settings.

Coder, in his March 4 letter to the TUUL, provided a more precise

accounting of the detentions: “Of the 20 arrested,” he wrote, “10 were

Negro (including a Negro woman). These 10 were released at City Hall.

Seven arrested were Mexicans, 2 of whom were released. The other 5 given

$100 fines and sentences suspended.” According to the Morning News,

Judge Calvin Muse, instructing an interpreter for one of the Mexicans,

said, “Tell him we have no objection to his living in Dallas but don’t want

him listening to the wail of a man who is trying to fan his people into a

mob.”23 Three Anglos were also taken into custody, Coder noted in his

letter: comrades Hurst, Sunshine, and Grive. After he posted his letter a

fourth was collared: police arrested Coder at the room where he was staying.

The aborted outing provided the authorities with an opportunity to

announce a new ground rule for demonstrations and a motive for suppressing

them. As the Morning News paraphrased the ground rule, “Police

and Fire Commissioner W.C. Graves does not want to interfere with the

right of free speech, but he doesn’t want the public streets used for Communist

activities. If they want to assemble they can hire a hall,” he said.

The new motive for harrassing the Reds was that they were race-mixers.

Dallas authorities had perhaps fretted, in the years between 1910 and the

onset of World War I, over the racial liberalism of the city’s branch of the

Socialist Party, which had focused on labor issues and electoral campaigns.

But most Dallas labor unions excluded African American members, and

few African Americans were enfranchised. The city had been home to

a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People since 1918, but membership in the organization had dwindled

during the 1920s and by 1931 was dormant. Socialists, in Texas and elsewhere,

had not pictured racial integration as an urgent cause, but with the

Communists, it had become just that for both blacks and whites among

the Party’s faithful.

In 1928 the Comintern, which styled itself as a Bolshevik League of

Nations, had issued a statement to the American party, ordering that “the

Negro problem must be part and parcel of all and every campaign conducted

by the Party,” and calling for “active resistance against lynching,

Jim Crowism, segregation and all other forms of oppression of the Negro

population.” Its edict had been followed by a campaign of internal education,

show trials, and purges of dissenting and recalcitrant comrades, and

by the inauguration, in early 1929, of efforts to organize the South. Unlike

members of the less-disciplined Socialist Party, Coder and Hurst had little

room to ignore the Communist Party’s national stance. Challenging white

supremacy was integral to their task.

When Dallas officials used Communist interracialism as a pretext for

repression, the press had no difficulty following suit. The Morning News

frequenty showed its bias in headlines of the era like “Black Mammy’s

Neighbors Jubilant as Oil Enriches Her,” and a Times-Herald story about

an African American querying a police officer on the whereabouts of a

stolen car put his conversation in dialect: “Cap I’se suttenly sorry to bother

you so much, but las’ nite I dreamed you had found my cah. Is yo?” Both

newspapers closed their stories about the February 25 arrests with paragraphs

citing police seizure of anti-segregation literature. “Lewis Hurst,

who claimed to be the secretary of the Texas communists was arrested first

when officers found him distributing circulars advocating race equality

and abolition of ‘Jim Crow’ and negro segregation laws,” the Times-Herald

explained. The Morning News spelled-out the lawmen’s fears: “Sergeant D. Garrison said that the defendants were urging ‘Abolition of Jim Crow

laws . . . and ‘of all laws which disenfranchise the negroes, abolition of laws

forbidding intermarriage of persons of different races and preventing

negro children or youths from attending general public schools or universities.’”

Reviewing the situation several weeks later, the New York Times,

which covered the affair in half a dozen back-page articles, editorialized

that “when Coder and Hurst mentioned racial equality, their troubles in

this community began.”

According to a story in the Daily Worker and to grand jury testimony,

Coder had told comrades from San Antonio and El Paso that on February

28—three days after the ill-fated Fair Park rally—he had been kidnapped

by five pistol-toters, presumably Ku Kluxers, then driven fifty miles into

the country, stripped of his clothing, robbed of his cash ($4.50), and

warned to get out of Texas. Distrusting the “bourgeois” criminal justice

system, Coder had not reported the event to the police.30

Unlike the Communist Party, its tormentor, the Ku Klux Klan, had

an extensive history in Dallas. The lapsed Reconstruction-era organization

began a revival in Georgia following the release of filmmaker D. W.

Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The Klan spread from Atlanta across

the South and Midwest, reaching Houston in 1920. Within a year, in the

words of historian Charles C. Alexander, “Dallas was the star Klan city”;

its klaverns claimed some 13,000 members. The Dallas Klan was arguably

the largest in the nation, and certainly the leader in per-capita numbers.31

Local klaverns conducted some five dozen floggings, mostly of whites,

in South Dallas river bottoms and at a clearing in the countryside near

Hutchins that apparently doubled as an after-hours hangout for the

Realm’s more visceral members. Dallas’s downtown district hosted nighttime

parades of white-robed members, male and female, and in October

1923, the city drew some 75,000 Ku Kluxers and their family members to

the Fair Park for “Ku Klux Klan Day.” So prominent was the city in Klan

affairs that in 1922, a Dallas dentist who was a former city Cyclops and

Great Titan was elected Imperial Wizard of the national organization.32

But the most important legacy of the Klan was its entry into electoral

contests. Candidates it endorsed swept the Democratic primary and

November elections—then largely a second thought—in 1922, and in

1923, Ku Kluxers captured city hall, too. They met with similar success

2016 Klansmen, Communists, and Civil Liberties in Dallas, 1931 263

in Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, and other Texas locales. Alexander’s 1965

work, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest, speculates that “the order probably

had a majority in the house of representatives of the 38th Texas Legislature,

which met in January of 1923.” The lasting result of the Klan’s brief

electoral success in Dallas County was that it seeded members in police

forces and judicial bureaucracies.

During its ascent, the Klan twice raised its hood, providing a peek into

the mysteries behind its usual anonymity. In a 1921 recruitment attempt,

an Atlanta Klan official mailed former Dallas mayor Ben Cabell a carbon

copy of a document listing the initials and surnames of 106 Dallas Ku-

Kluxer policemen. The Dallas police force would not hire its first African

American patrolman until World War II had ended, and in 1930 at least

forty-six of the former Klan cops were on the still lily-white force, including

two as captains and eight as detectives. Either for internal purposes

or for distribution during the 1922 elections, the Invisible Empire also

printed a handbill listing thirteen members of the group’s executive committee,

and a “Steering Committee of 100,” which included the county’s

Democratic Party chairman, the sheriff, and a district judge. Lewis Turley,

police commissioner at the time, was listed in both categories.35

Although a few promiment ministers and businessmen praised the

KKK’s rise, “a revived Klan threatened Dallas’ image as a forward-thinking,

cosmopolitan city—ripe for eastern investment capital—and alarmed

many of the moderate business leaders,” historian Patricia Evridge Hill

has pointed out. In 1922, opponents formed the Dallas County Citizens

League to nominate and field anti-Klan candidates, who eventually prevailed.

Klan rivalries in state elections disunified the Texas Empire, and

by 1925, financial scandals—and a sensational rape by an Indiana Klan

leader—had besmirched the group’s public image. Dallas historian Darwin

Payne, whose chronology of the rise and fall of the city’s Klan is the

most thorough to date, found that by 1926 Realm membership in the city

had fallen by 90 percent. Dropping out from an organization speaks to

its functioning, but does not testify to disillusionment with its aims: Dallas

became a city of Klan fellow-travelers, while about a thousand stalwart Ku

Kluxers hung on, waiting for another revival.

The Klan came out of the shadows on March 3, the day before Coder and Hurst disappeared. That morning passersby in East Dallas found

handbills someone had nailed to telephone poles overnight. The bulletins

bore the caption “White men, What are you going to do about it?” and carried

the name of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

The following afternoon, Coder and Hurst were rounded up and

hauled to jail again. A March 5 Times-Herald story titled “Red Agitators Are

Beaten Up In Dallas Jail” detailed the event. Apparently written on information

supplied by police and fellow prisoners, it reported:

Coder was arrested Wednesday afternoon by Policeman Paul Adair while handing

out literature in the negro quarter at Elm street and Central avenue, and sent to

jail. A few minutes after being locked up he was attacked and beaten by H. Holland,

another prisoner, when the two got into an argument over their ideas of

intermarriage of whites and negroes. . . . Holland was released shortly after the

fight when arresting officers completed an investigation of a case in which he was

supposed to have been involved and it was found that he had no connection with

it.

A few hours later, “Hurst was arrested . . . at Elm and Akard streets. When

he arrived at the jail he had some of the Party’s anti-racist literature under

his shirt. One of the other prisoners found out and a fight started. Hurst

was roughly handled when he argued his views on racial equality and

intermarriage,” the article stated. “Coder and Hurst will be given a chance

to leave town,” the article concluded, “upon promises of refraining from

attempting to hold public gatherings.”

The offer to exile the two Reds was perhaps in keeping with a Dallas

tradition of dealing with racial dissidents dating to 1859, when two Methodist

ministers, Solomon McKinney and Parson Blount, were jailed for

abolitionism and told to exit the region. In White Metropolis, Dallas historian

Michael Phillips noted that when the pair “mysteriously disappeared

from jail, the Herald”—an early-day Dallas weekly—“suggested that this

happened through the aid of ‘the Prince of Darkness’ or perhaps ‘the

assistance of outside pressure.’”

About 6:00 p.m. on the day of the beatings, George Clifton Edwards,

perhaps conscious of himself as the era’s Prince of Darkness, upon reading

that his clients faced peril in the hoosegow, paid a visit to their cells.

He found them in the bruised and battered condition that the Times-Herald

had described and proposed that they be released, as the authorities

had offered, on the condition that they leave town. He then went home

and about an hour later telephoned the jail to learn that his request had

been granted. About 8:00 p.m. he presented himself at its booking desk,

and after a short delay, he and the Communists walked up the stairs that

linked the booking desk, in the basement, to the sidewalk on Harwood

Street. Then they disappeared.

Edwards got off lucky. His kidnappers drove east on Main Street, turned

right to Fair Park, then headed south. On the edge of town, near a landmark

of the day, the Wig-Wam Tourist Camp, they untied him and put

him out of the car. As the rest of the Klan convoy passed, he spied Hurst

through the rear window of one of its vehicles.42 But he made no report

to the police because, like Coder, he did not trust them. Instead, the following

morning, hoping to involve a higher power, he told his story to a

Dallas federal district attorney.

The release of Edwards may have been serendipitous—but it might also

have been planned. In his 1974 biography of his father, George Clifton

Edwards Jr. wrote: “At one point one of the abductors noticed that Dad

had a Masonic emblem in his buttonhole and asked him what degree.

Dad answered ‘Thirty-second.’ That seemed a satisfactory enough answer.

Shortly afterward the car stopped on a dark piece of country road, and

they put Dad out, telling him to go home and to talk to no one about the

events of the night.” But both the father and son recounted an exchange

with a darker implication. George Jr. had driven his father to the jail, and

according to the elder’s instructions, had parked their car at the front of

the municipal library, just a block away. George Jr. saw three cars parked

across from city hall but did not think anything was unusual because “after

all, we were in downtown Dallas, literally within a stone’s throw of the central

headquarters of the Dallas Police Department.” About half an hour

later he went into the station to see what had become of his dad. A sergeant

at the desk told him, “Don’t worry. Your father will not be hurt.”

This story, of course, implies that the officer knew what was happening on

the outskirts of town.

Although Edwards had yet made no public statement about the event,

news of the kidnapping broke in an exclusive story carried by an early edition

of the city’s third-ranked daily, the afternoon Dallas Dispatch, whose

reportage of the incident is known today only through excerpts in other

publications. Its account was written by longtime Dallas reporter Edmund

Barr and carried a byline, a rare gesture in those days. Barr’s story, quoted

in the Morning News, said:

The Ku Klux Klan came back to life Thursday night when fourteen men, occupying

four large sedans kidnapped C. J. Coder and Lewis Hurst, San Antonio Communists,

when they were released from jail, drove them to a secluded spot south of

Hutchins, beat them with a doubled rope and left them bleeding and tied.

For his story Barr visited the spot where he had been told the beating took

place, at a wooden bridge over Cooke’s Branch Creek about a mile south

of Hutchins. He reported finding footprints and signs “that a struggle had

taken place.”46 But something was missing from Barr’s sensational lines:

he did not name the sources of his information or say whether Coder and

Hurst were dead or alive.

Having gotten no satisfaction from his meeting a day earlier with the

federal district attorney, on Saturday, March 7, Edwards appeared before

the executive committee of the Dallas Bar Association, a written statement

in hand. He explained his circumstances and his suspicions, and

persuaded the group to wire Governor Ross Sterling, asking for a state

investigation. On Monday, Sterling dispatched two Texas Rangers, James

Huddleston and the legendary Manuel T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas to
investigate.

Always image-conscious, Dallas leaders were outraged by Sterling’s

move. Mayor J. Waddy Tate telegraphed the governor in protest: “No

doubt you realize the sending of Rangers to our peaceful, law-abiding city

without their being asked for is injurious and a reflection upon our good

city. . . . We respectfully request that you withdraw them at once,” his wire

said. In a show of concern, Sheriff Hal Hood dispatched three deputies to

the bridge that Barr had cited as the scene of the flogging. They returned

saying that they had found only pig tracks.

A grand jury was already in session at the Dallas County courthouse

and on Wednesday, March 11, it began hearing testimony about the

affair. Reporter Edmund Barr was called, but he refused to name his

source. Judge Calvin Muse fined him $100 and jailed him for contempt of

court.50 The following day, Barr, having been instructed by his publisher,

was again brought before the grand jury, and this time he testified: Norman

Register, a sixty-year-old district court clerk, had been his source, he

said. According to the Times-Herald, “Register, well known for his activity

in fraternal and political circles here for many years, is a former cyclops

of the Oak Cliff Klan. That organization still uses as its meeting place an

Oak Cliff building leased to the organization by Mr. Register,” the story

alleged.

Register was then called to testify. The Morning News drew a poignant

picture of the scene: “Barr assisted Register, who is crippled with rheumatism,

across the street from the criminal court building to the grand

jury quarters in the old courthouse.” Register denied that he had spoken

to Barr for the story, and a few days later so did Owen George, a Dallas

County assistant district attorney with whom Barr said he had confirmed

Register’s report.54 At the end of the day, Police Commissioner Graves

may have summed up the gendarmarie’s attitude. “I don’t think anything

even bordering on what has been reported in the newspapers ever happened,”

he said.

However, for several days the grand jury continued to hear from varied

witnesses, including policemen who had been on duty at the jail on the

night of the abduction. A figure who surprisingly came forth was twentyfive-

year-old George Papcun, whom both the Morning News and Times-Herald

described with the same pair of words: “bushy-haired.”

Correspondence from the files of the Party’s District 10 office shows

that Papcun, an organizer for the TUUL, was at the time a fellow traveler,

not a comrade; he had been expelled by a northeastern district in 1930.

Probably because he was a miner, the TUUL had stationed him in El Paso

as an organizer. It dispatched him to Dallas a few days after the Edwards-

Coder-Hurst kidnapping to manage publicity and to raise protests, he

said. He was joined there by a correspondent for the Daily Worker, Sam

Littcin, as the grand jury learned when it subpoenaed telegrams from the

city’s Western Union and Postal Telegraph agencies.

On the afternoon of March 11, Littcin had sent a dispatch to the

Worker alleging that Coder and Hurst were “brutally murdered by a mob

which kidnapped them Thursday night. One arrest made.” But Littcin’s

telegram, and another by Papcun, did not name the arrestee, nor reveal

sources for those claims. Nevertheless, the next day the Worker carried a

banner-headline story that took their reports as gospel, “Coder and Hurst

Brutally Murdered By Lynch Mob.”

Three days later the Worker broke news of a very different kind: Coder

and Hurst, it said, were in Kansas City. Based on information from District

10 Party organizer Paul Cline, the newspaper said that the pair arrived

the day before, riding a freight train. About dawn on the morning of their

kidnapping, it claimed, African American farmers had run across the two,

tied and lying in a field, delirious. The farmers had taken them to their

nearby home and for several days nursed them back to health.

On Saturday morning, March 14, three Dallas men—pilot Harry Fowler,

Times-Herald city editor E. K. Mead, and Dallas County district attorney

William McCraw—left the city in an enclosed five-seat Bellanca monoplane

loaned to them by Dallas stockbroker Royal A. Ferris Jr. They were

bound for Kansas City. Upon their arrival about four hours later, they

made their way to the District 10 offices, where under Cline’s supervision,

they interviewed Coder and Hurst. A photo taken during the Kansas

City sitting does not show trauma on the face of either man. “Both of

them look and act like Texas country boys of the tenant farmer type,”

Mead wrote in a column upon his return. According to him, Coder was

“young and his thin, sharp face, topped with a busy crop of blond hair,

. . . lacks all marks of high intelligence.” This description coincided with

an earlier remark by lawyer Edwards, who said that Hurst was a “poor, frail

and rather dull country boy who had no friends” and with that of Richard

Potts, editor of an idosyncrtic Dallas magazine, The Common Herd, who had

spoken at the Red’s first rally. Hurst would later charge that the Dallas

trio had gained entry by claiming that they were reporters. During their

chat, Coder told his interviewers that when he and Hurst were brought to

the jail’s booking desk on the night of March 5, a man who had apparently

been waiting for them to appear had rushed outside to signal the kidnapping

crew. He also said that in Hutchins, one of his captors boasted that

“the Klan begins where the law ends.”

According to Hurst, only after Cline badgered McCraw into confessing

his identity did the district attorney propose the deal that provided

speculation in the newspapers for days. He asked the two Communists

to return with his party and to testify before the grand jury. When Coder

and Hurst frowned at his proposal, he offered to buy them train tickets.

Stories subsequently published about the flight and the interview drilled

into details: McCraw offered the two Reds protection by Dallas police and

sheriff’s officers, and when they snubbed that, showed them a telegram

from Governor Sterling’s office, promising that, if they liked, Texas Rangers

would meet them at the state line. Hesitant to make any decision, they

telephoned Edwards, who said that he did not trust the local authorities

or believe that the Rangers could guarantee the pair’s safety in Dallas.

The Bellanca returned to Dallas without them, carrying a half-humbled

McCraw. “I do not believe those men were flogged, although there seems

to be little doubt that there was a kidnapping,” he said. On the day when

stories about the Kansas City interview appeared in the Dallas papers, the

Daily Worker also published an exclusive, a statement signed by Coder and

Hurst, describing their beatings in jail, their abduction, and their flogging.

Its details largely matched Barr’s March 6 report.

George Edwards had been absent from Dallas trying a case in Eastland.

But on Monday, after he went before the grand jury to give an account

of his kidnapping, Dallas officials and the press began speculating about

pledges from the two Communists to return—not to testify, the two said,

but to stage another demonstration. Police Commissioner Graves repeated

his injunction against street protests, and over the next few days, Cline

and the Daily Worker made a series of statements about the two Texans’

plans. They said that Coder and Hurst would hitchhike, that they would

come back by freight, that they would take a passenger train, and that

Hurst was already en route by auto. But neither man showed.

On the eve of the last grand jury session two weeks later, Edwards

received a telephone call from Hurst, who said that he was in Dallas.

According to a subseqent report by Common Herd editor Potts, Hurst also

contacted him and dropped by the publication’s office the next morning.

He afterward went to Edwards’s office, bringing a typewritten letter he

said he wanted to mail to the press. Edwards, concerned for his client’s

safety, promptly drove Hurst to Fort Worth, where, after Hurst dropped

his missive in a letterbox, Edwards left him on the streets. The lawyer

would later report that neither he nor Hurst were aware that about the

same hour, the grand jury released its finding:

It is our conclusion that no physical violence was done to any of the parties. As to

the abduction, it appears from the testimony and subsequent developments that it

was done by the Communists themselves for publicity purposes. . . . The presence

of agitators of this type and the presentation of their doctrines is destructive to the

social and proper interest of this country.

United Press International, to which Hurst mailed his statement, later

told the Times-Herald that the opening line of the letter was “The grand

jury investigation turned out just the way I expected it to be, a well-planned

whitewashing scheme.” The following week a Morning News editorial belatedly

expressed a similar conclusion: “The News takes it as an undisputed

fact that free speech in Dallas depends in large part upon whether the

character of the speech is pleasing to the economic and political palate of

the officials of Dallas.”

Editorialists at the News probably knew what Hurst only surmised, that

grand juries in those days were blue-ribbon panels stacked against people

like him. None of the twelve men who sat on the grand jury were wage

earners, nor were any of them members of the minorities to which the

Communist made special appeals. Among them were a cotton broker,

an investment broker, and J. B. Wilson, a man sometimes described in

the area press with the words “Dallas capitalist.” Also on the panel were

a county commission clerk and a police captain who was one of the men

named on the Klan’s 1922 list of police for members.

The grand jury’s mention of “publicity” may have been a reference to

a March statement by Commissioner Graves that “the whole matter is a

hoax, framed as a double-barreled publicity stunt to promote sympathy

for the Communists and Edwards’s candidacy for the City Council.”

Although it is doubtful that his brief association with the Communists

provided the kind of publicity Edwards wanted, he indeed had filed for a

seat on the council. On April 9, when ballots were canvassed, he came in

second among three candidates, with only 7 percent of the vote.

Charles J. Coder remained in Missouri. In October 1931, in the company

of other Communists, he was arrested and sentenced to a year in jail.

But in early 1932 he was sent to Arkansas, where he headed the Party’s

campaign to put candidates on that state’s ballots. Central Control Commission

records indicate that he was restored to full Party membership

in 1932, an indication that during his weeks as the Party’s Dallas heromartyr,

his status with the organization had been irregular. His disappearance

from Party and public records thereafter suggests that the former

Carl Miller adopted yet another name—or that was never been Coder

nor Miller, but someone else.

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/klansmen-communists-and-civil-liberties/