This day’s post arrives to us via George Wallace: American Populist, and it concerns not the pugilistic Wallace but a previous Alabama governor, Big Jim Folsom.
Folsom, as we see here, was a man who had to choose his exercises of executive mercy very carefully due to the fraught racial politics of his state.
“I admit that we have got the worst penal system in the world, including Dark Africa,” Folsom said two years later* in the course of commuting the death sentence of a man whose crime was stealing $1.95.
What made Folsom most vulnerable to abandonment by even those deeply committed to his social programs was his demonstrative concern about the plight of Alabama’s blacks. He freely pardoned and paroled black convicts, believing they had been wrongly jailed or punished excessively because of their race. He harbored deep misgivings about the death penalty, especially in Alabama because use of the electric chair seemed reserved almost exclusively for blacks. In 1956, at a time of growing racial tension in the state, two black men were scheduled to die in Kilby Prison’s electric chair on the same night, one for murdering his wife and the other for raping a white woman. Folsom commuted the murderer’s sentence to life in prison, but he allowed the young rapist (who had been nineteen at the time of the crime) to die and said that he “just couldn’t” commute the sentence of a black man convicted of raping a white woman. “I’d never get anything done for the rest of my term if I did that,” he said. “Hell, things are getting so bad, they’re even trying to take Black & White Scotch off the shelves.” (It was true. The government of Alabama, which controlled the sale of liquor in the state, seriously considered barring that brand of Scotch whisky because of the name and because its label showed two Scottish terriers — one white and one black — joyfully playing together.)
The miscegenating spirit urges you to get in the holiday spirit.
* Folsom said that in 1958, the same year he let Jeremiah Reeves go to the electric chair.
On this day..
- 1691: Johannes Fatio and the leaders of the 1691er-Wesen
- 1852: Eduardo Facciolo Alba, Cuban patriot
- 1654: Hieronymus Duquesnoy the Younger, sculptor
- Daily Double: Felix Platter's Diary
- 1554: A handsome young man from Montpellier
- 1620: Sidonia von Borcke, the sorceress
- 1529: Adolf Clarenbach, Lower Rhine evangelist
- 1926: Sataro Fukiage, serial killer
- 1637: William Schooler and John Williams
- 1832: Lucy (Wells), jealous slave
- 1987: Mehdi Hashemi, Iran-Contra whistleblower
- 1898: The Six Gentlemen of the Hundred Days' Reform
- 1402: False Olaf