In 1944 a landmark Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright challenged all-white elections in the South as never before. A black dentist named Lonnie E. Smith had sued an election official named S. S. Allwright for the right to vote in the Texas Democratic primary. The NAACP supplied the brilliant young lawyer Thurgood Marshall to argue the case, and the court had found Smith in the right.
“The United States is a constitutional democracy,” the Supreme Court ruled. “Its organic law grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any state because of race.”
The first full election cycle following Smith v. Allwright was in 1946, the year Strom Thurmond ran for governor. For the first time in generations, black people in the South were hoping to freely participate in the elections.
On August 13, 1946, a black man named George Elmore attempted to vote in a Democratic primary in Richland County in South Carolina. Since the South was a one-party system (the Solid South), the winner of the Democratic primary would be the winner of the office. Election officials refused to accept Elmore’s ballot. With the help of lawyers from the newly empowered NAACP, Elmore sued. The outgoing South Carolina governor at the time, Olin D. Johnston, gave a speech to the state legislature in response to the Elmore case.
“We will have done everything within our power to guarantee white supremacy in our primaries and in our State in so far as legislation is concerned,” Governor Johnston said. “Should this prove inadequate, we South Carolinians will use the necessary methods to retain white supremacy in our primaries and to safeguard the homes and happiness of our people. White supremacy will be maintained in our primaries. Let the chips fall where they may!” His audience understood what he meant by “necessary methods.”
Yet a white judge in South Carolina decided the case in Elmore’s favor. “For too many years,” Judge J. Waties Waring ruled, “the people of this Country and perhaps particularly of this State have evaded realistic issues . . . Racial distinctions cannot exist in the machinery that selects the officers and law-makers of the United States; and all citizens of this State and Country are entitled to cast a free and untrammeled ballot in our elections.”
By the time the ruling was issued, the 1946 South Carolina gubernatorial election was over. Strom Thurmond won the Democratic primary, and ran unopposed in the November general election. Thurmond was now one of the nation’s youngest governors. But his white constituents knew they faced a battle over voting rights. Roughly 40 percent of the state’s population was African American.
Throughout his adult life, Thurmond kept a secret relationship with his daughter Essie Mae. Her existence was highly dangerous to Thurmond the more he moved into the political spotlight. But he found ways to visit her regularly, and he helped her financially. She was a grown woman living in New York City when he became governor, and he convinced her to come back South to attend the all-black South Carolina State College. She would remember traveling out of New York on a nonsegregated train car, having to change trains in Washington, DC, and getting on a segregated car. Now back in the South, there were separate bathrooms, water fountains, waiting rooms—those for blacks and those for whites.
“Why I thought the world war might have changed things I’ll never know,” she later wrote in her memoirs. “I guess I felt that if our black soldiers could fight for America, America could fight for them, but that was not to be.”
Shortly after Thurmond took office, on February 16, 1947, the phone rang in the Columbia governor’s mansion. When Thurmond picked up the line he heard the nervous voice of the city editor of the Greenville Piedmont, a local newspaper serving a town one hundred miles northwest of South Carolina’s capital. The editor told Thurmond a terrifying story: A black man named Willie Earle had been accused of the robbery and fatal stabbing of a white taxi driver. Earle had been arrested, but a white mob had taken him from the county jail by force. He’d then been stabbed, beaten, and shot through the head.
Police claimed to have substantial evidence that Earle was guilty of murdering the white taxi driver, Thomas W. Brown. But even if true, that did not condone the murder of Earle—not as far as the new governor Strom Thurmond was concerned. Thurmond knew he was on the spot. Would the rule of law hold up? The facts emerging were disturbing, and it was clear the case was going to get national attention.
Thurmond immediately ordered the FBI on the case, and brought in the strongest prosecutor he could find, Sam Watt of Spartanburg, who had successfully prosecuted 471 of 473 cases in the past year. Thurmond wanted to bring a murder case. Numerous witnesses were interviewed. The jailer, whose name was Gilstrap, told how a mob of some thirty white men had come to the jailhouse. “I knew they meant business,” he told investigators. “They had a shotgun.” The county physician said Earle had been stabbed five times, in the chest, stomach, forehead, neck, and thigh, before he was shot to death through the right temple. Numerous mob members named the man who pulled the trigger: R. Carlos Hurd Sr., a forty-five-year-old taxi dispatcher. Right before the victim was shot in the head, according to court testimony, he muttered his last words: “Lord, you done killed me.”
This type of mob violence of white men against a black victim was not new. The South’s darkest secret was one that stretched back decades. But in this case, unlike others, white men named a fellow white person as the triggerman in the lynching of a black American. Numerous newspapers, including the New York
