Letter from Albert E. Barnett to Tom Clark

723 Simpson Street Evanston, Illinois March 15, 1946 The rope with which Cordie Hon. Tom Clark Cheek was hanged was bought Attorney General of the United States at a hardware store in Department of Justice Lewisburg, Governor McCord's Washington, D. C. home town. My dear Mr. Clark: The statement of Clark Foreman, President Southern Conference of Human Welfare, regarding the anti-Negro violence at Columbia, Tennessee came to me through the mail today. It has presumably been placed in your hands with urgent insistence on Federal investigation and action. Like Mr. Clark Foreman, my ante- cedents are Georgian and Alabamian. Like him, I am a southern Democrat. I write you in hearty support of the procedures he urges. Our voices are voices of southern white men who are not only Democrats but democrats! The Bilbos and Rankins illustrate the possible difference between the two. I lived for twenty years in Nashville, Tennessee. With Dr. Thomas Elza Jones, president of Fisk University of that city, I carefully in- vestigated the lynching of Cordie Cheek by & Columbia, Tennessee mob. When I read accounts of the recent disturbances at Columbia in the Nashville Tennessean, the name of C. H. Denton caught my eye. He is the magistrate who fixed bail for Negroes arrested and denied bail to others. Looking back into my file on the Cordie Cheek lynching of December 15, 1933, I discovered that the automobile of the same C. H. DENTON WAS USED IN THE ABDUCTION OF CORDIE CHEEK. ARMED MEN ABDUCTED NEGRO BOY, ONLY SEVENTEEN YEARS OF AGE FROM HIS UNCLE'S HOME IN NASHVILLE WHEN A MAURY COUNTY GRAND JURY HAD ADJOURNED WITHOUT INDICTING HIM, THREW HIM INTO C. H. DENTON'S CAR, DROVE TO A POINT ON THE COLUMBIA-LEWISBURG ROAD, AND IN THE PRESENCE OF FIVE HUNDRED TO A THOUSAND SPECTATORS HANGED HIM TO A CEDAR TREE BY THE ROADSIDE. White residents of Maury County told Dr. Jones and me that invitations to the lynching were tele- phone from C. H. Denton's home telephone to people all about Maury County notifying of the time and place of the lynching and inviting them to see the show. It is a travesty on justice that Negroes under arrest at Columbia in the present situation should have their bond set or denied by a magistrate whose car was used in the abduction and lynching of Cordie Cheek in 1933 and over whose telephone invitations were allegedly issued to people to witness the lynching. Mr. Witherspoon, a deputy sheriff who with a white farmer named Cheatham saved Cordie Cheek from lynching a month earlier, was dismissed as deputy sheriff shortly after the lynching had occurred. I wrote this case up in detail for the late Senator Edward P. Costigan at the time the Costigan-Wagner Federal Anti-lynching bill was being considered in committee. I can furnish you with a copy of the study if you desire it. It shows that the Maury County Coroner who declared Cordie Cheek came to death "by hands unknown" was actually the man who pushed the boy off a step ladder and hanged him! Negroes can hardly expect justice from local officers of such atti- tudes. Respectfully, Copy to Gov. Jim McCord Albert E. Barnett Nashville, Tenne ssee