The Invisible Line (46 page)

On cross-examination, nearly every question that Looney's lawyer asked included the word
Negro
. “Did you ever hear any one else call you negroes before George Looney?” “Did you ever hear your father say you were mixed with part negro?” George Spencer remained calm and polite.

Only once did he reveal a bit of temper. “Did not Will Short on Home Creek call you a negro to your face?” Looney's lawyer asked.

“No, sir,” Spencer replied. “That would be a little dangerous.” The very fact that the question offended him was evidence of his whiteness.
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THE DEFENSE CALLED SEVEN witnesses, mostly school board officials justifying their decision to expel Melvin Spencer, and read the depositions of seven more. Some witnesses alleged that the Spencers had been the subject of rumors about their race from the moment they moved into Buchanan County. Another witness suggested that George Spencer had been comfortable enough in his community that he could wear his race casually—that Home Creek was set apart from the rest of the South, that it did not subscribe to the same insistence on purity. “He told me they were mixed blooded,” said Albert Stevenson, “he said he had negro blood in him, but he didn't object as it made him hardy.”
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But George Looney's last witness brought the outside world, the rest of the South's obsession with racial purity, right back into the courtroom. Eugene Billisoly was different from everyone else who had testified. He was not from the mountains. He had attended the University of Virginia and made his living practicing law. He had crossed the state to testify, all the way from Norfolk, because he had a skill that no one else in the courtroom had. Billisoly informed the court that nearly half of Norfolk's eighty thousand residents were black, and he had personally supervised forty or fifty blacks while working as a city administrator. Based on that experience—and based on three years of medical training before he studied law—he suggested that he could tell at a glance if someone had more than “one-eighth negro blood in them.”
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Supporters of segregation often spoke of blackness as a disastrous contaminant from which Jim Crow laws purported to protect whites. This sense of race and purity was premised on a belief that people could distinguish blacks from whites. Reflecting the growing authority of doctors and social scientists in a modernizing country, medicine and science provided the language, a method, and a basic confidence that segregation was right and could be maintained. In courtrooms all over the country experts were identifying people as black or white based on the whites of their eyes, the curve of their spines, the texture of their hair, the shape of their nostrils, and the tint of their fingernails. It was unclear whether scientific testimony would outweigh common sense in Buchanan County, but the very fact that Looney's lawyers would put Billisoly on the stand suggested that the new thinking about race—and the new authority of science—had some resonance for a mountain jury.
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Billisoly's testimony was brief. Looney's lawyer pointed to Melvin Spencer and asked, “Is there any negro blood in this boy?”

Billisoly looked at the nine-year-old and concentrated. “Well,” he said, “he looks like there is negro blood in him. Has nose, lips, and chin very much like a negro. Very characteristic.”

“Look at that man,” the lawyer said, pointing at George Spencer, “and tell us what you think of him.”

Again Billisoly leveled his gaze. “Well, sir, he has some of the features of a negro.”

William Daugherty rose from his chair for cross-examination. He pointed to George Spencer's sister. “What do you think of her?”

The defense expert declared that he “would consider her of pure Caucasian blood.”

Daugherty pointed to Spencer's mother. “Look at that lady,” he said. “Do you think she has any negro blood in her?”

“No, sir,” said Billisoly. “I do not. She is a white woman.”

Daugherty pointed to Spencer's father. “Look at that man . . . what do you think of him?”

“Let me see his hair,” the witness said. “His hair looks a little like a negro. I believe there is some negro there, I can't say how much.”
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THE JUDGE INSTRUCTED THE jury that under Virginia law, Melvin Spencer was legally white unless he had “one-sixteenth or more ... negro blood.” By one-sixteenth, the judge clarified that if the boy's great-grandfather, Old Jordan Spencer, was “less than one-half negro . . . then the said Melvin Spencer had less than one-sixteenth of negro blood and is not a negro.” Even if the jury believed that the Spencers had a reputation for being black in Johnson or Buchanan counties, it would still have to find for the plaintiffs if the child had less than the exact proportion of “negro blood” spelled out in the statute. Because it was nearly impossible to determine exactly how black Melvin and his father were—let alone determine the blood fraction of Melvin's dead great-grandfather—the instructions seemed to favor the Spencers.
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At the same time the judge also allowed the jury to excuse George Looney's “strong or violent language disproportioned to the occasion” if it believed “that the party using the language was engaged in a bona fide investigation for a lawful purpose.” Given the importance of segregating the schools—“few things would . . . tend more toward social equality and the amalgamation of the races than to educate them together,” Looney's lawyers would argue—the judge seemed to be giving Looney considerable leeway with even slanderous accusations, as long as they were meant to protect white children from contamination.
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The jury filed out of the courtroom to deliberate. They had to determine whether Looney's accusations were false and malicious, but also whether a Buchanan County native's word was worth more than a newcomer's, whether Arminda Spencer was worth protecting, and whether the color line had to be drawn no matter what the human consequences. It did not take them long to reach a decision. They returned to the jury box and delivered their verdict: judgment for the defendant. George Looney had not slandered George Spencer by referring to his family as “God damned negroes.”

 

 

FACED WITH THE FINDINGS of a Buchanan County jury, the airing of his family's history in an open courtroom, and the triumph of an enemy whom he would regularly encounter along Home Creek, George Spencer and his father and brothers could have picked up their guns. More than one blood feud had started in the mountains after a jury verdict, particularly when one party believed the verdict had been biased. Spencer and his family also could have packed their belongings and left the area. Once it was generally known that they had been legally classified as “colored,” what future did the Spencers have in an all-white county?
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But George Spencer stood his ground and appealed the verdict to the Virginia Supreme Court. Convincing a court to overturn a jury verdict was never easy, and Spencer's case was all the more difficult because on balance the evidence showed that Old Jordan had been widely regarded as racially different. Moreover, where race had yet to become an overwhelming obsession in the hills—regardless of their reputation, the Spencers had had little trouble finding a place in their community—Richmond was an epicenter of the movement for racial purity. Looney's justification for destroying the Spencers, “preserv[ing] the racial integrity and superiority of the white man,” would resonate with a court that was fundamentally engaged with the task of enabling Virginia to segregate.
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Nevertheless Roland Chase and William Daugherty raised seventeen grounds for reversal. They objected to seven of the jury instructions and to seven rulings by the trial judge that admitted or excluded particular testimony or physical evidence. The lawyers emphasized Looney's foul mouth. Defense counsel would later complain that Chase and Daugherty's submission to the court “has the term, ‘God damned negroes,' coming twelve times from the lips of this Appellee. It would be hard to find a coarser and more profane type of man than the Declaration attempts to make [Looney].” But Spencer's lawyers devoted most of their energy to arguing that the evidence failed to support the jury's verdict. Nothing proved that Melvin Spencer was more than one-sixteenth black, and any privilege that George Looney could claim for taking extreme action to keep the schools racially exclusive was undermined by his malice toward the Spencers. If the evidence did not exactly show that the Spencers were “of pure caucasian blood,” neither did it prove that they were legally black. But even supposing that Spencer won on this argument, could his neighbors on Home Creek accept a family that was white on a technicality?
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In response, Looney's lawyers stated simply that Virginia's public policy “gives to the citizens of the state the right to have their children educated with children of their own race.” “Now how can such policy be properly carried into effect and such right of the citizen be properly protected,” they asked, “if the patrons of the school be not allowed, without fear of slander suits, to protest . . . against pupils who they do not consider under the laws entitled so to do, attending the same school attended by their children[?]” The defense lawyers implored the court not to let the fact that George Looney was “habitually profane” overshadow his laudable purpose in keeping blacks and whites separate.
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For two years and a month, the appeal was pending. For two years Melvin Spencer was shunned from school, and his family had to share their hollow with a sworn enemy. But there was no violence.

On September 7, 1914, just as news of the Battle of the Marne was reaching the United States, the Virginia Supreme Court set aside the jury verdict in
Spencer v. Looney
and ordered a new trial. The justices discounted the evidence of the Spencers' reputation, insisting instead on the nearly impossible proof of an exact blood quantum. “It is true that several witnesses ... say that the grandfather of plaintiff . . . had some of the appearances of a negro,” the opinion held, “but none were able to say what proportion of negro blood, if any, he had in him.” Any privilege that Looney had to safeguard his children's segregated schooling was overcome for several reasons: first, Looney had used “the most profane, uncalled for, and violent language”; second, the two warring families had been friendly until the defendant's brother was killed; and finally, Looney had gone to a tremendous amount of trouble and expense to wage his war. By strictly interpreting the one-sixteenth rule and by inferring malice, in part, from Looney's zealous investigation of the Spencers' race, the court made it difficult for anyone to raise questions about racial identity without fear of legal action.
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Despite the grounds for its ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court was not opposed to segregation. Yet no matter how compelling it was to “preserve the racial integrity and superiority of the white man,” the court showed some sense that a judgment for Looney would portend a bleak future for the white South: the possibility that petty feuds would increasingly take the form of racial witch hunts, that government authorities would reflexively err on the side of purity and paranoia—and that a good number of allegations might be borne out with the proper investigation. White communities had to be secure in their racial status before they could commit to the politics of racial purity. By letting the Spencers remain white, by discouraging efforts to investigate and uncover individuals' racial backgrounds, the court was making the South safe for segregation.

After the court ruled, no one bothered the Spencers again. The case was probably never retried, and the Buchanan County courthouse was gutted in a 1915 fire that destroyed most of Grundy. The family remained on Home Creek. Years later Melvin Spencer would marry a local woman and had eleven children who survived him. Perhaps their neighbors regarded the judicial decision as the final word on the Spencers' race. Or maybe the case never mattered much at all—people knew Looney had a war to fight, but they never believed or cared about the accusation. There was too much work to do, hillsides to harvest, in the long-shadowed hours between sunup and sundown.
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As Melvin Spencer resumed his education, scientists from the Virginia Geological Survey were determining that there were coal deposits three feet thick opposite the schoolhouse and up and down Home Creek. The 1920 census declared Buchanan County to be entirely white, with all but four residents native-born Americans. It became a selling point to attract mining companies into the hills. “Among such a homogenous population,” concluded one report, “industrialists need have little fear of labor disturbances.”
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S
HE WAS PERFECT. Henry Field took one look and made his way through the gaping crowds. In the summer of 1931 the International Colonial Exposition was drawing thousands of visitors to the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern outskirts of Paris. Tourists, Parisians, and even the occasional Bolshevik packed the pavilions and plazas displaying the arts, industries, and cultures of France's global empire, from Algeria to Cambodia, Dahomey to Djibouti.
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The exposition was painstakingly designed to be ethnographic—sober and scientific, an authentic account of humankind in all its variation. At the same time there was no avoiding a carnival atmosphere. The exposition billed itself as a “Tour of the World in a Single Day,” a sliding scale from civilization to savagery and all points in between. It promised “the seductions of the picturesque and the irresistible magic of art,” offering at a glance “the thatch roofs of Togo, the red kasbahs of West Africa, and the circumflex, surprising, aerial accent of . . . Sumatra houses ... the tomtom of a Negro . . . the Melody of the World, and its History.” Although Asians and Africans in native dress milled through the crowds and periodically performed traditional songs and dances, few visitors would have been shocked at the sight of them. For centuries, people from the remotest parts of the world had entertained the French, as caged curiosities and sideshow freaks.
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