Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...debate a drastic anti-lynching bill introduced by Congressman Gavagan from New York's black Harlem. In Jackson, Miss., before delegates to a farm conference, Governor Hugh Lawson White was boasting that Mississippi had not had a lynching in 15 months. In Winona, Miss., in a jampacked courtroom in Montgomery County's white brick courthouse, Roosevelt Townes and Bootjack McDaniels, 26-year-old Negroes, were pleading not guilty to a charge of murdering a crossroads country grocer during a robbery last December at nearby Duck Hill. One day last week these simultaneous events were the prolog...
...debate at Washington droned on, furnishing a strange far-off accompaniment, Negroes Townes and McDaniels were led handcuffed from the courtroom. If their minds registered anything as the sheriff and two deputies escorted them down the back stairs to return them to jail, it was relief. The Court had assigned counsel to defend them, set a date for trial by jury. Everything was according to law. But when they stepped out of a side door of the courthouse, they found themselves face to face with what so often handles cases like theirs in the South. An angry mob surged forward...
...Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, looking very solemn and very fit in spite of having celebrated his 75th birthday the day before, cast hardly a glance at his jam-packed courtroom as he took his seat. With a rustling of robes his Associates joined him. The Chief Justice, turning his head, gave a brief nod toward the right extremity of the bench. Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts, end man of the Court, took up a manuscript and began to read...
...silent intake of spectators' breaths all but caused a vacuum in the courtroom. At last the fateful decision was at hand, the five-case test of the disputed Wagner Labor Act. Those who had camped at the Court's portal since dawn in order to get seats, felt rewarded. Government attorneys, who had preferred seats, nudged one another expectantly. Mrs. Hughes, who had presumably had a tip from her husband that this would be a good decision day to attend, sat in the front row of spectators paying very close attention...
...these cases, Chief Justice Hughes read the majority decisions. As he reached the heart of his decision, Government attorneys grinned excitedly, every spectator in the courtroom realized that he was seeing history made. Excerpts...