Word: thurmonds
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Many & many a citizen throughout the land held Governor James ("Sunny Jim") Rolph Jr. of California directly responsible for Negro Warner's death. Week before, Governor Rolph had congratulated the "patriotic citizens" of San Jose for lynching John Holmes and Thomas H. Thurmond who had confessed to the murderous kidnapping of Brooke Hart. California, boasted its Governor, had given the rest of the Union a "lesson" in dealing with criminals (TIME. Dec. 4). Missouri, it seemed, had been quick to learn...
...Hart's body was found in five feet of water by duck hunters one morning last week. Employes in his father's San Jose department store identified the body, painfully recalled fitting the clothes which the corpse still wore. In San Jose, where gaunt-faced Thomas H. Thurmond and hulking John Holmes had been jailed after confessing to the crime, red-hot resentment took shape as a mob. Asked if he would call out the militia, florid Governor James Rolph Jr. snorted: "What! Call out the troops to protect those two guys?" By nightfall some 6,000 infuriated...
...undersigned, students of Harvard University, emphatically condemn your stand in regard to the lynching of John Holmes and Thomas Thurmond...
Lynching is murder in its most brutal form. You, who are under oath to uphold the law, have given this worst of crimes your complete sanction. You cannot expect such men as Holmes and Thurmond to obey the law if the governor of the state of California does...
This time there was no Clarence Darrow, no highly paid alienist, no maudlin press, no bribed jury, nor oratorical defense lawyers, and no harassing of bereaved relatives on the witness stand. Thurmond and Holmes were too gulity to be accorded the delightful interlude called American criminal justice. The mob was sick of a system that convicts 299 out of 300 law abiding citizens accused of violating traffic regulations and then refuses to convict 79 out of 30 accused murderers...