This Day in Southern History (Congressman Shoots Black Man)

March 27, 1908—Confronted by a black man on a Washington, D.C., streetcar, swigging out of a bottle, Democratic Congressman and diehard Prohibitionist James Thomas Heflin of Alabama chose the calm, rational response: shooting the fellow. Amazingly, this politician would not only escape punishment, but continue in his old post and even win higher office, where he would become a historic embarrassment.

This year, as an African-American, for the first time in history, stands an excellent chance of winning a major-party nomination for President, it’s useful to look back a century to discover the state of race relations then. This relatively little-known episode is as good a place to start as any. The fact that it is almost forgotten says much about how casually racism of the most vicious kind was once woven into the fabric of political life.

I first came across this curious incident in, of all things, a baseball book: Cait Murphy’s Crazy ’08, or what she calls “The Greatest Year in Baseball History.” In addition to its account of that landmark year (for Cubs fans, who saw their team win its last World Series, it’s been only downhill since then), the book includes a number of interesting asides on the wider cultural climate in the country, including this one sentence that made me sit up and take notice: “In March, a congressman from Alabama, James Heflin, shoots a black passenger on a Washington streetcar for insulting him.”

What!!??? I asked myself upon reading this. I knew I had to write about this for the blog.

Nearly 75 years later, the name “Heflin” would have been immediately associated with Howell Heflin, a genial sort who, like his uncle, served as U.S. Senator from Alabama. Unlike his forebear, Howell quickly recognized which way the political wind was blowing and reaped much good will and many votes from blacks who exerted their right to vote in the wake of the civil rights movement.

If Howell Heflin was an example of the “New South,” then “Cotton Tom”—so nicknamed for his advocacy of the cause of farmers—was practically an archetype of the unregenerate bigot. Even George Wallace and Jesse Helms weren’t so nakedly anti-civil-rights or racist. No less an authority than Southern historian Diane McWhorter has labeled him—as you’ll see, not without justification—“the biggest boob in the history of Congress.”

Yet this exotic political creature existed in enough quantity on Capitol Hill at one time that, when the creators of the 1947 musical Finian’s Rainbow satirized a loudmouthed politico as “Senator Billboard Rawkins,” they knew that audiences would associate him with Senator Theodore Bilbo or, if their memories extended just a bit further, to “Cotton Tom” Heflin.

Before the shooting incident, Rep. Heflin made noise less with firearms than with his mouth. After President Theodore Roosevelt invited Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner, the Alabama congressman announced that if an anarchist happened to explode a bomb under the table where the two men dined, then “no harm would have been done.” (Two years later, Heflin was shocked to enter a sleeping car only to find that he had to share it with Washington, who was occupying the lower berth.)

A mere month before the shooting, Heflin tried to insert a clause into a bill that would segregate D.C.’s streetcars. That ploy didn’t work, but it wasn’t the last time he’d provide what Daniel Patrick Moynihan later called, in a much different context, “boob bait for the bubbas.”

Shootings are not to be taken lightly, particularly when the assailant leaves someone seriously wounded, as in this case. But Heflin not only got the case dismissed, but began to proclaim it one of the high points of his career to date.

Most people would say that arrived six years later, when he successfully co-sponsored a bill creating Mother’s Day, but even that was not unmixed with calculation: Heflin believed—correctly, as it turned out—that the bill would take the edge off voters who loathed his opposition to women’s suffrage.

In 1920, Congressman Heflin moved up to the U.S. Senate, where he propounded more idiotic (oh, I’m sorry, we have to be objective here—controversial) positions against federal child-labor legislation and Roman Catholicism, and for Prohibition.

It was the latter two stances—not, unfortunately, his racism—that brought Heflin’s political career to an end. Al Smith’s Catholicism and opposition to Prohibition led Heflin to support Smith’s Republican opponent, Herbert Hoover, in the 1928 election.

Then as now, just as it’ll probably be 20 centuries from now, parties don’t like turncoats. Even though many Southern Democratic officeholders had their issues with Al Smith, few went to the point of endorsing his opponent or to calling their party’s nominee “the hireling of the Pope.” Alabama’s Democratic Party voters weren’t amused, and they responded by denying Heflin renomination in 1930.

Still, Helfin didn’t give up. By a one-vote majority, his former colleagues decided to let him speak about the $100,000 (this in the midst of the Depression), 15-month voter-fraud probe they had authorized the election won by his opponent, John Bankhead (yes, that’s the uncle of the salty actress Tallulah).

Given two hours, Heflin took five, replete with the African-American dialect and red-faced ranting that had fueled his career to date. But the clubby Senate doesn’t like anyone who makes it look like a laughingstock (even when it really is), as Joseph McCarthy would learn to his horror more than 20 years later in his censure vote. Two days after the kind of performance that led Time Magazine to label the senator “Tom-Tom” Heflin, his former colleagues tossed out his claim and with it, his last chance for a political resurrection.

In Finian’s Rainbow, Senator Rawkins is magically transformed, by the wish of a leprechaun, into a black man, and suffers enough for his pains that he becomes a civil-rights advocate. Al Smith, had he been alive, might have chuckled at the transformation, as would “Cotton Tom’s” 1908 shooting victim.