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Two cars collided at a busy Oklahoma City intersection on July 4, 1942, slamming into a gas station pump and igniting an inferno that killed four women — and exposed deep racial bias in the city’s justice system. Police dispatched multiple ambulances to the scene 2 ½ miles east of the State Capitol. Most belonged to funeral homes and were segregated by law at the time in Oklahoma. The two occupants of one car were burned so badly that police mistakenly had them loaded into a “Negro ambulance.” The bodies remained in the vehicle for more than an hour before they were identified as White women and moved to an ambulance from a White funeral home. The women were Eula Mae Sizemore, 37, and Velma Kerr, 31—the sister-in-law of Robert S. Kerr, who would become Oklahoma’s governor in 1943. The two remaining victims were a passenger in the other car, Grace Banks, 35, and the gas station owner’s wife, Ida Forewood. Mrs. Forewood was trapped when the couple’s living quarters behind the station caught fire. Within days, prosecutors charged the driver of the second car, Marshall LaDay, 28, with murder. Authorities accused him of drunken driving and said he failed to stop before entering the intersection. LaDay was Black. He went on trial in October of that year. Defense witnesses testified they didn’t smell alcohol on LaDay’s breath at the scene. They also said the car carrying the two White women caused the crash by speeding through the intersection. The judge declared a mistrial when the jury deadlocked. That same October, at a filling station on the city’s south side, a 6-year-old Black boy named Palmo Washington was doused with gasoline and set on fire. He spent weeks in a hospital recovering from burns.
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Above: Six-year-old Palmo Washington was hospitalized for weeks after a White man threw gasoline on him and set him on fire. (Photo by James Simpson, The Black Dispatch)
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The perpetrator, J. W. Pierce, was 18, White, and awaiting induction into the U.S. Navy. He confessed to police, saying the boy had been a nuisance at the gas station. Nevertheless, the county attorney allowed Pierce to leave
for his Navy assignment in San Diego, California. It took two weeks – and an outcry from The Black Dispatch, Oklahoma City’s Black newspaper – for the county attorney to ask the Navy to return Pierce to Oklahoma on a charge of assault with intent to kill. In an editorial, The Dispatch asked:
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Why should the county attorney’s office charge a man with murder in a case where there is copious evidence of an unavoidable accident, and release another man from prosecution who admits an act of depravity without any mitigating circumstance surrounding his confessed culpability?Another thought: What do you suppose would have happened in this city, and what would have been the action of the county attorney’s office, had an 18-year-old Negro youth thrown gasoline on, and set fire to, the garments of a six-year-old white youth?LaDay went on trial again in February 1943. The jury deadlocked once more. Prosecutors threatened to try him a third time – but never did. Pierce, meanwhile, was acquitted after a one-day trial in March. Reporting for this article is based on coverage from The Black Dispatch, The Daily Oklahoman, and Oklahoma City’s Daily Law Journal-Record, accessed via Newspapers.com. Additional genealogical details were confirmed through Ancestry.com.
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Madeline Confronts Her Own Prejudice
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Madeline Webb (above right) rubbed shoulders with George Raft, Errol Flynn, and many other Hollywood figures during a three-year period she spent in Los Angeles in the 1930s. But leaving her home state of Oklahoma also meant coming to terms with the racial prejudice she grew up with. Click here (8-minute read) for an abridged passage from the forthcoming true crime book Madeline Gets Life that illustrates an encounter with Black jazz violinist Stuff Smith (above left). Madeline spoke about the incident with a biographer in the mid-1970s. Click here to listen (4:45 minutes).
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Deer Creek DriveA Mississippi Murder and a Racial Reckoning
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Above: Ruth Dickins walks from the courthouse to jail in Greenville, Mississippi, on June 29, 1949, after a jury convicted her of murdering her mother with a pair of garden shears. Husband John Dickins (left) and defense attorney Ben Wilkes (right) accompany her. Mrs. Dickins said a Black intruder committed the crime. (Photo by Bobby Moulder, Jackson Clarion-Ledger)
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A gruesome scene greeted police when they entered Idella Thompson’s home on Deer Creek Drive in Leland, Mississippi, on a November day in 1948. Mrs. Thompson lay dead in her rear bathroom, stabbed more than 100 times with a pair of garden shears. Her adult daughter, Ruth Dickins, was there, drenched in her mother’s blood. Ruth told the officers she was attacked by a Black man – with a “thin face and thin lips” – just as she discovered the body. They fought and she grabbed the shears from him, she said, and he ran out the back door and disappeared. Beverly Lowry’s Deer Creek Drive takes a masterful look at white privilege in the Deep South of the 1940s and 1950s.
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Ruth Dickins belonged to a wealthy cotton-growing family in the Mississippi Delta. As Lowry notes, police and townsfolk were hardwired to take her story at face value because she was White. An armed posse rode through Black neighborhoods on horseback looking for a suspect. More than 100 Black men were interrogated. The search proved fruitless. Two months after the crime, Ruth was charged with first-degree murder – and allowed to live at home while awaiting trial. In June 1949, a jury convicted her and sentenced her to life in prison. But the socialite spent only six years in prison. A campaign by her husband persuaded Mississippi’s governor to suspend her sentence. Author Beverly Lowry grew up in the Mississippi Delta around the time of the killing. She did not know Ruth but weaves the experiences of her less-well-to-do family into the narrative. The book serves as a forceful commentary on race and privilege in America.
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This Month in True Crime Infamy
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Even as Oklahoma newspapers reported on distant battles, August 1943 brought headlines closer to home — tales of murder, jailbreaks, and despair. August 8 – Blaming the Victim Albert Clarence Bingham murdered his estranged wife, Mary, slashing her throat on a Tulsa street as their 10-year-old son looked on. Captured four days later, the 35-year-old painter blamed alcohol. But he also held Mary responsible. Bingham said he would have quit drinking and joined the church “if Mary had gone back with me.” He died in Oklahoma’s electric chair in May 1946.
August 9 – Alcatraz-bound Two teenage Choctaw Indian boys accused of murder overpowered two guards and escaped from a county jail in southern Oklahoma. Clarence Carnes, 16, and Cecil Berry, 18, were captured within a day. In December that year, they received life sentences for killing a gas station worker. Carnes made history two years later as the youngest prisoner ever sent to Alcatraz. He was 18. The next year, Carnes became the sole survivor of a group of inmates who staged a violent escape attempt. Carnes won parole in 1973 but returned to prison twice due to new offenses. He died in a federal prison hospital in Missouri in October 1988 at age 61. He is portrayed in two movies, Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story (1980), and Alcatraz (2018).
August 20 – Crime Boss Kills Man A pool hall argument involving a Tulsa bootlegger spilled onto a city street and turned deadly. Liquor kingpin Billy Mann told police he shot Jack Morris, 39, because Morris had struck him in the billiard parlor and, once outside, came at him with fists raised. Authorities charged Mann with murder, but a judge freed him, ruling he acted in self-defense. Morris was a known troublemaker who had been arrested several times for fighting and drinking. Mann was also a known criminal, having served two stretches in federal prison in the 1920s and 1930s for conspiracy and violating prohibition laws. He got out of the liquor business in 1950 and died six years later at age 61.
August 31 – Abortion Provider Accused of Murder Oklahoma City’s Lena Griffin Smith was charged with murder after a 21-year-old woman died from complications prosecutors linked to an abortion. Authorities accused Griffin Smith of operating an “abortion mill” for 15 years. Naomi Congdon died August 28 after 10 days in the hospital at the Naval Air Station in Norman, south of Oklahoma City. Griffin Smith was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The state parole board recommended freedom for her in 1950.
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Above: In July, I visited Riyadh (via Zoom) and talked with staff at the Saudi Broadcasting Authority about writing for TV and radio. Most were journalists, a few were technical folks. All were very sharp. Thanks to Michelle Schaner for organizing the seminar.
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