Nearly all these defendants were exercising a right their state permits to all persons accused of a capital offense. They had brought their families to sit with them in court. Many had their wives beside them, young women, for the most part very young women, in bright cotton and rayon dresses, their curled hair wild about them. A number of these women had brought their children with them; one had five scrambling over her. All the children were plump and comely, and though some were grimy, all of them were silent and miraculously court-broken. Mr. Hurd, though married and a father, was accompanied only by his own father, a thin and sharp-nosed man, his eyes censorious behind gold-rimmed spectacles, the whole of him blanched and shrivelled by austerity as by immersion in a caustic fluid. It was altogether plain that at any moment he and his son might become possessed by the idea that they were appointed God’s arm and instrument, and that their conception of God would render the consequence of this conviction far from reasonably bland.

It was said by the anti-lynching element in the town that the families had been brought into court to sit with the defendants in order to soften the hearts of the jurors. But certainly they liked to be there, and the defendants liked to have them there. It is quite untrue to imagine, as was often said, that the defendants were sure of being acquitted. They were extremely afraid of what might be coming to them, and so were their families. Several of the wives sat in close embrace with their husbands, shaken from time to time by the inimitable convulsions of distress. One pregnant girl in a green dress sat throughout the trial with an arm thrown about her young husband’s shoulder, rubbing her pudgy and honest and tear-stained face against his arm. Many of the men, including some who seemed to take no particular interest in their wives, obviously enjoyed playing with their children. One tall and dark young man with an intelligent face sat with his wife, who was dressed with noticeable good taste, and two pretty little daughters. During the recesses, he spread his legs wide apart, picked up one or the other of the little girls under her armpits, and swung her back and forth between his knees. He would look down on her with adoration as she gurgled with joy, but if she became too noisy, he would stop and set her down with a slight frown and a finger to his lips. It was the oddest gesture to see in this trial, in this place. Mr. Hurd’s father was also there out of profound concern for the person whom he loved, though he made no physical manifestation except for occasionally biting his lips and lowering his head. His part was to confirm his son’s title to rectitude, his inheritance of grace. It was so hot in the court that the women at the press table all wore fresh dresses every day and almost every man except the attorneys and officers of the court sat in their shirts. But Mr. Hurd’s father, from the beginning to the end of the case, wore a neat blue coat and a conservative tie. Most of the defendants and their relatives, but never Mr. Hurd or his father, chewed gum throughout the proceedings, and some chewed bubble gum. So, until the press made unfriendly comment, did two of the attorneys.

Behind the defendants and their families sat something under two hundred of such white citizens of Greenville as could find the time to attend the trial, which was held during working hours. Some were drawn from the men of the town who are too old or too sick to work, or who do not enjoy work and use the Court House as a club, sitting on the steps, chewing and smoking and looking down on Main Street through the hot, dancing air, when the weather is right for that, and going inside when it is better there. They were joined by a certain number of men and women who did not like the idea of people being taken out of jail and murdered, and by others who liked the idea quite well. None of these expressed their opinions very loudly. There were also a number of the defendants’ friends. Upstairs, in the deep gallery, sat about a hundred and fifty Negroes, under the care of two white bailiffs. Many of them, too, were court spectators by habit. It is said that very few members of the advanced group of colored people in the town were present. There were reasons, reticently guarded but strongly felt, that they did not want to make an issue of the case. They thought it best to sit back and let the white man settle whether or not he liked mob rule. But every day there went into court a number of colored men and women who were conspicuously handsome and fashionably dressed, and had resentment and the proud intention not to express it written all over them. They might be put down as Negroes who feel the humiliation of their race so deeply that they will not even join in the orthodox movements for its emancipation, because these are, to their raw sensitiveness, tainted with the assumption that Negroes have to behave like good children to win a favorable report from the white people. In the shadows of the balcony the dark faces of these people could not be seen. Their clothes sat there, worn by sullen space. The shoulders of a white coat drooped; a hat made of red roses tilted sidewise, far sidewise. The only Negroes who were clearly visible and bore a label were two young men who sat in the front row of the balcony every day, cheerful and dignified, with something more than spontaneous cheerfulness and dignity, manifestly on parade. They were newspapermen from two Northern Negro journals. They had started at the press table down in the front of the court, for the newspaper people there, Northern and Southern, national and local, had made no objection, and neither had the judge. But one of the defense attorneys said that it was as good as giving the case to him to have a nigger sitting at the press table along with white men and women, and this remark was repeated. Also, the local Negroes intimated that they would take it as a favor if the Northern Negroes went up into the gallery. So they took their seats up there, where, it may be remarked, it was quite impossible to get anything like a complete record of the proceedings. Then there was a very strong agitation to get them to come back to the press table. But that turned out to be inspired by the defense. Such was the complication of this case.

It was complicated even to the extent of not being a true lynching case, although the man taken from prison was a Negro and the men charged with killing him were white. Or, rather, it was not a pure lynching case. The taxi-drivers of Greenville are drawn from the type of men who drive taxis anywhere. They are people who dislike steady work in a store or a factory or an office, or have not the aptitude for it, have a certain degree of mechanic intelligence, have no desire to rise very far in the world, enjoy driving for its own sake, and are not afraid of the dangers that threaten those who are on the road at night. They are, in fact, tough guys, untainted by intellectualism, and their detachment from the stable life of the community around them gives them a clan spirit that degenerates at times into the gang spirit. The local conditions in Greenville encourage this clan spirit. In every big town, the dangers that threaten taxi-drivers as they go about their work are formidable and shameful to society, and they increase year by year. In Greenville, they are very formidable indeed. A great many people are likely to hire taxis, for there are relatively few automobiles in the region; two-thirds of the people who are likely to hire a Greenville taxi live in small communities or isolated homes; it is so hot for the greater part of the year that people prefer to drive by night. Hence the taxi-drivers spend a great part of their time making journeys out of town after dark. In consequence, a large number of taxi-drivers have during the last few years been robbed and assaulted, sometimes seriously, by their fares. The number of these crimes that has not been followed by any arrest is, apparently, great enough to make the taxi-drivers feel aggrieved. The failure to make an arrest has been especially marked in cases in which the assailants were supposedly Negroes, for the reason it is said, that Negroes are hard to identify. The taxi-drivers therefore had a resentment against fares who assaulted them, Negroes in general, and the police. In defense of the police, it is alleged that investigation of these crimes is made difficult because a certain number of them never happen at all. Taxi-drivers who have got into money troubles have been known to solve them by pretending that they have been robbed of their money by fares, whom they describe as Negroes in order to cash in on racial prejudice.