The Last Public Execution in America

by Perry T. Ryan

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CHAPTER 16

BETHEA'S NEW ATTORNEYS

During his stay in the Jefferson County Jail, Rainey Bethea encountered five young black lawyers who proved to be invaluable friends. They committed themselves to save his life, without pay, as an ethical duty to an impoverished black man. Bethea was returned to the Jefferson County Jail in Louisville on June 21. Two black lawyers began to work on his appeal, Charles Ewbank Tucker and Stephen A. Burnley. Later, three other black lawyers, Charles W. Anderson, Jr., Harry E. Bonaparte, and R. Everett Ray, joined the fight to save Bethea's life. These attorneys appear to have been very accomplished individuals, especially for black men who lived in the 1930's.

Charles Ewbank Tucker, an accomplished attorney who was also a minister, befriended Bethea and sought to help him in his quest to avoid the death penalty. It appears appropriate to provide some discussion of this very renowned Louisville lawyer, who sought justice for many poverty-stricken blacks in Kentucky and elsewhere.

Tucker was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 12, 1898, the son of Rev. William H. and Olivia (Grey) Tucker. When he was only an infant, the Tucker family moved to Jamaica, where his father was a clergyman of the Jamaica Branch of the English Baptist Union.

His father was a justice of the peace but was not trained as a lawyer. Prior to studying law, Charles attended Beckford and Smith's College in Jamaica, graduating in 1913. Tucker acquired a slight Jamaican accent while he lived there, which he retained throughout his life. Tucker was ordained into the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in 1915. He continued his education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a private men's college, completing his education there in 1917. He then entered Temple University, in Philadelphia in 1919.

Tucker read law under the Honorable Charles Gogg at Point Pleasant, Virginia. He pastored various churches before coming to Louisville, including some in Pennsylvania; Montgomery, Alabama; Sharon, Mississippi; one Mount Zion church in Augusta, Georgia; and one in Key West, Florida.

His first church in Louisville was the Stoner Memorial A.M.E. Zion church at the corner of Twelfth and Oak Streets.

Tucker was living at 1527 South 12th Street in Louisville when he successfully completed the Kentucky Bar Examination. On November 29, 1929, the Kentucky Board of Examiners on Admission to the Practice of the Profession of Attorney and Counselor at Law filed its report with the Kentucky Court of Appeals, recommending that Tucker be admitted to the bar. The court approved the recommendation and admitted Tucker.

Tucker loved to gamble on race horses, and he enjoyed drinking scotch occasionally. He was known as quite a gentleman, who had an intense feeling for the underdog. He was an individual who respected law and order but believed it should be evenhandedly administered. An intellectual, he read anything he could get his hands on. He sometimes read five daily newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Herald-Examiner and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Despite the general appearance of being an extrovert, he was really a very private individual. He had a horrible temper which would subside as quickly as it arose. He could not stay angry with people, and he would not carry a grudge.

As a criminal lawyer, Tucker practiced mostly in the Louisville Police Court and sometimes in the Jefferson Circuit Court. He loved to tackle criminal cases in which blacks were the defendants, apparently indignant at the prejudicial manner in which blacks were often treated in Kentucky at the time. His name appears on several Kentucky appellate cases as counsel for blacks who appealed death sentences.

At the time of the Bethea trial, Tucker resided at 1228 West Jefferson Street in Louisville.

He served as the presiding elder in Philadelphia and Baltimore and attended conferences in Kentucky and the conference of the A.M.E. Zion church. He was elected bishop of this organization on May 13, 1956, while he was serving as the presiding elder of the Indiana conference. He ceased practicing law when he was elected a bishop in 1956.

Tucker was not without his own personal troubles. As a civil rights activist, he had little tolerance for fellow blacks whom he felt were inhibiting progress for equal rights. One such incident is exemplified by the events which occurred in December of 1961, when Tucker attended a national convention of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity at the Sheraton Hotel in Louisville, apparently to protest the fraternity's admission policies. Tucker was asked to leave, and when he refused, Robert Kilgore, a black Louisville policeman, who was a member of the fraternity, escorted Tucker out of the building. Within a few days, Tucker distributed about 2,000 copies of a handbill which criticized Kilgore as being a person of limited training and no culture and describing him as a "professional moocher."

Kilgore sued Tucker for libel in the Common Pleas Branch of the Jefferson Circuit Court and won a judgment against him for $3,000 compensatory and $1,500 punitive damages. While Tucker counterclaimed against Kilgore for assault and battery, the jury found for Kilgore on the libel suit and found against Tucker on his counterclaim. Tucker appealed the judgment to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and that court affirmed the judgment of the lower court on October 9, 1964. The published decision can be found at Tucker v. Kilgore, Ky., 388 S.W.2d 112 (1965).

Tucker's own son, Neville M. Tucker, became a lawyer who later served as a judge in the Louisville Police Court.

Tucker was invited by President Richard M. Nixon to give the invocation at his inauguration on January 20, 1969. Tucker was a die-hard Republican. The invitation to give the inaugural invocation came about because he wrote a letter to Reader's Digest, which was published about 1967 or 1968, which impressed some Nixon political supporters. Some native Louisvillians used their influence to obtain the invitation. Tucker flew to Washington and participated in this event while it was broadcast on international television.

In his final years, Tucker became a diabetic and, late in 1975, was admitted to Jewish Hospital in Louisville. Poor circulation caused gangrene to develop in one of his legs, and surgeons were forced to amputate the limb. This procedure ultimately proved to be unsuccessful, and Tucker died of cardiac arrest at the hospital on Christmas Day of 1975. He was survived by his wife, Amelia Tucker, his son, Neville, and his daughter, Olivia. At the time, he resided at 1715 West Ormsby Street in Louisville. The body was cremated at the Louisville Crematory on December 30, 1975.

Neville M. Tucker later moved to California. Amelia later moved to California to be near her son. She died in February of 1987, in Los Angeles.

Tucker's daughter, Olivia Bernice, moved to Orange County, California. She was married and divorced from a man named Clement. She now owns a group of retirement homes in California.

Charles William Anderson, Jr., another of Bethea's new attorneys, was one of the most powerful black men in the South. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 26, 1907, the son of Dr. Charles W. and Tabitha L. (Murphy) Anderson. His father was a respected physician, and his mother was a well-known school teacher. He was educated at Kentucky State College, in Frankfort, from 1921 to 1925, but received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, in 1927. He later attended Howard University School of Law in Washington, D. C., where he graduated in 1930.

He was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1932.

At the time of the Bethea trial and hanging, Anderson was a partner in the law firm of Anderson, Thomas & Walker, located at 614 West Walnut Street in Louisville.

Perhaps most significant in Charles Anderson's career is that he was the first black man to ever serve in Kentucky's House of Representatives. Taking his oath of office in January of 1936, only six months before Bethea's trial, he served five consecutive terms in the legislature, until January of 1946. He was the first black legislator in the South since the Reconstruction Era. As a legislator, Anderson fought for equal funding of schools for blacks and sought other measures to bring about racial equality.

He received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Wilberforce in 1936. The Bethea proceedings left a lasting sense of unfairness and cruelty on Charles Anderson. As a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, he promoted Senate Bill 69 of 1938, in which the Kentucky General Assembly repealed the portion of Section 1137 requiring hanging for the crime of rape. The new law, which became effective on May 30, 1938, was identical to the law which had been enacted in 1910.

In 1946, Anderson resigned his seat in the Kentucky House of Representatives in order to become Jefferson County's first black Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney, a position he held until 1952. On August 21, 1959, President Eisenhower named him an alternate United States Delegate to the General Assembly of the United Nations. He died at the age of fifty-three on June 14, 1960, when a train struck his car on Old Christianburg Road, about a mile northwest of Bagdad, in Shelby County.

Stephen A. Burnley was born June 6, 1898, in Hartsville, Tennessee, the son of Alex and Betty (Talley) Burnley. He graduated from Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1920. In 1922, he received his law degree from Walden College of Law, and in 1931, he was admitted to the Kentucky Bar Association. Moving to Louisville, he worked as an associate in the law firm of Anderson, Thomas & Walker. He resided at 1118 Wilson Avenue.

Burnley became an active member in the Stoner Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church, pastored by Charles Ewbank Tucker, located at the corner of Twelfth and Oak Streets in Louisville. Later, he served as a trustee for the church and became the attorney for the Kentucky Conference of the A.M.E. Zion Church as well as the director emeritus of the Adult Education Department of the Conference.

Actively involved in the community, he was a member of the Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, a grand chancellor and general counsel for the Knights of Pythias, and president of the Pythian Dependent Widows and Orphans Aid.

Burnley lived at 3507 Grand Avenue in Louisville. He died at Medicenter in Louisville on March 5, 1975, and is buried in the Louisville Cemetery.

R. Everett Ray was born in 1896. He graduated from college in 1928 from Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts, and later attended law school.

At the time of the Bethea trial, he made his office at 422 South Sixth Street in Louisville.

Somewhat elusive, almost no information is available about Harry E. Bonaparte. The 1936 Roll of Members of the Kentucky Bar lists him as a member, and he was admitted to practice before the Kentucky Court of Appeals on May 22, 1936. However, the 1936 Louisville Directory does not list him as a resident of Louisville. According to the records of the Office of Vital Statistics in Frankfort, Kentucky, no person named "Bonaparte" died in Kentucky between 1911 and 1988.