White v. Crook
White v. Crook (1966) was a legal case in which the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama found that the jury commissioners of Lowndes County had violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by racially discriminating against Black men in the jury selection process. The court also held that the Alabama state law excluding women from serving on juries violated the 14th Amendment. The case was prompted by the trial of Tom Coleman, who had murdered seminarian and activist Jonathan Myrick Daniels in August 1965. It also was the first of its kind in which a federal court found that the 14th Amendment prohibited sex and racial discrimination, connecting the civil rights and women's rights movements.
White v. Crook began to take shape in 1965 soon after the murder of Daniels, a student at Harvard Divinity School. He had traveled to Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march and stayed to lead activities for the Episcopal Society of Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU). He was later arrested with three other activists during a protest at a Whites-only store in Fort Deposit, Lowndes County. Upon their August 20 release from jail in Hayneville, the county seat, the four walked to a nearby convenience store to buy sodas. As the group approached the store, they were confronted and threatened by Coleman, a volunteer deputy sheriff and construction worker for the State Highway Department (present-day Alabama Department of Transportation). Coleman raised his shotgun and aimed at Ruby Sales, a young Black female activist, but Daniels dove in front of Sales and was instantly killed by the shot.
Upon hearing the news, Episcopal minister Rev. John B. Morris brought the case to the attention of American Civil Liberties Union attorney Charles Morgan Jr. Morris was the founder and first executive director of the ESCRU. In the years before this case, Morris actively participated in the Freedom Rides and organized clergy groups to participate in the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 protests in Selma, Dallas County. Morris and Morgan already knew each other from working close by in Atlanta. They feared that Coleman, like many before him, would be acquitted by a biased, all-White jury. Just months earlier, an all-White jury failed to reach a verdict in the trial of Ku Klux Klan member Collie Leroy Wilkins for the March 25 murder of Viola Liuzzo and the judge declared a mistrial. He was later acquitted by an all-White jury at another trial in October. Hoping to strike at the corrupt and persistent discrimination against Black Americans from jury duty, Morgan filed a suit in federal court on behalf of five Black potential jurors. The suit not only complained about the exclusion of Black men from jury service but also questioned the legitimacy of the exclusion of women from juries in Alabama.
At that time in Alabama, jury selection was controlled by a commission of three members, appointed by the governor, for each county. Alabama state law required the commissioners to place the names of all male citizens of good repute in the county on the jury roll. Alabama law required the commission to search registration lists, tax assessor lists, city directories, telephone directories, and other sources of information at least once a year to create the list of potential jurors. The Lowndes County Jury Commission made its list, however, by primarily using the county voting lists, which included no Black citizens prior to March 1965. In total, the commission only had seven Black men on the jury roll as a result of this practice and voter discrimination until the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year. Indeed, no Black men had ever served on a civil or criminal jury in Lowndes County, despite Blacks making up 80.7 percent of the total county population and 72 percent of the adult male population as of the 1960 Census. And women were completely barred from jury service through a state law. At that time, only two other states completely excluded women from jury service: Mississippi and South Carolina.
Morgan's attempt to delay the Coleman trial until the question of jury discrimination had been settled proved unsuccessful. In September, an all-White jury composed of Coleman's friends and acquaintances acquitted him for the murder of Daniels after 89 minutes of deliberation. He had much better success with the suit he brought before a federal court in 1966. The case was named for Gardenia White, who filed the suit with four other would-be jurors against Bruce Crook, a member of the Lowndes County Jury Commission, and others, including Mrs. Kelly Coleman, who was married to a cousin of Tom Coleman. The court agreed with his argument that the systematic and statutory exclusion of Blacks and women from jury service violated their equal-protection rights under the 14th Amendment. Fortunately for Morgan, two of the three judges on the panel, Richard T. Rives and Frank M. Johnson Jr. (the third was Clarence Allgood), had previously written decisions in support of the civil rights movement. In their decision, the court ordered Lowndes County jury commissioners to get rid of the current jury roll and create another one in accordance with state law. As for the law prohibiting women from jury service, the court found that the state legislature of Alabama would need time to create new legislation regarding women serving as jurors, which it did in 1967.
The state of Alabama did not appeal the ruling. Therefore, the Supreme Court never heard the case nor had the opportunity to link the civil and women's rights movement in Supreme Court jurisprudence.
