The parade name is taken from a fictional character, “Bud Billiken,” whose column “Bud says” appeared in the Chicago Defender newspaper, penned by several writers.

Over the last 20 years, the parade has become more of a citywide event, even though it’s still staged on the South Side. Corporate sponsors and politicians dominate, many of them responsible themselves for the terrible state of public education in the city.

While this may be annoying, there is a hidden aspect of the parade that would surprise many–that the first Bud Billiken was African American novelist Willard Motley. Many parade participants and spectators would be even more surprised to learn that the Chicago-born and -raised Motley was a militant fighter for civil rights and active campaigner in one of the most controversial criminal defense cases in Chicago’s history.

Most people walking Chicago’s streets today wouldn’t recognize Motley’s name–even though, according to literary historian Alan Wald, he “was in all likelihood the most prolific novelist associated with the concluding years of the Black Chicago Renaissance.”

Born in 1909 and raised in Englewood on the South Side of Chicago, Motley aspired from a young age to be a writer. As a teen, he wrote a children’s column, using the pseudonym “Bud Billiken,” in the Chicago Defender for a little over a year between December 1922 and January 1924.

Motley had an adventurous spirit, and soon after he graduated in 1929, he began a series of cross-country trips that netted him a small income as a travel writer. Many of the people he met on his travels provided raw material for his later novels. It’s also important to recognize that Motley, according to friends and supporters, was gay–though not openly so, since this was a time when being Black and gay could have lethal consequences.

By the late 1930s, Motley was back in Chicago and lived in the Maxwell Street neighborhood around 14th and Union Streets, one the few multi-ethnic and multiracial neighborhoods in the city at the time. He helped launch Hull House Magazine in 1939, and the next year, he started working for the Federal Writers Project of the Works Project Administration, the New Deal era program that supported writers during the Great Depression.

With the approach of the Second World War, Motley began to take militant positions on political issues that would be characteristic for the rest of his life. “When the Selective Training and Service Act was passed in 1940, Motley declared that he would not serve in the segregated military,” according to Wald. He filed for and received a conscientious objector status from the U.S. military.

While working as a lab technician, Motley spent the war years researching and writing what became his best-known novel Knock on Any Door. It quickly became a bestseller in 1947, selling over 47,000 copies in its first three weeks on the market and 350,000 over the next two years, and it was made into a popular 1949 film starring Humphrey Bogart.

The novel tells the story of Nick Romano, a street tough who kills a cop and is sentenced to death. Motley sees that Romano’s tragic life is shaped by the poverty, bigotry and despair of his upbringing. He portrays Romano as a sympathetic character, and Motley’s opposition to the death penalty is clear and eloquent at the climax of the story.

Motley, like the much better known Chicagoan Richard Wright, used his success to support causes for social justice. Soon after Knock on Any Door became a bestseller, he became an active member of the campaign to save James Hickman from the electric chair.

James Hickman was an African American father of seven who shot and killed his landlord David Coleman in July 1947. Coleman, who was also African American, had made repeated threats to burn the tenants out of the building he leased at 1733 W. Washburne in Chicago. Coleman’s tenants resisted his efforts to cut these tiny, shabby so-called “apartments” into even smaller ones.

Coleman apparently made good on his threats. Near midnight on January 16, 1947, A fire consumed the Hickmans’ apartment, while James Hickman was working the night shift. Panic overwhelmed the family as they scrambled to escape the inferno. With only one stairwell, which was blocked by fire, and no fire escape, the only way out was through the one window in their apartment, and straight down three stories to the ground. Neighbors piled blankets on the ground below to break their fall.

James’s wife Annie and his son Willis would survive the fire and the leap to the ground, but four of his children were found dead underneath the bed. The artist Ben Shahn would later immortalize this scene and the entire Hickman story in a series of illustrations in Harper’s in 1948.

Hickman returned home the following morning to find his family gone. He later recounted to the respected Chicago journalist (and future U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic) John Bartlow Martin that a neighbor approached him and broke the tragic news: “He said, ‘Mr. Hickman, I hate to tell you this, four of your children is burnt to death.’ And I weakened to the ground.”

Hickman found his family, buried his children, moved into a new apartment and returned to work. The Chicago police didn’t seriously investigate the case, despite testimony at the coroner’s inquest of the deadly threats made by Coleman. Coleman would later be fined only a few hundred dollars for a housing code violation–small consolation for the Hickman family.

During the next six months, James’s wife and surviving son became increasingly worried about his mental stability. James suffered terrible mood swings and near breakdowns.

On July 16, he picked up a gun and went to confront Coleman at his home on the South Side. He found Coleman sitting in a car outside his house and accused him of setting the fire. Hickman later claimed that Coleman admitted it. Hickman raised his pistol and shot him four times. Coleman was mortally wounded and died three days later.

Hickman went home, and was arrested without resistance and confessed to the shooting of David Coleman. The State’s Attorney offices for Cook County (where Chicago is located) announced that they would charge Hickman with murder and seek the death penalty.

A defense campaign was organized to support Hickman by members of the Chicago branch of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and leading labor activists in the city. They argued that the real cause of the death of David Coleman was the racist housing policies of the real estate companies and property owners that confined African-Americans to housing in the South Side ghetto and tiny enclaves in the rest of city. If James Hickman and his family had been allowed to live wherever they chose, none of this would have happened.

Motley threw himself wholeheartedly into the Hickman defense campaign. His involvement opened many doors for supporters of Hickman. But one door that Motley couldn’t open was to the daily Chicago Sun newspaper, one of the largest papers in the city.

Motley met Hickman in prison and wrote an eloquent appeal that the defense committee attempted to publish in the Sun. But Sun’s owner, Marshall Field, heir to the Field family fortune and a well-known liberal, refused to print Motley’s appeal, even though the defense committee was prepared to pay for the space. Motley publicly attacked Field for his hypocrisy, as one of those “rich liberals…who talk out of both sides of their mouths.”

The defense committee had Motley’s appeal circulated to many of the largest Black newspapers in the country, including the Chicago Daily Defender. Motley didn’t hold back his feelings about the case when he wrote of visiting Hickman:

You have seen many pictures of men who have killed. You have seen the photographs of the returned soldier. Perhaps next door lives a boy who killed some other boy during the war. In the war, millions of men killed other millions of men because they believed they were a threat to their homes, their wives, their children. This threat was thousands of miles from home. These were strangers killed, with whom there had been no personal contact.

James Hickman killed the man who had threatened his wife and children with a death more horrible than the Nazi gas chambers. And carried it out. This is what I was thinking of as I sat talking to Hickman today. Hickman needs help. There are three children left who need him. A wife who needs him. Will you help us help him?

Hickman’s trial lasted nine days in November 1947 and ended with a hung jury. The following January, the State’s Attorney’s office announced it wouldn’t seek to retry Hickman because of the public outcry surrounding the case. Samuel Freedman, the assistant State’s Attorney who prosecuted Hickman, belatedly concluded, “The state feels this man has paid enough with the loss of his children.”

Soon after the victory in the Hickman case, Motley continued to take militant positions in an increasingly hostile political environment. He supported the 1948 Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace for president. Wallace had been Roosevelt’s vice president during the Second World War, and he pledged, if elected, that he would continue the reforms of the New Deal, support civil rights, and pursue peace, not conflict, with Russia.

Wallace’s presidential campaign was largely supported by the American Communist Party and was subjected to intense red-baiting through out the campaign. He would only garner 1 million votes in the election.

The following year, Motley became a public supporter of Jimmy Kutcher, a member of the Socialist Workers Party who was fired as a “subversive” from his job as a clerk in the Veterans Administration–though he didn’t play the high-profile role in the Kutcher campaign that he did in the Hickman case.

Kutcher was a veteran who fought in some of the toughest battles in the early days of American involvement in the Second World War. His legs were irreparably mauled by artillery fire during the Italian campaign and were amputated later. He walked with prosthetics for the rest of life. It took a decade for Kutcher to win his job. Kutcher’s story is recounted in his book The Case of the Legless Veteran.

In 1949, Motley also publicly supported the campaign to free 12 leaders of the Communist Party who were indicted under the repressive Smith Act. They were convicted and spent many years in prison. Henry Winston, the one Black defendant, went blind from lack of medical treatment in federal prison, and wasn’t released until 1961.

Motley left the U.S. in the early 1950s to live in Mexico. He died there in 1965. Since his death, Motley has all but been forgotten, except by a handful of scholars. Chicago is a city that claims to be proud of its history–yet the story of Willard Motley/Bud Billiken is another one of the many examples of how people deemed “unacceptable” or “inconvenient” to the political establishment are thrown to the wayside. This is an unnecessary tragedy. Motley’s papers, including hundreds of unpublished items, are archived at Northern Illinois University, just a short drive from Chicago.

The Bud Billiken parade organizers should put aside space and time to highlight the life and work of Willard Motley on parade day. Hopefully, when young people finish marching and get back to school this fall, they will have teachers who can tell them about the man who really was Bud Billiken.

Thanks to Alan Wald for his help in writing this article.

Panic ensued. The one hallway leading out of their attic apartment was engulfed in flames. Charles, Annie and James’ 19-year-old son, made a daring leap through the wall of fire and escaped, but the rest of the family was trapped. The only way out of the inferno was through the window; there were no fire escapes. Annie made it down to the second floor windowsill with the help of another son, Willis. The crowd below placed a pile of blankets on the ground to cushion her fall and told Annie, dangling for her life, to let go. She hit the pile and survived. Willis also jumped and survived. The fire, described by one Chicago firefighter as a “holocaust,” killed four of the Hickman children. They were found underneath the bed with Leslie (14), shielding the bodies of his younger siblings Elvena (9), Sylvester (7), and Velvena (3).

Hickman returned home the following morning to find his building gutted and his family gone. He recounted later that a neighbor approached him and broke the tragic news. “He said, ‘Mr. Hickman, I hate to tell you this, four of your children is burnt to death.’ And I weakened to the ground.” Even though he was distraught and wracked with pain, Hickman remembered a threat made by his landlord to burn out the tenants out of his building if they didn’t move out.

Hickman found his family, buried his children, moved into a new apartment, and returned to work. But justice eluded him. “Paper was made to burn, coal and rags. Not people. People wasn’t made to burn, ” he told his son. The police didn’t seriously investigate the case. Coleman, his landlord, was a free man. Over the next six months, Hickman became increasingly depressed and frustrated. His family worried about his mental stability. On July 16, he picked up his .32 caliber pistol and went to confront Coleman at his home on the Southside of Chicago. He found Coleman sitting in car outside his house and accused him of setting the fire. Hickman later claimed that Coleman admitted it. Hickman, a deeply religious man, raised his pistol, looked Coleman straight in the eye and said, “God is my secret judge,” and shot him four times. Coleman died three days later.

Police arrested James Hickman at his home and charged him with murder. State prosecutors sought the death penalty. The Hickman family saga could have ended with another tragedy with James facing life in prison or execution by the State of Illinois. But a small group of revolutionary socialists in Chicago, members of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP), took the lead in putting together a vibrant community based campaign that ultimately resulted in James Hickman going free. How did they accomplish this?

Jim Crow Chicago Style

James Hickman, like many African Americans during and immediately following the Second World War, came to Chicago to escape the grinding poverty of life in the rural Deep South. Hickman was born on February 19, 1907 near Louisville, Mississippi. His parents were sharecroppers and at ten years old he went to work in the fields. When James was sixteen years old he married Annie, who was to be his wife for the rest of his life. They had nine children together. His first goal after arriving in Chicago was to find a decent paying job to support his large family. He eventually found one at International Harvester’s Wisconsin Steel plant near the Indiana border. But finding decent housing for his family was another story.

Hickman searched for housing in Chicago when the overwhelmingly bulk of the city’s growing African-American population was still confined to a narrow sliver of land on the Southside of the city starting at what was then called 22nd Street (now called Cermak) and stretching to 62nd Street between Wentworth and Cottage Grove Avenues. More than 60,000 black workers came to Chicago from 1940 to 1944 seeking employment in war-related industries. This migration to Chicago continued after the war. “Between 1940 and 1950 Chicago’s black population swelled by 214, 534,” according to Chicago housing historian Arnold Hirsch, bringing it up to a total of 492, 265. The boundaries of the ghetto were walled off by restrictive “covenants”—deals between white homeowners and larger institutions, which stipulated that that only whites could buy homes in certain defined areas.

In 1927, the Chicago Real Estate Board began promoting racially restrictive covenants to YMCAs, churches, women’s clubs, the many chambers of commerce and property owners’ associations as a way of “protecting” the value of their property from incoming black families. This racist housing policy was backed by the city and by the policies of the federal government. It is believed that by the mid-1940s as much as 80 percent of Chicago’s residential housing was covered by restrictive covenants of one kind or another. The Supreme Court in 1948 ruled that restrictive covenants were unconstitutional, the year following the Hickman case, though little would change for many years.

The available housing for Blacks in Chicago was confined almost entirely to the South Side ghetto, leading to massive overcrowding. A small enclave of Blacks was beginning to grow on the West Side of the city, but it was plagued by the same problems that residents struggled with in the South Side ghetto. In many cases, black landlords were as guilty as white landlords of making money hand-over-fist by cutting up apartments into smaller and smaller units called “kitchenettes.” The cute sounding word really meant a dilapidated one-room apartment. According to Hirsch, “The Chicago Community Inventory estimated that there were at least 80,000 such ‘conversions’ between 1940 and 1950.” Nicholas Lemann, in history of the black migration to Chicago, The Promised Land, vividly describes the kitchenettes as “rickety three-story tenemen…with heating, plumbing, and insulation that were rudimentary at best and often completely non-functional.” Yet, there was little to no options for black families seeking shelter. The housing crunch for blacks was made worse by returning veterans. Blacks faced white violence when they tried to move into predominately white communities. This is how Jim Crow worked in Chicago. This is also how James Hickman met David Coleman.

A dangerous man

David Coleman was also from the South and came to Chicago in 1943 with ambitions to be a businessman. Coleman met a woman in July 1946 with a building to sell at 1733 West Washburne, on the West Side of Chicago; he leased it from her shortly thereafter. In effect, he had day-to-day control of the property and he collected the rents.

In the middle of August 1946, Hickman heard that an apartment was available at Coleman’s building, which was subdivided into Kitchenettes. Coleman first showed him the basement apartment for $50 a month. Hickman later told journalist John Bartlow Martin, “The water was half a leg deep in the basement…no windows, no lights, no nothing in there.” Hickman declined the basement “apartment” but Coleman quickly offered him an attic apartment for $6 a week until the space on the second floor became free. “We walked up the stairs, it so dark,” Hickman later testified, “we almost had to feel our way…I am walking around looking at it, I don’t like this. She [Annie] said, I don’t nether but surely we can stay here because we ain’t got no place.” It was a small attic that adults could barely stand-up in, and there was no electricity, no gas, and only one window. But they needed shelter for their seven children. So, despite their reservations the Hickman’s told Coleman that they would take the attic “apartment” with the expectation that the second floor apartment would be theirs soon. They gave Coleman one hundred dollars as a down payment.

Days turned to weeks and still there was no word from Coleman on the promised apartment. Finally, Hickman confronted Coleman in mid-September 1946 and demanded back his $100 deposit so he could look for another place. Coleman refused. “I won’t pay you until I get ready,” Coleman barked at Hickman. In return Hickman said he would take him to court. Hickman recalled that Coleman threatened to burn him out. “He said he had a man on the East Side ready to burn the place up if…I had him arrested.” The Hickmans swore out a warrant for Coleman’s arrest but the police didn’t arrest him.

This wasn’t the first time that Coleman threatened to burn his building. The previous fall, tenants in Coleman’s building stopped contractors (who showed up with no notice) from further cutting up their apartments into smaller units. Coleman appeared at the scene and tenants told him that he would have to go to court to evict them. He declared, “I am the owner, I don’t have to go to Court to do that, I will get everybody out of here when I want if it takes fire.”

Coleman was clearly a dangerous man, but the city authorities did nothing. In fact, the coroner’s jury that heard testimony concerning the death of the Hickman children could not decide if the fire was accidental or deliberate, and recommended that the State’s Attorney initiate an investigation into it. No serious investigation was done. In the end, Coleman was fined by the city authorities for a series of safety and health violations—totaling $450—the equivalent of $112.50 a piece for each of the dead Hickman children.

“We got there first”

Soon after Hickman shot and mortally wounded Coleman, he returned home and waited for the police to arrest him. He offered no resistance and confessed to what would soon be the murder of David Coleman. While in jail Hickman was interviewed by a two of the most important newspapers in Chicago, the Chicago Daily Defender, the leading Black newspaper in Chicago, and the Chicago Daily Tribune. But by far the best piece of journalism on Hickman was written by Robert Birchman for The Militant, the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Worker’s Party, who laid out the case. “The story of Hickman is the story of negligence and callous disregard of housing and health conditions. It is the story of the horrible slums in which the Negro people are forced to live in dilapidated, disease-ridden firetraps,” declared Birchman. “It is the most tragic of many calamities in which 22 persons have lost their lives, many others suffered injuries and hundreds made homeless as a result of fires in Chicago’s Negro ghettos since the first of the year.” Shortly after Birchman’s interview with Hickman, M.J. Myer, a Chicago labor attorney and co-counsel in the (historically important but largely forgotten) Minneapolis sedition trial of American Trotskyists in 1941, became lead counsel for Hickman. Myer released a statement shortly after the coroner’s inquest into Coleman’s death, that read in part, “In Hickman’s mind all evidence pointed to Coleman’s responsibility for the burning to death of his four children This idea has obsessed him until it reached a point where he no longer could control himself.” Myer also announced that a defense committee was being formed on Hickman’s behalf. Two other attorneys joined Myer; Leon Despres, then a counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and soon to be a famous Chicago alderman, and William H. Temple, an African-American criminal defense attorney and a member of the Chicago NAACP executive board, giving Hickman an effective legal team. They all agreed to represent him without compensation.

How did the SWP get involved in the case so rapidly? They had 150 members in the greater Chicago area, whereas the Stalinist Communist party, by far the dominant group on the U.S. Left, had easily ten times that number, if not more. “We got there first, not the Communist Party, because our members were involved in the neighborhood in tenant rights,” longtime socialist Frank Fried, told me in a telephone interview. “They were members of the Westside Tenant’s Union.” Fried had just left the navy and was active in the liberal American Veterans Committee; he would become a leader of the SWP-initiated Hickman Defense Committee.

Immediately following the fire, the tenants in Coleman’s building organized themselves into the Chicago Area Tenants Union, which members of the SWP were actively involved in. The driving force behind the tenants’ union was the Chicago SWP organizer, Milt Zaslow (who went by the public name of Mike Bartell) and his partner Edith. “The tenants’ rights organization that began in the building where Milt, Edith and their son lived,” wrote Karin Baker and Patrick Quinn in 1997 obituary of Zaslow/Bartell. “The group pushed for improved living conditions, among other demands. At one time a renters’ strike developed that involved thousands in the city of Chicago. The campaign got so big that people in distant neighborhoods were calling them, wanting to get involved.”

The SWP also benefited from the revival of civil rights activism following the end of the war. The Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), which was founded in 1941 at the University of Chicago and pioneered many of the tactics that became mainstays of the civil rights movement of 1950s and 60s, took the lead in the fight against Jim Crow in Chicago. “Chicago CORE, after a year of inactivity, was revived in the autumn of 1945 under the chairmanship of the black schoolteacher and NAACP leader, Gerald Bullock.
Finding few members interested in action, he dropped the chapter’s rigid selection procedures and made a broad appeals for new members to which the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) responded,” according to historians Meier and Rudwick. Gerald Bullock would later play an important part in the Hickman defense campaign. An SWP member became the editor of the local Chicago CORE-News. One of the most successful campaigns of CORE, involving SWP members, was the campaign to desegregate the aptly named White City Skating Rink in 1946. “Although it was located in the predominantly African-American part of the city, only whites were allowed in certain areas of the park, such as the roller rink. The SWP under Milt’s leadership was central in implementing a broad-based campaign that broke the color barrier at White City.” Frank Fried recalls, “Mike was an organizer’s organizer. He got up everyday and read the four daily newspapers, and look for things to get involved in.” The Hickman case was one of them. Leon DesPres deeply believed that, “but for Mike, James Hickman would have been convicted.”

“Will you help us?”

Working quickly, SWP activists put together a Hickman Defense Committee on August 8, 1947. The focus of it’s work was, according to Fried, was “to make it politically impossible in the eyes of the people of Chicago for the prosecutors to convict Hickman, to put as much pressure that could be mobilized on the city, and take the case national to pressure the state and the city.” The committee received support from the Chicago Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Industrial Union Council, the American Federation of Labor Building services employees union, the American Veterans Committee, and the Baptist Ministers Conference of Chicago. A public appeal for Hickman was signed by Willoughby Abner, first vice-president of the Chicago CIO Council and chair of the Hickman defense committee; Charles Chiakulous, president of the UAW-CIO Local 477; and Bernis Johnson, chair of the Westside NAACP Youth Council.

Abner was important to the defense campaign because of his stature as a leading black trade unionist in the UAW in the Chicago area. According to historian Nelson Lichtenstein, Abner “organized thousands during the war in several South Side foundries and small manufacturing facilities.” Sidney Lens, a local trade union official, who later become a nationally known historian and antiwar leader during the Vietnam War), also played a central role in Hickman’s defense campaign. “We put a collection can for donations, a petition and leaflets about Hickman in every store, bar or restaurant we could in the black neighborhoods in Chicago,” says Fried. “People gave generously. Everybody knew about Hickman. I think the prosecution was screwed from the beginning.”

Why was the Hickman cause so popular? The reasons were explained in an article written on the case for the journal Fourth International some time before Hickman’s trial. “Every so often a previously unknown individual suddenly attracts wide attention. There is usually a social reason for this. The story connected with the particular case epitomizes the plight of voiceless millions, focusing on the needs of one group and the crimes of another, bringing into the light of day the festering rottenness of class society…. Hickman’s story is the story of Jim Crow as it is practiced north of the Mason-Dixon line.” The tragedy of James Hickman personified the plight of Chicago’s black community.

Seeking to organize a large public display of support for James Hickman and his family, the defense campaign organized rallies at several churches across Chicago. The largest rally was held on September 28, 1947 at the Metropolitan Community Church on Chicago’s South Side. To build the rally, the campaign put up “hundreds of posters announcing the event,” canvassed the area with “two sound trucks,” and handed out “40,000 leaflets.” Over 1,200 people attended with the overwhelmingly African-American audience unanimously passing a resolution calling for Hickman’s release. The featured speaker at the rally was actress Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and was a member of a powerful Democratic Party family from Alabama. Her father had been speaker of the House of Representatives in the late 1930s, but she broke with her family over the conservatism of the Southern Democrats, particularly their virulent racism. Her involvement in the Hickman campaign was something of a “coup” for Sidney Lens. He recalled three decades later:

I was leaving my office on Dearborn Street one evening when I noticed her name on the marquis half a block away. She was starring in a new play. On the spur of the moment I went to the stage door and asked for her. To my surprise she knew about Hickman and was immensely sympathetic. When I asked her, however, to speak at the rally we planned at the Metropolitan Community Church, she shuddered as if I hit her with a blast of artic air. “Why, Mr. Lens, how can I make a speech?” It took a while to figure out that what she meant was that while she was capable of reciting other people’s lines, she was incapable of constructing a speech on her own. I agreed therefore to write a speech for her, and a couple of days later she advised that “I read it to my secretary and made her cry. I’ll be happy to deliver it.”

Bankhead, according to Lens, “drew tears from the whole audience, a couple of thousand people” with a riveting speech:

It seems to me a shameful condemnation of our society that 2000 years after Christ, people are still herded together into Black ghettoes merely because of their skins have different pigmentations than other people. No one condones murder or any act of violence. I hope the day shall come soon when humanity can resolve not only its racial problems but all problems coolly and rationally; when emotional acts of violence—be they individual or national—can be eliminated. So long, however, as there exists anywhere on earth one minority that is treated with contempt, that is herded into Black slum areas, that is abused and insulted, so long will we have violence, hate, brutality, savagery. So long as there exists a Jewish problem, or a Mexican problem—or a problem of any minority—so long will one form of violence beget another. I am proud to be one of the humble gladiators in this struggle against narrow prejudice and stupidity. I am glad to lend my efforts so that there shall be no more James Hickman tragedies.

Other speakers that night included the best-selling African-American author Willard Motely, and Chicago packinghouse union official Philip Weightman. Hickman’s attorney M.J. Myer roared to the crowd, “It is not Hickman who should be on trial, but the inhuman landlords and real estate interests who sacrifice human lives for profit, for they are the real criminals. They are the people who should be put behind bars and kept there.” The Communist Party, which could have contributed significant resources to the Hickman campaign, refused to participate and stood outside the Hickman defense rally handing out a pamphlet, The Great Conspiracy by Alfred Kahn, attacking the SWP and repeating old slanders that Trotskyism and fascism were in league against the Soviet Union.

Motley, author of the 1947 best-selling novel Knock on Any Door, which was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart in 1949, played an incredibly important part in the Hickman defense campaign. He had a huge reputation at the time of the case. His book sold 47,000 copies during its first three weeks in print and a total of 350,000 during the next two years. His involvement opened many doors for supporters of Hickman. However, the one door that Motley could not open was to the Chicago Sun (soon to be the Sun-Times). The Chicago based author met Hickman in prison and wrote an eloquent appeal that the defense committee attempted to publish in the Chicago Sun, one of the largest circulating newspapers in the mid-west. The Sun’s owner Marshall Field, heir to the Field family fortune and a publicly identified liberal, refused to printed Motley’s appeal even after the defense committee was prepared to pay for the space. Motley publicly attacked Field for his hypocrisy. He is one of those “rich liberals…who talk out of both sides of their mouths.” The defense committee had Motley’s appeal circulated to many of the largest Black newspapers in the country including the Chicago Daily Defender. Motley didn’t hold back his feelings about the Hickman case:

You have seen many pictures of men who have killed. You have seen the photographs of the returned soldier. Perhaps next door lives a boy who killed some other boy during the war. In the war millions of men killed other millions of men because they believed they were a threat to their homes, their wives, their children. This threat was thousands of miles from home. These were strangers killed, with whom there had been no personal contact. James Hickman killed the man who had threatened his wife and children with a death more horrible than the Nazi gas chambers. And carried it out. This is what I was thinking of as I sat talking to Hickman today. Hickman needs help. There are three children left who need him. A wife who needs him. Will you help us help him?

“This man has paid enough”

The defense campaign scored a major victory when the State’s Attorney office announced on the eve of the trial that it was dropping its demand for the death penalty. This changed the whole atmosphere surrounding the trial. Leon Despres, co-counsel for Hickman, said that it made the trial “less edgy.” It was also a backhanded admission that the pressure of the defense campaign was working. James Hickman went on trial for the murder of David Coleman on November 5 before a white judge and an all-white jury in the Cook County Criminal Court building. The presiding judge was Rudolph Desort, the prosecutor was Assistant State’s Attorney Samuel Friedman, and M.J. Myer was the lead counsel for the defense. The prosecution presented a total of eight witnesses that included four policemen and Coleman’s half-brother, Percy Brown, who under cross-examination gave testimony that reportedly contradicted statements he had made earlier to the police.

M.J. Myer in his opening statements argued that Hickman was not guilty because he was “temporarily insane” at the time of the shooting of David Coleman. Myer placed the blame for the shooting of Coleman on the terrible living conditions in Coleman’s building and the death of the Hickman’s four children. Myer called witnesses that testified to Coleman’s previous threats to burn the tenants out of the building and James’ anguished state of mind following the fire and deaths. Two psychiatrists testified for the defense. Dr. Boris M. Ury interviewed Hickman, while he was incarcerated at Cook County Jail. Hickman spoke about the divinely inspired “mission” of his dead children’s lives. “I see the future in these four was destroyed. They would have been great people had they lived. I had a vision, but their lives was cut-off.” Dr. Ury’s report went on: “Client continued to discuss the grandiose ‘mission’ of his children: ‘The Lord had work for them to do. He had picked them out…’ Examiner [Ury] inquired whether this godly mission would be confined to work among the colored people but he was assured by his client that the mission would be applicable to all people.” Dr. Ury concluded his report by saying that Hickman shot Coleman “in a schizoid, disassociated state, feeling he was accomplishing the Lord’s will.”

Leon Despres considered James Hickman’s testimony in court “magnificent” and, at times, “poetic.” Hickman sat solemnly in the witness chair and wore a modest gray suit with a white flower in lapel, according to Chicago Daily News reporter John Culhane, who pieced together the courtroom scene from interviews with Leon Despres and access to his Despres’ case files for an article he wrote in the mid-1960s.

“This was God fixed this,” Hickman testified.

I had raised these children up and God knowed that vow I made to him…that these children was a generation to be raised up. God wasn’t pleased what happened to them….

I had two sons and two daughters who would some day be great men and women, some day they would have married, some day they would have been fathers and mothers of children. These children would have children and these children would children and another generation of Hickmans could raise up and enjoy peace.

The trial lasted nine days. On November 15, after nineteen hours of deliberation, the jury informed the judge that they couldn’t reach a decision. It was a classic “hung jury”—seven to five for acquittal. The State’s Attorney’s office initially declared that it would retry James Hickman the following January. But it soon reversed itself and announced that it was dropping the murder charge and recommending to the judge that Hickman be sentenced to two years probation if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He agreed and walked out of court a free man on December 16, 1947. Hickman had served a total of five months in jail. Samuel Friedman, the prosecuting attorney, said that one of the major reasons that his office didn’t want a retrial was the public support for Hickman from across the country as he held up letters of support for Hickman. “They are too numerous to read all of them here,” Freedman declared holding up a fistful of letters, resolutions and telegrams, “but the general opinion is to the effect that mercy ought to be shown to an individual who, under the stress of the loss of four children, has been punished to such an extent that society can be magnanimous and afford him a chance to return to his remaining children and his wife, and spend the rest of his lifetime in peace.” Though he admitted “some quarters” would disagree with his recommendation, Freedman concluded, “The state feels this man has paid enough with the loss of his children.”

“A chain of personal memories”

The Hickman family returned to the private lives after the trial. But within a year the case received it’s widest publicity (outside of Chicago) when Harper’s magazine commissioned renowned journalist John Bartlow Martin to write a story on the Hickman case. Martin’s writings would today be called “true crime,” but that would be a great disservice to them. They were neither lurid nor exploitative, as many true crime works are. Martin’s writing style combined the best techniques of a novelist and a journalist with the motivation of a socially conscious liberal. In his autobiography, written many decades after the Hickman case, he recounts how he approached writing the The Hickman Story:

In preparing to do the piece, I read Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and other books, but only for my own background information—I wrote the piece almost entirely from interviews, especially interviews with Hickman and his wife and with the landlord’s relatives, I simply told the story of Hickman’s and the landlord’s lives and their world—the world below.

The “world below” was one of racism and poverty that greeted Black refugees from the Deep South. “I wanted to do not an article, crammed with demographers’ statistics, but, rather, a story about a man. James Hickman had been a sharecropper in Mississippi. He was deeply religious and deeply devoted to his children.” Martin’s article is great writing and deserves to be read by everyone today committed to social justice.

But what lift’s the story from the page is the illustrations of the Hickman case by the great American artist, Ben Shahn. Shahn’s name is not one that many Americans would recognize, but millions have seen his work, particularly his drawings of the martyred Sacco & Vanzetti, and the three murdered civil rights activists, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Shahn’s drawings of the Hickman case that hung on the east wall of Leon Despres’ old law office caught the eye of reporter John Culhane, prompting him to write one of the few profiles of the case to appear in the decades that followed the trial. Shahn later wrote of his own struggle to capture the enormity of the Hickman family tragedy:

I was asked to make drawings for the story and, after several discussions with the writer, felt that I had gained enough of the feel of the situation to proceed. I examined a great deal of the factual visual material, and then I discarded all of it. It seemed to me the implications of this event transcended the immediate story; there was universality about man’s dread of fire, and his sufferings from fire. There was a universality in the pity which such a disaster invokes, had its overtones. And the relentless poverty which had pursued this man, and which dominated the story, had its own kind of universality.

Sometimes, if one is particularly satisfied with a piece of work which he has completed, he may say to himself, ‘well done,’ and go on to something else. Not in this instance, however. I found that I could not dismiss the event about which I had made drawings—the so-called “Hickman Story.”… I had some curious sense of responsibility about it, a sort of personal involvement.

The Hickman tragedy “aroused in me,” Shahn recalled, “a chain of personal memories.”

There were two great fires in my own childhood, one only colorful, the other disastrous and unforgettable. Of the first, I remember only that the Russian village in which my grandfather lived burned, and I was there. I remember the excitement, the flames breaking out everywhere…The other fire left its mark upon me and all my family, and left scars on my father’s hand and face, for he had clambered up a drainpipe and taken each of my brothers and sisters and me over the house one by one, burning himself painfully in the process. Meanwhile our house and all belongings were consumed, and my parents stricken beyond their power to recover.

The most powerful of all of Shahn’s Hickman drawings is the four huddled, deceased children. His “personal involvement” led him to use his own siblings as the basis for the drawing. “They resemble much more closely my own brothers and sisters.” John Bartlow Martin’s story and Ben Shahn’s drawings remain the most powerful documents from that era of the Hickman case. Unfortunately, the Hickman trial transcript disappeared many decades ago along with much of the paperwork related to Hickman’s legal defense. The Sidney Lens Papers at the Chicago Historical Society has some of the Hickman defense campaign literature, flyers and brochure—just enough to give you a feel for the campaign.

“Dismiss it in a sentence or two”

Despite all of this, one has to ask, how can such a powerful story disappear from the public memory? This is an amazing story, not only of rapacious greed and racism that led to an excruciatingly painful family tragedy, but also the triumph of justice over very long odds. It didn’t take place in some remote part of the country, but played itself out in Chicago, who’s crime-obsessed, tabloid press salivated over stories of much less interest. I think there were several things working against the Hickman case getting the recognition that it deserved. The case took place in 1947; over the next few years the death-grip of the Cold War would tighten around U.S. society. A virulent level of repression would drive socialist, communists and radicals of various allegiances to the very margins of American society. In many ways, the campaign to save James Hickman was one of the last echoes of the great radicalization of the American working class of the 1930s and 1940s. A successful political campaign to free an African-American man who shot and killed his landlord led by revolutionary socialists is not the type of story to be embraced during the height of the American Century. The Hickman case was simply steamrolled over by a decade and half of political repression and cultural conformity. This, however, is only a part of the answer.

The other part lies, I believe, in who writes the history of the American Left. By-and-large they were historians that were members of the Communist Party and the New Left of the 1960s, few of who have shown any interest or political sympathy for the revolutionary tradition of Marxism and the Russian Revolution in the form Trotskyism in this country in the 1930s and 1940s. “Trotskyism has been written out of the history of the American left,” notes veteran revolutionary socialist Joel Geier. There are notable exceptions, such as Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals or Bryan Palmer’s James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, but too often the most popular left-wing histories of the 1930s and 1940s simply dismiss, denigrate or out-rightly censure the role of Trotskyism in the radical movement.

One of the worst examples of this is Labor Untold Story by Boyer and Morais, published by the UE, one of the unions of the CIO era that was led by the CP. It strait-forwardly ignores the Trotskyist-led great Minneapolis Teamster strikes of 1934. It was the strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco that directly led to the formation of the CIO. This type of censorship may be extreme but not uncommon. This includes the 1941 trial of the Trotskyists of the SWP for “subversion” under the reactionary Smith Act that became the model for the trials that destroyed the CP after WWII. Yet, as Ellen Schrecker in her Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America notes, “There is little scholarship on the Trotskyist Smith Act case. While recognizing it implications for the later Smith Act cases, most writers tend to dismiss it in a sentence or two.” Instead of “dismissing it in a sentence or two,” it’s time that Trotskyism gets the proper recognition it deserves in American radical history.

There are many stories such as the Hickman case that need to be recovered from oblivion and retold. Last year Clint Eastwood’s film Changeling was released. Set in 1928 Los Angeles, it told the real-life story of Christine Collins and her search for the truth behind the kidnapping of her son and the mind-boggling public relations stunt by the LAPD, who sent her the wrong child and then attempted to shut her up when she refused to play along. It led to an explosion of public protest. The story disappeared from public memory for eight decades until screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, a former journalist, was contacted by an old source at Los Angeles City Hall, who told him that the city was planning to destroy some of its archives and that there was “something [Straczynski] should see.” This turned out to be a transcript of a city council hearing of Collins’ case. There are thousands of stories of injustice and struggle hidden away in the archives of city halls around the country. Hopefully, younger historians can bring to light the many of these stories before they are lost to history.

I want to extend a special thank you to two people, Frank Fried and Leon Despres. Frank first told me about the Hickman case at Joel Geier’s 70th birthday party, and Leon Despres (who passed away on May 7, 2009 at 101 years old) for allowing me to discuss the case with him at his Hyde Park residence. Patrick Quinn has been extremely helpful in tracking down important sources of information on the case and commenting on the first draft of this article. I also want to thank the Chicago Historical Society for allowing me access to the Sidney Lens papers, and the Library of Congress for access to the Hickman files in John Bartlow Martin’s papers. The librarians in charge of the Willard Motley papers at the Northeastern Illinois University were very helpful but I ended up referencing different material on Motley’s role in the Hickman case.