National

Attorney Feels Driven to Solve 1940 Slaying of NAACP Member

Published

11 years ago

June 22, 2015

In this June 10, 2015, photo, retired attorney Jim Emison sits in his home office in Alamo, Tenn. In 2012, Emison was researching a story he planned to write about a court case when he came across an online article about two lynchings in 1937 and 1940. The latter was about Elbert Williams, a charter member of the local NAACP branch. Williams was killed by unknown assailants on June 20, 1940, more than two decades before NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down by a Klansman outside his Jackson, Mississippi, home. Williams' slaying was never solved, but Emison hopes to change that. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

In this June 10, 2015, photo, retired attorney Jim Emison sits in his home office in Alamo, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Lucas L. Johnson II, ASSOCIATED PRESS

BROWNSVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The man in the black-and-white photograph on Jim Emison’s desk seems to look right into him, all but demanding to not be forgotten. Emison is doing his best to oblige.

The photo features a man named Elbert Williams and two dozen other charter members of the NAACP’s Brownsville branch, an audacious group of men and women who registered black voters in West Tennessee in the early days of the civil rights movement.

Williams would be dead the following year, killed by unknown assailants in Brownsville on June 20, 1940 — more than two decades before NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down by a Klansman outside his Jackson, Mississippi, home in 1963. Williams’ slaying was never solved, but Emison, a 71-year-old white, retired attorney, hopes to change that.

“We should do everything we can do to see who killed this man,” Emison said. “If there is anybody in a group that may have done it that’s still living, they need to be brought to justice.”

Three-quarters of a century after what some historians believe to be the first NAACP member killed for daring to speak up for civil rights, Emison has gotten federal authorities to take another look at it.

In the process, Emison just might make peace with a ghost from his own family’s past.

Emison’s obsession with Williams’ death grew more out of what he didn’t hear than what he did.

When he was a child, Emison sometimes heard his father, grandfather and uncle — all lawyers — talk about lynchings and other atrocities against African Americans. Once his uncle showed him a tree not far from Brownsville where he said a black man had been hanged.

Emison’s relatives seldom discussed the stories behind the crimes — doing so ran counter to a code of silence typical of small Southern towns. White people who knew about violent racist incidents usually didn’t share their secrets. Black people who had an inkling kept their mouths shut out of fear.

But Emison said the hanging bothered his father, and he talked to him about it.

His father’s uncle had been the Crockett County sheriff. Emison said a mob came to the jail one day in 1929 to seize and lynch an arrested man named Joseph Boxley, who had been accused of assaulting a woman. He said it’s unclear whether the mob forcibly took the man, or the sheriff willingly turned over the key. ButEmison said he’ll never forget his father saying he was afraid his uncle “did not act honorably that night,” words that have haunted Emison to this day.

“When it’s somebody that’s in your family, who may have been able to prevent it and didn’t, then that’s disturbing,” he said.

As a young boy growing up in the South, those conversations fostered a sense of outrage, a growing desire for justice that stayed with Emison during more than 40 years of trying cases in the Brownsville courthouse. Many of his clients were African American. Some of them he represented pro bono.

After all those years in the courthouse, Emison said he was shocked that he hadn’t heard about Williams’ case. And as he learned more, his anger only grew.

“It was just like he was discarded; valueless, worthless,” he said.

In 2012, Emison was researching a story he planned to write about a court case when he came across an online article about two lynchings in 1937 and 1940.

The latter was Williams’ killing. Emison ordered FBI and Department of Justice case files from the U.S. National Archives. To his surprise, officials there sent him un-redacted copies.

The records showed that Brownsville police, upset because the local NAACP branch was registering blacks to vote, had led an effort to force its members out of town. Then-U.S. Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge said in a letter to U.S. District Attorney William Clanahan that the “obvious purpose” of the police and others had been to “frighten the entire colored population of Brownsville and thus prevent qualified Negroes from exercising their franchise.”

Some of the members left town, but Williams stayed behind. When the police got a tip that he was planning an NAACP meeting at his home, a group of men led by police officer Tip Hunter went to his residence, said they needed to question him outside and then took him away. Williams’ body was found three days later in the nearby Hatchie River.

No autopsy was performed. A coroner’s jury ruled the body was “decomposed so badly we could not make thorough examination” and that the cause of death was believed to be by “foul means by persons unknown.”

Williams’ wife, Annie, and his father identified the body, and she soon moved to New York. Later, in an exclusive interview with the Amsterdam News, a black weekly in New York, Annie Williams said the local authorities had tried to prevent her from seeing her slain husband, and that “the coroner had already issued the order to have the body buried as soon as possible.”

“It was only because I insisted that they let me look at it. It was a terrible sight, but I recognized him. His head was swollen twice its normal size. There were two holes in his chest that looked like bullet holes, the skin on his arms, legs, buttocks was bruised and blistered. His arms and legs, I heard, had been tied with rope and his body weighted down by a heavy log tied around his neck.”

The Justice Department initially ordered the case presented to a federal grand jury, then mysteriously reversed itself and closed the case in early 1942. It did so in spite of evidence gathered by Thurgood Marshall, then special counsel to the NAACP, who went on to become the U.S. Supreme Court’s first African-American justice in 1967.

Emison wants the case reopened and Williams’ body exhumed, despite some resistance from a few people in the community, including one who told him “the past ought to be left to die, and not resurrected.”

But Emison has ignored them. He’s spent hours interviewing Williams’ descendants, relatives of NAACP members from the branch and even family members of two police officers — both now deceased — who went to Williams’ home that night. Relatives of the officers declined interviews with The Associated Press.

Emison even has suspicions about the killers. He believes exhuming the body could lead to a murder weapon, considering Williams’ wife said she saw what looked like bullet holes in his chest. Emison recently turned his findings over to Justice Department officials who he said are giving Williams’ case serious consideration despite the department’s announcement last year that it will likely stop prosecuting civil rights-era murders that occurred in the South.

Williams’ slaying wasn’t among the cases the Justice Department re-examined in recent years, in part because it hadn’t resurfaced until Emison started pushing.

“I am optimistic that they will be interested in this one,” Emison said. “It’s older, but it is of great historic importance.”

Edward Stanton III, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee, told The Associated Press the department is reviewing materials from the case, but didn’t say when a decision will be made.

“We’re giving a strong look at the information provided,” Stanton said.

Leslie McGraw, Williams’ great-niece, called Emison’s efforts “validating.”

“It didn’t seem like anybody was really interested in seeking justice,” said McGraw, who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Cornell William Brooks, the NAACP’s national president, spoke at a memorial for Williams on Saturday in Brownsville that was attended by more than 500 people. Brooks flew in from Charleston, South Carolina, where just a few days earlier a white gunman killed nine people during a prayer meeting at a historic black church.

During his speech, Brooks called Williams “the first martyr of the NAACP,” and he said those people killed at the church are also martyrs who won’t be soon forgotten.

“These two things are important together,” Brooks said. “Because what it says to me is that no sacrifice should be forgotten; no sacrifice should ever disappear into the sands of time.”

Following the memorial service, a historical marker was unveiled in Williams’ honor and Emison hopes the renewed attention won’t end there.

Patricia Sullivan, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, wrote about Williams’ case in “Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.”

She said his death speaks to the courage required to keep up the fight for civil rights.

“It’s central to understanding what the struggle has been about, and is about,” Sullivan said. “When I look at someone like Elbert Williams … you see that people were willing to risk everything if they thought change was possible.”

When he ponders that photograph on his desk, Emison said he too thinks about the courage it took for the branch members, particularly Williams, to keep pushing to register blacks to vote — knowing they might die.

Emison said that spirit pushes him to solve Williams’ case.

“This is something that I can do for civil rights,” he said. “This is justice.”
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Listening as a Lifeline: A Doula’s Witness to Black Maternal Health

OAKLAND POST — Maternal mortality and pregnancy-related mortality use different time frames and methods and are not interchangeable. Finalized 2024 CDC data recorded 649 maternal deaths nationally. The overall rate was 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, but for non-Hispanic Black women it was 44.8, compared with 14.2 for White women and 12.1 for Hispanic women.

Published

2 days ago

October 4, 2026

Post News Group

By Antoinette Stewart-Eneh, Special to California Black Media Partners

Word Count: 1058

Note: Client A, B & C, names are withheld for privacy; these accounts reflect my recollections as their Doula.

Client A rocked her hips on a birthing ball, surrounded by pale wood and warm textiles in a softly lit Scandinavian-style office. I was her doula through a Southern California maternal health company combining nurse-led care, technology, and wraparound support.

She was a healthy Black woman in her thirties. Her baby girl was doing well; her partner took notes as we discussed labor and advocacy.

Then we turned to their chosen hospital. I knew it well—and remembered a phrase from another client’s experience: “Policy of Sovereignty.”

Client B had been told she needed a repeat cesarean as a precaution, though the reasoning was unclear. Her obstetrician, who performed her first cesarean two years earlier, had assured her throughout pregnancy that she was healthy, healed, and ready for a vaginal birth. We asked staff to review her chart, consult her obstetrician, and reconsider immediate surgery. Instead, they invoked the “Policy of Sovereignty.”

The physician on duty, we were told, had final authority, regardless of her established care plan. I asked whether an ultrasound or reassessing the baby’s position could offer clarity. Cesareans can be lifesaving. But were Client B’s history, informed consent, and circumstances guiding this decision—or was routine overriding individualized care? We kept asking for her obstetrician. Beneath every request was a deeper question: Was she being heard?

The Numbers Behind the Stories

Statistics arrive in clean columns. The experiences behind them do not.

Maternal mortality and pregnancy-related mortality use different time frames and methods and are not interchangeable. Finalized 2024 CDC data recorded 649 maternal deaths nationally. The overall rate was 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, but for non-Hispanic Black women it was 44.8, compared with 14.2 for White women and 12.1 for Hispanic women.

In California, Black birthing people experienced 56.5 pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births during 2020–2022—3.8 times the White rate and four times the Asian rate.

As a doula serving Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties, I see faces behind those numbers. I remember concerns raised softly, then firmly, then desperately. I am tired of watching Black families enter spaces meant to protect them, only to discover they must defend themselves while laboring, bleeding, trembling, or recovering.

Returning to Client A

Client A’s labor stretched nearly 48 hours. As her condition worsened, she, her partner, and I asked whether a cesarean should happen sooner. A provider questioned my place as a doula, then said she was next.

Six more hours passed.

She entered surgery visibly ill with a serious uterine infection, her baby malpositioned and stuck. Her partner later recalled the provider saying, “This baby would never have made it through the birth canal.”

Those words landed like a blow. Our urgency had been treated as ignorance. With Client B, we questioned why surgery was inevitable. With Client A, why it was delayed. Doula advocacy is not about one kind of birth. It is about informed consent, individualized care, and timely action. Hospital routine should never outweigh the person carrying the risk.

Survival Cannot Be the Standard

The Black maternal health crisis includes unequal care, untreated conditions, racial bias, delayed referrals, poor communication, and inadequate postpartum support. It is about birth plans respected only until a hospital becomes less busy and postpartum care that asks whether a mother survived, not whether she has what she needs to recover.

Survival cannot be the standard. Technology can support care, but it cannot replace human connection. An algorithm cannot detect fear in a patient’s eyes, and a mission statement alone cannot ensure adequate staffing or culturally responsive care.

The Story of Client C

Before I arrived, I heard the chaos through Client C’s phone. Staff struggled to locate her baby’s heartbeat on an external monitor as her fear and blood pressure rose. I pleaded for an internal electrode before surgery.

“There’s not enough time,” a nurse said.

“I would like to wait for my doula,” Client C called out.

But she was medicated, hurried through consent, and wheeled away while I listened.

In the operating room, after a shift change, another nurse placed an internal electrode and said, “The previous monitor wasn’t working.”

No one responded.

According to her father, the obstetrician avoided eye contact: “We need to move forward.”

Surgery may still have been necessary; that was not mine to determine. But if faulty equipment helped create the emergency, the family deserved acknowledgment and explanation—not silence. No family should have to wonder whether major surgery followed an unavoidable crisis or a machine failure no one recognized in time.

From Prevention to Accountability

After supporting nearly 100 families, I have learned that danger often begins before admission. I have urged clients to seek care—and heard why they feared returning: dismissed pain, harsh words, shame for asking questions.

Care cannot be holistic where Black families do not feel safe enough to speak or return. Representation matters, but providers of color cannot repair inequity alone. They need adequate staffing, mentorship, culturally responsive training, reliable equipment, and colleagues that are reflective of all the aforementioned. It’s not the Black providers job to care for just the Black patients, everyone should have the same goal.

The Momnibus Act, California’s Medi-Cal doula benefit, the Transforming Maternal Health Model and the Perinatal Equity Initiative require more than promises; they need sustained funding, reliable reimbursement and accountable implementation.

Birth should be sacred. Yet too many Black birthing people arrive carrying the burden of proving their pain is real. A doula can listen, educate, comfort, and advocate—but cannot repair a system that refuses to listen. The true measure of progress is what happens when a Black birthing person says, “Something is wrong.”

Are they believed? When equipment fails, is that failure acknowledged? Do families leave not merely alive, but safe, respected, supported, and whole?

Until those answers are consistently yes, California’s maternal health success story remains unfinished.

About the Author

Antoinette Stewart-Eneh is a mother of two, holistic maternal wellness advocate, and birth and postpartum doula who has supported families since 2019. She serves as program operations coordinator for Frontline Doulas, a volunteer client coordinator with the Joy in Birthing Foundation and a childbirth educator in South Los Angeles. She is studying to become a midwife and lactation educator.

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‘We Don’t Talk Trash — We Pick Up Trash!’

OAKLAND POST — Following the cleanup, Jones talked with Richard Johnson, CEO of Formerly Incarcerated Giving Back (FIGB). Johnson said he wanted to bring formerly incarcerated nonprofits together not only to help clean up the city, but also to bring youth with them to mentor the next generation.

Published

2 days ago

October 4, 2026

Post News Group

High Street Coalition volunteers pick up trash on Sept. 26. Left to right are: Jo Ann, Ruben, JoJo, Jess, Jonathan ‘Fitness’ Jones and Linda in front. Photo courtesy of Linda.

By Dr. Maritony Jones, Special to The Post

When community activist Jonathan “Fitness” Jones heard concerns from senior residents in East Oakland about illegal dumping, recurring trash issues and the health hazards they created, he decided that watching the problem was not enough.

Jones, a member of the African American Sports and Entertainment Group (AASEG) and an Oakland Private Industry Council board member, learned that seniors were frustrated by the recurrence of illegal dumping even when trash has been cleared. Recurring trash can contribute to unsanitary conditions, attract rodents and leave residents feeling that their neighborhoods are being overlooked.

On Saturday, Sept. 26, Mr. Jones joined High Street Coalition volunteers at Dick’s Donuts near High Street and Quigley Street, spending the morning picking up trash and helping beautify the surrounding neighborhood.

High Street Coalition volunteers organize community cleanups on the second and fourth Saturdays of each month.

Following the cleanup, Jones talked with Richard Johnson, CEO of Formerly Incarcerated Giving Back (FIGB). Johnson said he wanted to bring formerly incarcerated nonprofits together not only to help clean up the city, but also to bring youth with them to mentor the next generation.

Jones and Johnson discussed developing a community model that brings formerly incarcerated individuals, Oakland youth and nonprofit organizations together to clean and beautify the city.

The vision is to create opportunities for formerly incarcerated adults to take leadership roles while mentoring young people through hands-on community service. The program could also provide youth with opportunities to develop leadership skills, learn teamwork and responsibility, and potentially gain employment experience.

The goal is bigger than removing trash from the streets. It is about restoring neighborhoods while building relationships between generations and creating opportunities for people with lived experience to give back to their communities.

Jones believes the message is simple:

“We don’t talk trash, we pick up trash.”

The proposed collaboration seeks to bring Oakland nonprofits, formerly incarcerated leaders, youth, residents, businesses and community organizations together around a shared purpose — cleaning the town, beautifying Oakland and building a stronger community together.