The mayor called John Boykin and he said, "send that young fellow over
there. Tell him to take those whips and keep them wrapped, and at the
right moment, show Talmadge." So Boykin called me in and said do that.
So I wrapped them.
Hartsfield was a master of publicity, he knew how to do it. So, I am sure
he called the press and said, "be set because they're gonna shake those
whips at the governor." So they were ready for them. A lot of people
thought that was staged by me and all that and I think some fellow in a
little old newspaper said that I set all that up there. That's a bunch
of crap, I didn't even have any understanding about it and didn't care
anything about it. I'm sure Hartsfield and Boykin decided that that
would be it. Boykin knew it would be powerful that way, but Hartsby
understood the publicity value of it. Talmadge didn't do
Page 36 it but in the process after we showed him that, Talmadge
said, "yeah, I was in a flogging one time." Didn't mean that he had
whipped anybody, but he was along. Well, since then the press has picked
it up now. They didn't do it right then but as time goes on they say
Talmadge admitted he was a flogger and they stop right there. They told
me that, thinking, I guess, I would want to and I said, "well, Talmadge
wasn't a flogger, he never belonged to the Klan." He was not that type
of fellow. He talked big like Venable.
Venable would have these meetings. He started up a little Klan and had
his own group. He would have a yearly meeting out there at Stone
Mountain where they would burn a cross up until a year or two ago. They
would come from North Carolina, Alabama. They would have their own
private Klan, but they would come here to that thing. He built a little
old building down in his pasture. Venable would talk big about the Jews
and all that crap. You would think he was a bloodthirsty man and he was
a gentle fellow if I ever saw one.
But this facade they put on and Venable—I was in Paris with my wife after
the thing was over, of course many years after that Venable had been up
in Ohio. There was a Klansman making a speech about what they ought to
do to the Jews. He was after the Jews and the blacks. Just raising hell.
That stuff in print looked like he was advocating a bloodthirsty orgy of
some kind.
When I picked up
The Herald Tribune, which I would get
every morning, published in Paris, pretty good paper. I looked in there
and on one side about three columns there was Venable and a
Page 37 headline about the Jews, the Klan and all that. Of course
they were an infinitesimal group then. On the other side though was
Martin Luther King, Jr., which the impact of both stories being this way
was that we were just in this country fixing to blow wide open. I read
it and I said to Francis, my wife, "Francis, look here. Martin Luther
King across this half of the paper and Jimmy Venable on the other. I bet
you this story about Venable made about a paragraph in the Atlanta
papers, probably not much more than that anywhere else. And Martin
Luther King might have made it in the black press,
The
Atlanta Daily World and
Pittsburgh Courier or
some of them and
The Chicago Defender. But I said he
probably didn't even get mentioned in there." I said, "I'm going to
write somebody and tell them to get those back issues and save them for
me because I want to see. People over here reading this and think the
country is fixing to blow up with racial tension and turmoil. And it's
just as calm and placid as you please."
Sure enough, that's the way it was. With Venable, to know him and to see
him, I've had in my court, I like the guy. He helped me during the Klan
thing. He belonged, you see. He didn't like this thing, beating people,
and he wasn't that kind of fellow. He carries the name today, some of
the Jewish people in Atlanta just shutter when you mention his name.
I know a Jewish lawyer, a woman lawyer, she's a millionairess, she talks
to me all the time, she's eighty some years old, a nice lady. She just
shakes when you mention Venable's name and I say, "Mildred, Venable is
good-hearted. He
Page 38 has helped black people, anybody,
Jewish people. He would go into court."