RACES: Mother Wit

In the 66 years since he was born on an Alabama cotton patch, Negro John Claybrook has by slow degrees made himself one of the most affluent members of his race in the South. He owns a large tenant farm, the bank and general store in its Negro settlement of 300, a fortune estimated at $100,000 and a colored baseball te?m. He lives in Memphis in the height of comfort. Credit for all this worldly success, Negro Claybrook, who never went to school, ascribes to his “mother wit.”

Last week to Negro Claybrook’s other distinctions was added that of being selected in Marion, Ark. to serve on a jury with eleven white men in the trial of two Negro youths for raping a white girl. He was the first Negro so honored in Marion since 1888, one of the few in the whole history of Southern jurisprudence. The trial—attended by 800 spectators who were searched for weapons at the courthouse door—lasted one day. When it ended, it took Juror Claybrook and his confreres only seven minutes to find the defendants guilty.