what happened to eleanor strubing after the trial

March|April 2005

Insult to Injury By Reynolds Holding
Correct On By Richard West. Garnett
Wrong, But Not Too Right By Kermit Roosevelt
The Mine Line Past Geoffrey Gagnon
How the West Was Lost By Daniel Brook
Saving the Race Past Daniel J. Sharfstein
A Crime With a Name By Nicholas Thompson

Saving the Race

In 1940, Thurgood Marshall defended a black chauffeur charged with raping his white mistress—and exposed the racism of the Due north.

THE Adult female LIMPED ALONG THE Route, SOAKING WET, scraped and hobbling, her apparel torn. Two truck drivers spotted her in the pre-dawn hours of December eleven, 1940, and pulled over past the Kensico Reservoir in Westchester Canton, N.Y. Waiting for the constabulary, they listened to the adult female's sensational story. Eleanor Strubing told them she had been raped again and once more in her Greenwich, Conn., mansion by her "Negro chauffeur-butler." The human being and so jump and gagged her, she said, drove to the reservoir, pushed her off a span, and pelted her with rocks. Strubing's sealskin glaze and one shoe had been lost in the freezing water.

Police force quickly found the chauffeur, Joseph Spell, back at the estate where Strubing lived with her husband, a wealthy advertizement executive. Later 16 hours of interrogation, a prosecutor announced that Spell had confessed. Along the East Coast, newspapers screamed the details of the "night of horror" and "pulp orgy." The New York Times reported on its front page that Spell admitted to attacking Strubing and "hurling" her off the bridge. A giant flick of Strubing reclining on the beach in a swimsuit was splashed beyond the comprehend of The Daily News. 9 months earlier, Richard Wright had published Native Son; now Greenwich had its own Bigger Thomas.

The publicity storm triggered an emergency at the New York headquarters of the NAACP. The organization's initial business organization was the tone of the news stories—"highly colored," equally NAACP banana secretarial assistant Roy Wilkins complained in a telegram to the city editor of The Daily News. In every story, Spell was immediately and repeatedly identified as the "Negro chauffeur," "the colored servant," and even "a colored human with a bad hangover." The graphic coverage of Strubing'due south account echoed Southern tales of rape that were used for decades to justify lynching. Rumors filtered into the NAACP that panic-stricken Westchester families were firing their black servants. Two days after the arrest, Thurgood Marshall, the organization's top lawyer, was on a train to Greenwich, committed to defending Joseph Spell "to the limit of our resources."

At 32, Marshall was spending nigh of his days on the route, trying cases, investigating race riots, and coming together with local NAACP branches. He jokingly called his piece of work "that stirring saga of unselfish devotion to a great cause, 'Saving the Race,' by Thurgood Marshall." While working on Spell'due south case, he also defended W. D. Lyons, a black Oklahoma human who had confessed, later on repeated beatings, to a triple homicide. Lyons five. Oklahoma is remembered for Marshall's skillful cross-examinations, for the jury'due south surprising decision to give the defendant a life sentence instead of the death sentence, and for Marshall's bitterness after the Supreme Court affirmed the accused'due south conviction despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence. Past contrast, The State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell has faded with time to get a curious footnote to Marshall's career.

Yet the Spell matter reveals the underappreciated importance of the NAACP's litigation in the Northward. Swamped with requests for help from all over the country, the organisation's lawyers targeted the Due south, suing over voting rights, equal pay for black teachers, and segregation in higher education. This was the route that led to the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. Meanwhile, a small number of Northern cases served the express purpose of raising funds and recruiting new members. A week after Spell's arrest, Marshall requested a budget increase from $4,000 to $9,000. "Nosotros will take to spend more money on regular defense force cases because these teachers' salaries cases and university cases will not proceed to keep our name going," Marshall wrote his trusted adviser, NAACP lath member William Hastie.

West. E. B. Du Bois, one of the NAACP'due south founders, thought Northern cases were more than than only fundraisers. In 1934, he resigned from the system in a huff, writing in The Crisis that the group'south Southern focus was based on the "fable" that there was "piddling or no segregation in the North." Unless the NAACP reckoned with the prevalence of Northern discrimination, racial equality would remain out of reach. "We have past legal activeness steadied the foundation so that in the futurity, segregation must be by wish and volition and not constabulary," Du Bois wrote, "simply beyond that we take non made the slightest impress on the determination of the overwhelming mass of white Americans non to treat Negroes every bit men."

The Spell case underscores the ability of Du Bois's critique. Throughout the winter of 1940-41, the NAACP's fundraising letters to its Northern branches stressed "the large number of Negro domestics who will be directly affected by this case and volition endure unless we do all in our ability to secure justice for Spell." Shut out of manufactory work and union jobs, thousands of African-Americans in Connecticut were forced to depend on positions in domestic service. John W. Lancaster, the head of the Bridgeport chapter of the NAACP, had graduated from Fordham University. He, besides, was a chauffeur.

When Marshall reached Greenwich, he was met by Samuel Friedman, a white attorney hired by the Bridgeport NAACP. A few years older than Marshall, Friedman had proficient law with his brother, Irwin, since the 1920s. Unassuming in his dark three-piece adjust and matching bow tie, his brusque blackness hair neatly combed back, Friedman was developing a reputation as a tenacious advocate with a flair for courtroom drama. Nearly 60 years later the trial, he described the Spell case in a videotaped interview with Bridgeport attorney Jacob Zeldes.

Friedman'south initial reaction to Spell's arrest, based on what he had read in the newspapers, was the aforementioned equally that of almost white people. "I don't think y'all could find a man on the street that in any manner had any sympathy for Spell or that believed that this was consensual, including me," he said. Bridgeport was non a hospitable city for African-Americans: A 1933 Connecticut law banning bigotry in public places was not enforced. Friedman was immune to accept Marshall to tiffin at the Stratfield Hotel restaurant simply because he was the hotel'south lawyer.

MARSHALL TOLD HIS CO-COUNSEL THAT HE DID Not BELIEVE A Discussion of Strubing's story. It was the NAACP'south policy to limit its criminal defense work to innocent clients. In 1 of his few comments about the case, Thurgood Marshall told Juan Williams, his biographer, that the press coverage of Spell's arrest prompted grim laughs at the NAACP. "He was supposed to have raped this woman iv times in one night," Marshall recalled. "All I got to tell y'all is when the story got in the newspaper, all the secretaries, all of 'em, came and said, 'Hey, defend that man. Nosotros want to run across it. 4 times! Ha ha. Ha ha. Four times in one nighttime. Yep, bring him in here, let the states see him.' I told 'em get out of my office."

Nevertheless, Marshall and Friedman knew that Spell's defense would exist a tough fight. The lead prosecutor, Lorin Willis, was an unreconstructed bigot. "He hated everybody," said Friedman. "If yous were a Polack, if y'all were a Jew, if you lot were a wop—this was Willis. He was a no-good S.O.B., that'due south what he was." The prosecution refused to open its files or make witnesses available to the defence force and it kept Strubing in seclusion in the five weeks between Spell'southward arrest and trial.

The second strike confronting Spell was his accuser'southward status every bit, in Marshall's words, "a member of the very highest strata of society." The Strubings were relatively new to Greenwich, merely their coin was one-time. Eleanor, known as Ellie, was the daughter of an investment banker who had been a governor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Her hubby's existence was charmed. After taking fourth dimension off from Princeton to serve as an ambulance commuter on the Western Front in World State of war I, John K. Strubing, Jr. returned habitation and quarterbacked the 1919 Tiger football squad to victory over Yale and a tie with undefeated Harvard. Adoring fans presented their "sturdy youths" with picayune gold footballs for their watch chains.

If the Strubings could take stepped out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and so Spell belonged to Richard Wright, whose work chronicled urban and rural blackness poverty. Built-in in Lafayette, La., in 1909, Spell spent six years in the Army before being dishonorably discharged for getting drunk and stealing and great an officer's motorcar. He married at 17 and separate with his wife after 3 months. Spell never bothered to get a divorce. Xxx-one at the time of his arrest, he and his common-law wife, a childhood friend named Virgis Clark, lived in the attic of the Strubing estate. He told Marshall and Friedman that he was also "going with" a 21-year-one-time White Plains Loftier School student. Spell and Clark had worked for the Strubings every bit butler and cook for a little more than than a month. The twenty-four hours earlier he started with the Strubings, Spell had been arrested and had received a suspended sentence for threatening to injure a former employer unless she gave him a pocket-size loan.

Late on the quaternary nighttime later on Spell's arrest, Marshall and Friedman interviewed him together at the Greenwich town jail. Spell insisted that, contrary to the prosecutor's statements, he had not confessed to rape and kidnapping, but merely to having consensual sex with Strubing. Spell and Strubing agreed that on the night of December x, Clark was asleep in the attic and John Strubing was in Cincinnati on business. At most ten p.m., Ellie Strubing had come up dwelling house from dinner with friends. She was fresh from the shower and wearing just a robe when Spell knocked on her bedroom door and asked if he could borrow some coin.

According to Strubing, Spell raped her, made her get dressed, took her downstairs, bound her hands and feet, and raped her again. Later on forcing her to write a ransom annotation, Spell put Strubing in the car, cut off the bottom of her dress and gagged her with the remnant, and drove until a policeman stopped the automobile. The officer did not notice Strubing, whom Spell had pushed below the dashboard. Spell took her back to the business firm and raped her a third and maybe a 4th time. Finally, he drove to the reservoir and pitched her in.

To Friedman, Strubing's version sounded "as cockamamie . . . as you could get." Spell's recounting of events made slightly more than sense to him. Spell said that when he went to Strubing'south sleeping room, his employer agreed to the loan, saying, "You lot've been squeamish to me, Joseph, and you lot tin can have anything I've got." He replied that he "would like to exist with her," and she walked over to her bed and turned down the embrace. Every bit Spell undressed, Strubing'south pet schnauzer started barking. Afraid that Virgis Clark would wake up, the pair put on clothes and went downstairs to the living room. There, Strubing took off her "rubber pantie girdle" and lay down on the sofa with Spell, only to worry that people might run across them from the window. Spell suggested they become to the garage. Off went the girdle once again, and, in Spell's words, they "had business" in the car.

But when Strubing fretted about getting pregnant, the sex stopped, leaving Spell to the devices of his "pocket handkerchief." Next, he suggested a bulldoze, and Strubing put on her fur coat. When they reached the Kensico Reservoir, she asked him to stop and then got out of the car, jumped a guardrail, and ran downwards an beach. "She said that she was all correct and for me to get on home," Spell told his lawyers. "I was afraid that if I went toward her, she might hurt herself." Spell left for a friend's business firm in White Plains and played blackjack until five a.m. Breaking even, he returned home and dozed off in the laundry room, where the police woke him up a few hours later.

Spell'southward story may not accept seemed closed to Friedman, but he felt confident enough to stand up with Marshall and tell reporters that Spell was innocent. When prosecutors offered a plea bargain, Marshall wrote to Friedman, "The more I think over the possibility suggested yesterday of Spell's accepting a 'plea' the more I am convinced that he cannot have any plea of any kind. It seems to me that he is not only innocent only is in a position where everyone else knows he is innocent. For that reason he should accept nix other than the dropping of all charges." Although Spell risked xxx years in prison, Friedman agreed.

WHEN SPELL'S TRIAL BEGAN IN January 1941, the press converged on the Bridgeport superior court, promising readers, equally the Bridgeport Herald put information technology, the "most sensational sex mystery in history." What followed was a re-enactment of erstwhile myths of white womanhood and black aggression that NAACP Secretary Walter White described as "expected in Mississippi, but not in Connecticut." Witness later on witness emphasized how distraught Strubing appeared on the morning time of Dec xi. The examining dr. had been forced to sedate her, they recalled, and when a black truck driver who had stopped to help approached her at the Kensico Reservoir, she had screamed to a police officer, "Protect me! Protect me! There'due south a colored human!"

On the second day of trial, Ellie Strubing entered the courthouse in a dark plaid coat and matching pillbox hat, attended by a doctor and a nurse. Her personal attorney happened to be chair of the state Republican Political party. Information technology was Strubing'south beginning public appearance since the incident. According to The Daily News, she tearfully testified that Spell threatened her with a pocketknife, choked her, forced her to write a ransom note, and raped her "while I was helpless with my hands tied." She begged him to take her silvery and jewelry, but "he said he couldn't do anything with that." Close to hysterics, she told the whispering court, "I'm sure he raped me iii times. Merely I can't remember at present. On a rock flooring—or something. Information technology'southward and then confused."

The defense force countered with cold facts. They pointed out that investigators had failed to find a bribe notation. And Strubing had not called the police force during several periods of time in which Spell left her alone. Spell stuck to the story he had told Marshall and Friedman, and Greenwich police Sgt. John Teufel backed him up. Teufel said that when he asked the doctor who examined Strubing whether he had taken a vaginal smear, the dr. answered that he "didn't find anything to accept a smear of."

At trial, Friedman questioned witnesses while Marshall, satisfied with his co-counsel's performance, took notes from the 2nd chair. During his ii-twenty-four hours cantankerous-examination of Strubing, Friedman combed through her story for discrepancies until she lost her temper. Once he'd shaken her out of the role of helpless victim, Friedman guided her back through her testimony. Why hadn't she called out to the policeman who stopped Spell? Friedman tied a handkerchief over his rima oris, and asked Strubing if Spell had similarly gagged her. She said yes. Afterward, the lawyer retied the handkerchief as tight equally he could and tested Strubing's merits that she could not make a sound. "I permit out a shriek," he recalled. "The jurors almost jumped out of their seats!"

Marshall told Friedman that it was a relief to attempt a case in the North, where he could enter a courthouse through the front door without fearing for his life. Simply throughout the trial, anonymous detest mail filled with graphic death threats and pictures of lynchings was sent to the lawyers, the jurors, and the judge. The state's closing argument was hardly less offensive, imploring the jury to "salvage the women of Connecticut" from "deposition." Spell was a "lust-mad Negro" who stalked his victim "like a panther," Lorin Willis said. Strubing, by contrast, was "a chaste and virtuous woman." "Behave Spell and you transport her forth with a name and reputation shattered and ruined across repair," Willis told the jurors. "At that place is no identify on this earth—no spot or pigsty nighttime enough that she tin observe to protect her—if he is acquitted of this offense."

Friedman skewered Strubing'south "fantastic story" and "evasive answers"—"her resort to tears, her antics on the stand, her resort to every possible trick in the cards." Simply looking at the all-white jury, he knew that discrediting Strubing was likewise risky. He had to offer the jury a way to assert Strubing'due south social standing and however acquit Spell. In a motion that the Baltimore Afro-American described every bit "brilliant," Friedman appropriated the prosecution's rhetoric, explaining how he overcame his own doubts to believe in Spell's innocence. "They had this improper relationship all through the nighttime. Joseph sees nothing wrong in information technology. The formality of marriage and divorce means nothing to him," Friedman argued. "But not to Mrs. Strubing. She has moral cobweb and nobility. . . . She knows she has done wrong." Strubing had plunged into the h2o with thoughts of killing herself, Friedman surmised. "But equally soon as she hit the h2o she was a changed adult female. She was a good swimmer and she simply couldn't drown."

As jury deliberations began, NAACP Secretary White started scrambling for funds to pay for transcripts and legal fees in the event that Spell was bedevilled. "Nosotros should win it hands downwardly," he wrote to the editor of the New York Historic period. "But, every bit you know all besides well, one tin can never figure on the vagaries of the prejudices of white people." According to The Daily News, Strubing waited in her Greenwich home, "waxing floors, knitting and doing other manual work prescribed by her doctor." After 12 hours, the jury returned with a verdict shortly before midnight: non guilty.

FOR THE NAACP, THE VERDICT WAS AS MUCH A RELIEF as a triumph. In the 7 weeks between Spell'south arrest and the verdict, the system had raised but $107.74 for his defense. But if the group'southward members were too poor to contribute much, many of them chosen the NAACP to thank Marshall for defending Spell. One Wilfred I. Hatchette sent an original poetic tribute with the lines, "Behold mad history . . . / Whose telegrams for once tin can't bear / The fruits of prejudice." A yr afterwards Spell'south amortization, Greenwich formed its own NAACP chapter.

Past the time of the verdict, Thurgood Marshall had already left Bridgeport for the Lyons murder trial in Oklahoma. Friedman also left town, vacationing with his wife to give the neighbors a chance to absurd off. "A lot of people were sore," he recalled. "I tin't tell you the things they said." Spell told reporters that he would move home to Louisiana, but he but made information technology to East Orange, N.J. He lived there with Virgis until his death in 1968.

Despite the prosecution's prediction, Ellie never became an outcast. The Strubings retreated for several days to Philadelphia, where Main Line matrons sent telegrams to the governor of Connecticut to protestation the verdict. The couple later moved e from Greenwich to Erstwhile Lyme, where John was country club president and Ellie threw perfect dinner parties. Later on John died in 1961, Ellie married a prominent New Oasis attorney. According to a stepdaughter, Ellie remained close to the people she was friends with before the trial. Shortly later she died in 2000, her footstep-grandson married an African-American adult female. Ellie had been invited before her death but she said she would be unable to attend the wedding.

Daniel J. Sharfstein is writing a book on the colour line in the American Southward, a subject he has written about previously for Legal Affairs.