Two days after witnessing the senseless death of George Floyd under the knee of brutal Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin as three of his fellow officers looked on and did nothing, I received an email from my friend Paul Price informing me that the 1970 film The Liberation of L.B. Jones was currently streaming on Prime Video. Starring veteran actors Lee J. Cobb and Chill Wills and then-newcomers Roscoe Lee Browne, Lola Falana, Yaphet Kotto and Lee Majors, the blood curdling details of the film’s provocative plot were unknown to me. While I consider myself an aficionado of crime films from that era, I had zero knowledge of the troubled race relations and police brutality that awaited me in the fictional down south town of Somerset, Tennessee. Though the town was fictional, it was based on Humboldt, Tennessee, the small parish where the author lived with his wife Sally and four children.
Taking place in the early 1960s at the beginning of the first civil rights movement, The Liberation of L.B. Jones was based on a 1965 novel by Jesse Hill Ford, a now forgotten southern scribe whose work was once compared to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. The book was originally published under the title The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, dealt with the harsh realities of race and rights in the Deep South, and received wonderful critiques from the Kirkus Review and the New York Times. Published by Atlantic-Little Brown, it was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and a National Book Award finalist. The title was shortened for the film because the studio didn’t want to confuse audiences who might think it was a costume drama about the 19th century romantic poet.
Legendary filmmaker and Oscar winning director William Wyler (Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur) signed on in 1969 to direct The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones as the first in a five movie deal he had with Columbia Pictures. For Wyler, the film was a huge departure from the Barbara Streisand debut film Funny Girl he’d made the year before. “I had always wanted to do something on the racial issue,” the director said in William Wyler: The Authorized Biography by Axel Madsen. “When (producer) Ronald Lubin brought me Jesse Hill Ford’s novel, it seemed like a good story, very powerful, very blunt, in a way a harsh and shocking story. When the author came to us and I asked him, ‘Aren’t you putting it on a little thick?’ he answered, ‘Not at all, it’s all based on facts.’”
Ford heard the story the decade earlier from a black maid who he talked to about the murder of a colored Humboldt undertaker James Claybrook in 1955; the name Lord Byron Jones was inspired by a black barbecue stand owner he’d befriended named Alfred Lord Tennyson Pullman. While the 1960s community depicted in The Liberation of L.B. Jones was seemingly content with the separate but unequal relations between the races, it all comes to a boil when L.B. (Browne) went to white lawyer Oman Hedgepath (Cobb) seeking a divorce from his unfaithful wife Emma (Falana). Dressed in virginal white throughout the film, she was carrying on an affair with racist redneck sheriff Willie Joe Worth, played with devilish menace by Anthony Zerbe.
Falana, who began her career as a dancing/singing protégé of Sammy Davis Jr., played the “selfish and abrasive shrew,” as Ebony magazine (September, 1969) described Emma, with the gusto and sexiness that reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Falana was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year, alongside Marlo Thomas, Jane Alexander and Carrie Snodgress, who won for Diary of a Mad Housewife.
In The Liberation of L. B. Jones there was no back-story of how their affair began, but both Emma and Worth were quite brazen in their disrespect towards L.B., who finally decided enough was enough, and sought a divorce. All was well in that Jim Crow town until Emma decided to contest the divorce, which meant that Willie Joe, a husband and father, would be named in open court and his affair with a “darkie” would be scandalous for both himself and society at large.
Miscegenation was against the law in Tennessee until 1967. Naturally that didn’t keep white men from “messin’ around” with “colored gals,” or even raping them, as was shown in one of the many painful L.B. Jones scenes. But, as long the “niggers” stayed in their place, all was well in the land of Dixie. Though L.B. had risen to the level of millionaire, he was still a “nigger” in the eyes of any white person that deemed him so. The moment L.B. dared to step over the line, with the nerve to demand justice and expect fairness, the law-abiding mortician was forced to face the consequences of his actions.
A parallel storyline that eventually meets the main plot at the crossroads involves Sonny Boy Mosby (Kotto), who has come to town to kill Stanley Bumpas (Arch Johnson), a cop who almost killed him when he was a 13-year-old boy. Bumpas is also Worth’s partner. Sonny left town as a scared and scarred youngin, but returned a decade later to extract his revenge. Ironically, he comes back on the same train that Hedgepath’s liberal lawyer nephew Steve Mundine (Majors) and his wife Nella (Barbara Hershey) is also riding on.
A newlywed couple hoping to begin their married life in town Mundine’s mother hailed from, he is being set-up to be Hedgepath’s law partner and, hopefully, heir to his practice and sprawling estate that comes complete with marble staircase, chandeliers and a good-natured Negro butler. While I’m sure the characters were richer in the book, on screen they added very little to the narrative, representing, as John Greco pointed out, “Wyler’s liberal whites in a sea of bigoted trash.” Nevertheless, after witnessing the racism, hatred and good ol’ boy bigotry that spills blood and destroys lives without repercussions, the disgusted couple was obviously uneasy.
With the action set four years before marching Blacks, who were often referred to as boy regardless of age, wore signs that proclaimed “I AM A MAN,” the climax was bloody and the wicked cop got away with his crimes without ever having to worry about consequences or his own conscience. Willie Joe Worth showed more emotion over a dead dog than a dead man. At the end, we see young Steve and Nella, having packed their bags, ready to leave Somerset and all its ugliness.
***
Ford, who was born in Troy and raised in Nashville, had served in the Navy and relocated to the small town of 10,000, where there were 3,500 blacks, in 1957. “Ford had stumbled almost by happenstance into Humboldt,” reporter John Taylor wrote in 1997. “But once there, he encountered what the regional writer requires: a powerful sense of place. Humboldt, with its softly rolling landscape, its fertilizer factory, its annual strawberry festival, and its statue of a Confederate soldier, with its isolation, its resistance to change, and its deeply segregationist culture, had specificity, distinctiveness. The people who lived there had been shaped by its history, and their stories were stories of a struggle to come to terms with that history.”
Ford worked in the rear office of his father-in-laws medical practice. Sitting in a soundproof, windowless room, Ford spent two years, ten hours a day writing the book while his wife taught school, the kids went to their grandparent’s house and his Saint Bernard named Captain laid at his feet. Lord Byron, the wealthy colored undertaker, first appeared in Ford’s 1961 debut Mountains of Gilead published in 1961. He sold the book to Atlantic Monthly-Little, Brown Books editor Edward Weeks, who’d published Ford’s first story “The Surest Thing in Show Business” in the magazine. He had Ford rewrite the story fourteen times, and later declared him one of the most promising writers of his generation.
“All I had was an old typewriter and cheap paper and desperation—sheer and utter desperation, and somehow the book got written,” Ford said of Liberation in 1969.
“All I had was an old typewriter and cheap paper and desperation—sheer and utter desperation, and somehow the book got written,” Ford said of Liberation in 1969. Critic Wirt Williams reviewed the book in the July, 11, 1965 edition of the New York Times. “The book glitters often with the special gifts of the author. It cuts without pity through the stereotypes and easy crystallizations that layer the issue and goes straight to its granite heart.” Critic Douglas M. Davis wrote in Life magazine that the book, “…is going to push a lot of fence sitters on segregation off the fence, one way or another.”
The movie rights for were bought by producer Ronald Lubin for $100,000, who then hired Ford and more experienced writer Stirling Silliphant (Nightfall, Village of the Damned) to write the screenplay. Ford bought 27-acres of property and built a grand house he called Canterfield complete with “a stocked pond, horses and exotic dogs.” Ford went to California to work on the screenplay and quickly got caught-up in the fast lane that included various meeting with Max “Dr. Feelgood” Jacobson, who began to give him vitamin B-12 shots that also contained methamphetamine sulphate.
Author Jesse Hill Ford.
“On return trips to Humboldt, Ford supervised the construction of Canterfield, the extremely grand house—a mansard roof, a marble entrance hall, parquet floors—he built on twenty-eight acres in the cornfields outside town,” Taylor wrote in The Liberation of Jesse Hill Ford, an Esquire profile. “Canterfield seemed pretentious for Humboldt, and its construction revealed Ford’s growing detachment from the town that had inspired him. His production of short stories, which some critics consider his most lasting literary accomplishment, dwindled as he spent time in Hollywood. But while his literary career began to lose momentum, his reputation continued to grow. “I predict within the next decade he’ll be going to Sweden to pick up the Nobel prize,” Silliphant proclaimed in 1969.
Like Ford’s novel, the film was told from multiple points of view. However, when it didn’t sell to a studio, Lubin convinced the duo to turn the material into a stage play instead. The men were friendly collaborators, though Silliphant later admitted that the subject of racism was unfamiliar territory for him.
“I was up to my gills with the prevailing wisdom that race relations in the USA were now okay,” he told journalist Nat Segaloff. “When, in fact, the only thing that changed was their delusion that they had at last accepted any person of a different skin color or ethnic background as a fellow human being. The film is unremitting, inexorable, without pity or compromise or solution. It simply states that hatred prevails.”
Silliphant, who Ford referred to as “the Shakespeare of film writers,” left the production when he was hired to write In the Heat of the Night. Another film project where race and racism was an integral part of the plot, that script won him an Oscar in 1967. Obviously, it was Silliphant’s new found bankability that helped lure the director. “Wyler was a reserved filmmaker—theatrically precise as a director of actors and meticulous, if fussy, as a creator of compositions,” Richard Brody wrote in his New Yorker review. “But he was discerning in his choice of subjects, and, as in ‘The Liberation of L. B. Jones,’ impassioned in his presentation of them…The film presents an array of racist injustices that involve the legal establishment as well as the police, who arrest with impunity any black person on nonexistent charges; the town’s white people brandish the law as a standing threat to black residents.”
New York Times film critic Vincent Canby described the film as “a post-Poitier, post-In the Heat of the Night sort of movie. Gone is the essentially cheerful, separate-but-equal, we’ll-work-this-out-together camaraderie that has always looked a little too easy in Sidney Poitier movies…The Liberation of L. B. Jones seems some more valid but only because it is more bleak.” I suppose the film’s bleakness contributed to its dismal box-office.
Though I enjoyed the movie and could even envision watching it again, I too was surprised that it didn’t have a more Hollywood ending where good triumphed and evil either died or went to jail. While the movie begins with a light airy feeling that was complimented by Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy opening theme, it soon becomes dark as the twelve-foot deep grave Jones sells to Mama Lavorn (Zara Cully). When Columbia Pictures previewed the film in December, 1969, many white viewers walked out. “If you want to start a riot this is the way to do it,” one man supposedly said.
“Everybody thought he’d sort of been making fun of the town, holding us up for ridicule in the eyes of everybody else,” one citizen of Humboldt to Life magazine in 1971.
However, as I later learned, the place where the film caused the biggest disturbance was in Humboldt, Tennessee, where writer Jesse Hill Ford still lived. The community was outraged that he’d aired their dirty laundry and, already thinking of him as an outsider, began to vandalize his property and making threatening phone calls to his home. “Everybody thought he’d sort of been making fun of the town, holding us up for ridicule in the eyes of everybody else,” one citizen of Humboldt to Life magazine in 1971. “There’s no doubt about it.”
In an interview conducted in 1969 for Kite-Flying and Other Irrational Acts Conversations with Twelve Southern Writers edited by John Carr (1972), Ford came across as a liberal southerner who, though proud of his roots, was above the racialism of the region. “Beyond telling the truth about the South, I’ve never felt that I owned anything in particular to the people in the South,” he told interviewer James Seay, who conducted the interview a year before the film was released. In that same interview Seay said, “(I) sensed that you’re no bigot. In fact, it’s very clear that you’re deeply concerned about the ramifications of slavery and the racial difficulties that we’ve had in all this.” That year when his third novel The Feast of Saint Barnabas, about a race riot in Florida, was released, critic Saul Maloff called him, “the voice of the moderate South.”
***
Eight months after the release of The Liberation of L.B. Jones, Ford became caught-up in his own deadly scandal when he killed a young Black man who had driven up on his property. The man was Pvt. George Henry Doaks Jr., the 21‐year‐ old son of a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, who was reportedly AWOL from Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. when he was shot while parked on the winding drive way to the Fords’ 27‐acre farm on the northern outskirts of Humboldt. He had been married two weeks before. The shooting occurred about 9:50 P.M. He was in the car with a female cousin Allie V. Andrews and a four-year-old that she was babysitting.
Andrews later told police that they had gone for ice cream, got lost and pulled into the driveway. Police claimed that Doakes pants were halfway down as though the couple was about to have sex. Ford, who was known to be naturally paranoid, a heavy drinker and an amphetamine junkie, said he thought the car had parked there to ambush his son Charles. Earlier that year the schools were integrated and football playing young Ford was having issues with Black players who were displaced and supposedly seeking revenge.
Although Ford instructed his wife to call the police, he went outside with a rifle and allegedly fired a warning shot in the air. When the car attempted to drive away, Ford claimed he hit the truck with his gun and another shot was fired. The second shot shattered Doakes’ skull and, seconds later, Andrews and the child emerged from the car and escaped into the night. That deadly second shot changed the lives of both the Ford and Doakes families forever. Ford was arrested, but soon released on a $20,000 dollar bond.
Shocked that he wasn’t automatically viewed as innocent, the incident also forced him to drop his liberal masquerade and release all the anti-Black rhetoric he’d bottled inside. In a brutally honest article published in Life magazine eleven months after the killing, journalist Marshall Frady spent months with the Fords before, during and after the trial.
Placing the blame on the dead man, Ford couldn’t believe that the prosecutor had brought the case to court, convinced it was because of his portrayal of the town in his work.
Placing the blame on the dead man, Ford couldn’t believe that the prosecutor had brought the case to court, convinced it was because of his portrayal of the town in his work. “So now that I’ve killed my nigger they’ve decided, by God, they just show me what that single standard of justice is like,” he said. Later, when his wife accused him of being “sympathetic to the nigguha(s)” in his writings, he replied, “Well, Sally, dammit, it hasn’t been sympathetic to the Nigras. If anybody thought that, they’re a fool.”
With only one Black man on the jury, who later confessed that he was afraid to oppose the eleven others, 41-year-old Jesse Hill Ford was found not guilty. According to the Life story, Ford was guarded by state troopers, who escorted him home. Reading Frady’s story decades later, my only problem with it was out of the thousands of words, there was only a paragraph about George Henry Doakes’ family, when his reverend daddy told the reporter, “You sorry? Then maybe you can guess how I feel. He was my own bone and blood—Jesse Hill Ford spilled it. But, what can you do? My boy was shot down in cold blood, but we don’t have no justice…we Christian people, we believe vengeance belongs to the Lord. But, Mr. Ford’s conscience won’t let him forget this.”
Reverend Doaks words were like a mojo. Within a short period of time, Ford lost his teaching job at the University of Alabama (Richard North Patterson was one of his students), his house, speaking engagements and his wife. Twenty-five years after being found innocent, Jesse Hill Ford put a .22 to his temple on June 1, 1996 and blew his brains out. “I just feel like he got whatever he was due,” Rudolph Doaks, the mother of George Henry Doaks, said in a 2001 documentary. “That’s the way I feel about it.”
Of course, I knew none of Ford’s tragic history when I sat down to watch The Liberation of L.B. Jones, and simply judged the film on its own artistic merits. In those last film frames, as their train pulled out of the station, I exhaled. I was angry and exhausted and tired and damn near tears. Simultaneously, the film was inspired, enjoyable and repulsive. As William Wyler’s biographer Axel Madsen pointed out, “The inference is that nothing has changed or will change.”
Part of the national myth has always been that racism was simply a Southern problem, whereas we all know that prejudice has no boarders. As I see it, our entire country has a little bit of Somerset sprinkled through it. Certainly, all I need to do is look at the headlines and watch the news to see that that the same kind of racist cop madness still happens in our country with regularity. It not difficult to replace Sheriff Willie Joe Worth’s name with now-fired Officer Derek Chauvin as well as the many other violent racists, police or otherwise, who have killed Black people simply because they were Black people.
