Odell Waller

Odell Waller (March 6, 1917 – July 2, 1942) was an African-American sharecropper from Gretna, Virginia, executed for the fatal shooting of his white landlord, Oscar Wheldon Davis, on July 15, 1940.

Waller maintained at his trial that the killing had been in self-defense, but was convicted by a jury of white citizens who had paid the poll tax, a measure that effectively barred blacks and poor whites from jury service.

The Workers' Defense League, a socialist labor rights organization, began a national campaign calling for the commutation of Waller's sentence, and was supported in its efforts by novelist Pearl S. Buck, philosopher John Dewey, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt also made a private appeal on Waller's behalf to Virginia Governor Colgate Darden.

Odell Waller was born in 1917 to Dollie Jones and an unknown father, who died shortly after his birth.

Jones gave the boy to her sister Annie Waller and Annie's husband, Willis Waller, to adopt, and Odell considered Annie his mother.

Odell completed three years of high school, but was forced to leave school to work on the farm.

The RWL's members had been expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1934 for their Trotskyist beliefs, and the organization was unpopular due to its opposition to World War II.

The group compared the trial to that of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American young men accused of rape in Alabama under suspicious circumstances, and began to criticize the racism and economic conditions of Waller's rural Virginia county.

Historian Richard B. Sherman argues that the group brought negative publicity to Waller's trial from the start by creating the perception that "radical outsiders" were behind his defense.

A socialist labor rights organization, the Workers' Defense League (WDL), offered to take over the defense and public campaign to avoid the stigma of communism from influencing Waller's case, but the RWL rebuffed them.

Stone and another defense attorney, J. Byron Hopkins, were given only three days to prepare Waller's defense.

After an all-white jury was selected, composed only of citizens that could pay the poll tax, Stone moved that the case be dismissed on the grounds that Waller was "deprived of a trial by a jury of his peers".

However, Stone failed to submit evidence that this was the case, a factor that would prove crucial in later unsuccessful appeals.

The judge dismissed the motion, as well as a tactically questionable motion by Stone that the judge himself was prejudiced in the case and should withdraw.

The testimony of Henry Davis and Oscar Davis's sons proved damning, and several witnesses also testified that they had heard Waller declare he would come home with his wheat or kill Oscar.

In an analysis of the transcript, Sherman proposes that the phrasing of these witnesses was so similar that they may have been coached by prosecutors, but the defense counsel did not pursue this possibility.

From 1935 to 1938, he was convicted of seven offenses, including assault, reckless driving, bootlegging, and carrying a concealed razor.

During the Great Depression, the Wallers fell behind on the mortgage for their farm, and after Willis died in 1938, the bank foreclosed.

Annie and Odell then agreed to become sharecroppers for a white landlord, Oscar Davis.

The relationship quickly soured.

Davis was also a sharecropper, and when his own landlord reduced Davis' land allotment, Davis reduced that of the Wallers to only 2 acre.

The Wallers accused Davis of failing to pay Annie an agreed $7.50 for taking care of Davis' ill wife for three weeks; when the Wallers subsequently refused to work in Davis' fields, Davis evicted them.

Following the eviction, someone on the Davis farm mutilated one of the Wallers' dogs.

After Annie's cousin Robert helped her harvest the farm's wheat, Davis took the whole crop rather than give the Wallers their share.

In January 1939, he married a woman named Mollie.

In April 1940, Odell had taken a job constructing electrical lines in Maryland, but he returned on the weekend of July 13–14 to investigate the worsening situation.

At 6:30 AM on July 15, 1940, Odell drove to Davis's farm to get the wheat with Annie, relatives Archie Waller and Thomas Younger, and a friend named Buck Fitzgerald.

He brought a .32 caliber pistol.

The subsequent events remain in dispute.

Henry Davis, a teenage black employee of Oscar Davis, maintained that Odell Waller had fired at Oscar Davis without provocation or warning, hitting him four times.

Oscar Davis' sons testified that their father had stated before he died that Waller had shot him without cause.

One son added that Davis had said Waller had continued to shoot after Davis had already fallen to the ground.

The testimony of other witnesses, including Waller's relatives, was inconclusive, as they were too distant to hear the conversation between Waller and Davis.

Waller stated that Davis had refused to let him take the Waller family share of the wheat, and had reached for his pocket as if to draw a gun; Waller then fired on Davis.

Davis escaped through the cornfield after being shot and was taken to the hospital, where he died of his wounds on July 17.

Afraid he would be lynched, Waller fled to Columbus, Ohio, but was arrested there at the home of an uncle on July 24 after a manhunt involving police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

During Waller's trial, which began on September 19, 1940, he was represented by Thomas H. Stone of the small communist splinter organization Revolutionary Workers League (RWL).

Though the campaign won several postponements of the sentence, Waller was finally executed on July 2, 1942.

The case failed to overturn the poll tax, but led to reform of Virginia's penal system and motivated Pauli Murray to begin her career in civil rights law.