Mercy for One, Silence for Seven
On a cold December night in 1949, Bill Allman was killed. This series follows the ripple effects — from courtroom to clemency, from grief to guitars — and the music that rose from it all... music that outlasted everyone who played it. Read the full series introduction here.
The Waiting
After Buddy Green’s re-capture, they loaded him on a convoy bound for the State Penitentiary in Richmond, Virginia — the final stop for condemned men whose days bled out in cigarette butts and whispered prayers. Buddy could practically hear the hum of the chair behind iron doors.
No letters survive from Buddy’s time on Death Row. No paper trail of his dreams, his terror, or the rustle of his attorney’s last petitions. But common sense says Willard Ashburn didn’t stop trying to save Buddy. He was a man who knew the back channels: when to send a letter, when to pour a drink, when to remind the governor that a young white veteran was worth saving — cracked or not.
By the time you’re down to counting days until death, hope becomes its own kind of torture. Buddy must have heard the echoes of the electric switch in his sleep — the chair waiting, the governor’s pen silent. If any mercy was coming, it stayed hidden behind office doors and late-night phone calls Buddy would never hear.
So Buddy sat, waited to die, and then — perhaps when he’d already rehearsed how his last breath would leave his lungs — came the news: the governor would spare him. Not by grace alone, but because Buddy was the sort of white man postwar Virginia still knew how to pity.
Battle’s Signature
Governor John Stewart Battle, a World War I veteran himself, chose to commute Buddy’s death sentence to life in prison, with the slim chance that “life” might someday mean freedom.
But just a year earlier, that same governor, so cautious with the executioner’s switch, had stood firm and cold against a wave of pleas that crossed oceans to land on his desk and pile up.
In 1949, the Martinsville Seven — Booker T. Millner, Francis DeSales Grayson, Frank Hairston Jr., Howard Lee Hairston, James Luther Hairston, Joe Henry Hampton, and John Clabon Taylor — were arrested and convicted of raping a white woman, Ruby Stroud Floyd, who survived the heinous crime. The trials of the Martinsville Seven were swift: all-white, all-male juries, verdicts handed down in eight days.
Their lawyers argued due process was a myth, their confessions coerced, their trials rushed and infected by fear. Protesters gathered on the Capitol steps.
Letters and telegrams to Governor Battle poured in from every corner of the globe, pleading with him to spare the seven men. The NAACP. Eleanor Roosevelt. The Pope. They didn’t ask for freedom — just life instead of the electric chair.
President Truman’s office logged thousands of telegrams in Washington, D.C.
Governor Battle read each plea and turned them all away.
“If the law is to be respected and enforced,” he wrote, “it must not be subject to the changing winds of sentiment.”
In Richmond, Governor John S. Battle faced no deluge of telegrams for Buddy Green — no letters from presidents, no petitions from the Pope. But just a year earlier, those same office doors had groaned under the weight of mercy pleas for the Martinsville Seven. Battle turned them all away. And yet, when it came to Buddy — a white, war-scarred veteran — Battle reached for his pen and spared him.
Governor John S. Battle
Governor of Virginia who denied clemency for Buddy Green.
Battle did stay the execution of the seven men, but only long enough to pretend he’d listened. When the final appeals ran dry, he washed his hands of it all.
“The law had spoken,” Battle said.
Some historians say the unique horror of the Martinsville case lay in its tension: the tug-of-war between due process and the fear of postwar chaos. Cities across America had boiled with race riots. Lawmen stiffened their backs, promising order at any cost. White supremacy, crime control, domestic security — they all bled together, and seven young men were electrocuted to remind a jittery public that the old code still held.
Battle’s official line for showing Buddy leniency, clipped and neat for the papers, claimed mercy: Buddy’s war record in Italy and the European-African-Middle East campaign had left him “suffering from mental stress and strain,” enough for Battle to believe that Buddy’s actions in killing Bill Allman were “not those of a normal individual, although in the legal sense he is not now insane.”
Battle went so far as to say he had consulted the Governor’s Board of Advisory on Mental Hygiene and followed their recommendation, yet his words still rang hollow, especially when held up to his words about the Martinsville Seven and their executions.
That’s because the court record says otherwise. The record shows Buddy was sane at the time of the murder and sane enough to stand trial. The man Virginia trusted most to untangle madness from malice — Dr. Joseph R. Blalock — had closely examined Buddy at Southwestern State Hospital. Blalock, a Johns Hopkins-trained psychiatrist and veteran of a thousand criminal cases, had seen the cracks that real insanity leaves behind. He determined that Buddy had none.
Dr. Blalock told Judge Kellam and Sheriff Malbon that Buddy was sane — sane when he raised the gun, sane when he pulled the trigger, and sane when he fled down that dirt road with four stolen dollars in his pocket.
The crack wasn’t in Buddy’s mind — it was in the law that bent to spare him.
The same governor who could not — or would not — find mercy for the seven men of Martinsville found it easily enough for Buddy.
To the system, Buddy was salvageable. He was white. He was a veteran. And if he was broken, well, a life sentence seemed punishment enough for killing another white man.
Martinsville Executions
Three of the Martinsville Seven — Joe Henry Hampton, Booker T. Millner, and John Clabon Taylor — were executed on February 5, 1951. The other four — Francis Grayson, Frank Hairston Jr., Howard Lee Hairston, and James Luther Hairston — went to the chair on February 2.
No mercy. No commutation. Just the hum of the chair and the silence of the graves that followed.
It would take seventy years before Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northrop would admit what was always true: that the Martinsville Seven were denied due process and executed under a double standard that never applied to men like Buddy. In 2021, they were granted posthumous pardons — too late to save their lives, but just in time to remind us what the word justice ought to mean.
A Crack That Never Closed
So Buddy never sat in that chair with the leather straps. The sheriff’s jail cell couldn’t hold him but the governor’s pen did. And back in Princess Anne County, folks folded the paper and looked at each other across courthouse steps and service counters, whispering that maybe the boy had just cracked under the strain, as Governor Battle said.
But the men who kept the courthouse pillars steady — Judge Kellam in his high school of Knights, Malbon on his bridge spanning the county line — knew better. The real crack was never in Buddy’s skull. It was in the law itself, bending like pine under a storm that never really passes. It just waits for the next gust to blow the jail door wide open again.
In the end, the Martinsville Seven spent their final hours singing and praying. Calm, composed, they faced death with more dignity than the system had ever shown them. Buddy, meanwhile, rose the next morning — alive. The law had spoken, but its voice wasn’t the same for every man.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
