Book Excerpt: A Police Beating in Petersburg

Eighty years ago, a young Black man was tortured by Petersburg police on a bogus charge that brought him within two days of execution.

The recent fatal police beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis recalls an almost equally horrific beating of a young Black man by Petersburg police in 1943, with near-devastating results.

At 9:40 a.m. on July 18, 1943, Silas Rogers, a 21-year-old Black Florida barbershop employee, was hitchhiking north between Petersburg and Colonial Heights when a Petersburg police car skidded to a stop beside him. Two furious officers leaped from the car and ordered Rogers at gunpoint to lie on the ground.

Rogers was a stowaway on a Seaboard Airline Silver Meteor train on his way to a New York selective service board when a conductor found him and ordered him to disembark in Petersburg, forcing him to hitchhike.

The two policemen shoved Rogers into the car and, as they drove to the Petersburg station, accused him of murdering a fellow officer, Robert Hatchell.

The night before, Officers Hatchell and W. M. Jolly were on routine patrol when they spotted a Studebaker with North Carolina plates reported stolen. They U-turned in pursuit, and the car sped down West Washington Street before it wrecked near the hospital. The driver bolted. Two passengers named Jordan and Stephens were taken into custody by Jolly, while Hatchell pursued the driver.

Minutes later, two shots rang out behind the hospital, and Hatchell was found dead from a bullet that entered his left hip and excited his abdomen.

His gun, and the real shooter, were never found.

While in police custody, Rogers insisted he was on the train the entire time. He denied any knowledge of the stolen car or shooting officer Hatchell. But the police were undeterred and, convinced they had their man, began forcibly extracting a confession.

Hustings Court record 2855, Silas Rogers v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1943) graphically describes the brutal treatment Rogers endured:

“He was there severely beaten by the members of the Petersburg Police Force. He was struck over his head by a blackjack which inflicted a severe gash and a knot on his head. He was also hit with hard fist blows about the body and face which caused him to bleed profusely from the head and nose. Three glasses of water were poured up his nose as he was pinned to the floor on his back by several police officers. A police officer pointed a gun in his face and threatened to kill him. His hair was pulled, he was slapped down, and his hands were bent backwards to the near-breaking point …”

The torture worked, and Rogers finally confessed to killing Hatchell. Then, police brought in Jordan and Stephens. They claimed Rogers was not the driver.

With Rogers jailed, police searched the Petersburg Hospital and Lee Park area with bloodhounds for two days. They pulled fingerprints from the Studebaker, but none matched Rogers’. No paraffin test was conducted on Rogers to determine if he had recently fired a gun.

Rogers was indicted in the Hustings Court of the city of Petersburg on Aug. 6, 1943 for the murder of Robert Hatchell. The prosecution maintained that on the night of July 17, Rogers stole a Studebaker in Raleigh, North Carolina then picked up James Jordan and Charles Stephens nearby.

Jordan and Stephens testified that Rogers was the Studebaker driver although it was dark when they got into the car. They also admitted that they were AWOL from the army.

Officer Jolly also testified that Rogers was the driver of the Studebaker. However, he admitted that he only got a partial side view of his face. Not one witness could positively identify Rogers or anyone resembling him at any point.

Rogers testified that he signed a confession under duress after being beaten and water tortured by the police. Also, the clothes Rogers wore on the day of his arrest were introduced as evidence, but police had washed out the bloodstains received during the beating.

A Seaboard employee in Hamlet, North Carolina testified that he saw a man resembling Rogers get on the train near Raleigh. A conductor who ordered him off the train in Petersburg testified that the space where he was riding was dark, and he also did not get a good look at his face.

Despite all the conflicting testimony, the coerced confession, and the complete lack of forensic evidence, the jury found Rogers guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death in the electric chair.

Three writs of error were submitted to the Supreme Court of Virginia in October 1944. In Rogers v. Commonwealth, the High Court also admonished the actions of the Petersburg Police: “The record does disclose that when the defendant was first arrested [Rogers] was inhumanly assaulted by the police officers who had him in charge. Such conduct upon the part of the officers of the law merits our utter disapproval. The assault made upon the defendant was a cowardly one, uncalled for and beyond the realm of justification.”

Yet they upheld the verdict and set Nov. 24 as the execution date.

But two weeks later, on Oct. 24, a Seaboard diesel supervisor named Murray who was also on the same train met Rogers and his attorneys at the penitentiary. After the meeting, Murray told death row supervisor Capt. Penn “that is the boy” who had stowed away.

Murray signed an affidavit attesting to Rogers’ presence on that train, including details only the two could know, but it was too late to introduce this eyewitness evidence into a new trial. Once Murray’s affidavit became public, the Commonwealth started backpedaling that maybe Rogers did come to Petersburg by train after all, an admission that rendered their entire prosecution void.

In October 1945, the Pardons Board, citing reasonable doubt, commuted Rogers’ death sentence to life in prison. As inmate number 51111, Rogers got a job in the penitentiary as a sewing machine operator, and that is where his case paused for five years.

On Dec. 29, 1950, Silas Rogers acquired an unlikely supporter – Richmond News Leader editor, James J. Kilpatrick.

It was an unlikely union. During his 1950 –1966 stint as the editorial page editor, Kilpatrick blasted court-ordered integration and supported the “massive resistance” movement created by Virginia’s white ruling class. He also invented “interposition,” a term that described a states’ rights gambit to ignore federal laws they simply didn’t like.

Regardless, Kilpatrick believed that the courts had unfairly convicted Rogers and presented his case in a series of three editorials titled “The Curious Case of Silas Rogers.”

At the same time, an Argosy magazine investigation found out that Rogers had never learned how to drive so he could never have driven from Raleigh to Petersburg. Meanwhile, Rogers’ attorney, Robert Cooley Jr., and civil rights attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Martin A. Martin continued to pursue his case.

After the publication of Kilpatrick’s series, Gov. John S. Battle ordered an independent study of the Rogers case. Then, on Dec. 23, he called Kilpatrick and said, “You’ll be glad to hear this – Silas Rogers is coming out tomorrow.”

Dressed in a suit he sewed himself, Silas Rogers walked out of the penitentiary on Dec. 24, 1952, holding an unconditional pardon that Gov. Battle granted based on the “mass of evidence” accumulated over ten years.

“I never lost hope,” Rogers told News Leader reporter Charles McDowell while waiting to travel to Newark, New Jersey. “I still had my hope when there was only two days left before that electric chair.”

Rogers remained in New Jersey for the rest of his life. He died in 1983.

***

Correction: This book excerpt has been updated to correct the name of Seaboard Airline Silver Meteor train which Rogers rode. Thanks to the reader with the close eye for historical detail.

This is an excerpt from the book “Closing the Slaughterhouse: The Inside Story of Death Penalty Abolition in Virginia” by Dale Brumfield. Published May 6, 2022 by Abolition Press and Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (VADP), Richmond, Virginia.

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