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But the most likely suspect, Wilson, has had a week in which to get his story straight, and because he’s white and a military man, any jury will choke on the “reasonable doubt” introduced by their failure to secure the crime scene. Prosecuting Wilson will only result in a high-profile acquittal that will showcase every detail of their incompetence and make them look even dumber. What’s needed is a fall guy to pin it on. And nobody’s more vulnerable to that sort of judicial lynching, in 1943 America, than one of the train’s African-American crew members. A provincial jury made up of white people whose familiarity with Black people consists entirely of racist pulp-mag stories about savage Black rapists attacking pure white maidens will be far more likely to convict a Black man than a white one in the absence of any real evidence of guilt. And such a fall-guy just happens to be handy, so with a little help from the LAPD’s jailhouse interrogation squad, they fabricate what they need. So, is this what happened? We can’t really know for sure. But it seems very likely. The motive was certainly there.
The U.S. War Department.BUT THE AGENCY with the most compelling motivation to crucify Folkes was the U.S. War Department. Here’s why: Imagine, for a moment, that you are an 18-year-old single woman, and it’s early 1943 — close to the darkest hour of the war. You’re doing your best to be brave, and everyone must make sacrifices, so you’re riding trains unchaperoned and walking to your home-front manufacturing job in the dark by yourself. But it’s OK, because you feel safe with all the uniformed soldiers and sailors around. Strong and brave and confident, they represent security to you, and you feel sure that if you should ever need anything, you could ask one of them to help you out. Then suddenly you hear about a story from the West Coast: A U.S. Marine has been accused of having raped and murdered a pretty girl just like you, in a Pullman sleeper car just like the ones you’re riding in regularly, all by yourself, on long war-related trips. Suddenly you’re looking at those soldiers and sailors in a completely different way — as potential threats rather than as sources of comfort. And every other pretty woman in the country is doing the same. They’re avoiding rail travel. When forced to take an overnight train, they’re arriving at their destinations exhausted and unrested. Worse yet, other low-quality men in uniform are starting to jump on this criminal bandwagon. There’s another assault, and another. Soon women are refusing to travel alone on rail cars and wondering if they’re safe on the streets. Morale, at this most key point in the war effort, collapses. And it all could have been avoided if … if the crime that touched it all off had been committed not by a uniformed soldier, but by, say, an African-American railroad cook. That would make it so much more of a random sort of threat; a Black train cook climbing into a Pullman berth with a passenger would be so unusual that people would view it as a freak incident. Looked at this way, railroading Folkes was almost a patriotic duty, and his subsequent execution wasn’t much different from a death on a battlefield. It may even have saved lives. But the price of that non-outcome was a grave injustice, an innocent man killed and a guilty one not only set free, but released from the duty assignment that would likely have cost him his life. And in fact, out of all the military personnel in that “murder car” on the night Martha James was killed, the only one who survived the war was the one who, if our theory is correct, should have taken Folkes' place in the gas chamber: Pvt. Harold Wilson.
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