‘I never dreamed I’d ever be a free man again’: How a town of Old World farmers saved a black man marked for death

‘God will save you’ One of their own The greatest break

On June 10, 2019, a Rosalia man named Robert Charles Williams passed away. A devout Christian who always carried a beloved copy of the New Testament and a loving husband known for his unimpeachable work ethic, Williams was 82 years old.

For over half a century, he had been living on borrowed time and what he believed to be the grace of God. He was never supposed to live past 23.

As the country was set ablaze by the civil rights movement and reactionary violence in the American South, Williams had quietly walked into the sleepy country town of Warden one summer day in 1959 and quickly become a beloved member of the farming community. The African American field worker was a reserved, overachieving farmhand for four years, primarily for elderly sugar beet farmer John Zirker.

He fashioned a fastidiously tidy home for himself in a quonset hut on Zirker’s farm, and in a few short years had earned a reputation for outworking other laborers, a man trustworthy enough to care for the horde of children and grandchildren when farmers left town on holiday. The work was rough, but life was quiet, simple and routine.

Then on Sept. 15, 1963, a phalanx of FBI agents came screaming into Warden and arrested Williams as he stepped out of his car. Bystanders familiar with Williams reportedly rushed to his defense, demanding to know why federal agents had just seized the best-liked farmworker in town.

As the possibly apocryphal story goes, the agents, dumbfounded, pointed to a bulletin board in the post office, where a wanted poster that had been on display for years showed the picture of a black man from Georgia on the lam for murder. Perhaps realizing it for the first time, the crowd was staring at a slightly younger picture of Williams.

But something was off.

“We’re here for Cauthen,” the agents said.

There was a lot that the Warden community did not know about Williams. To start, he had been born in 1937 over 2,500 miles away in Pike County, Georgia, to the name Charlie Will Cauthen.

Cauthen was orphaned when he was just 9 years old when his mother died of cancer, his father having died of a heart condition years earlier. Still a child, Cauthen worked nights at a restaurant and went to school in the day, managing to finish the ninth grade before serving honorably in the Armed Forces. Beyond his older sister, who raised him, he formed family with cousins.

When in 1959 a white service station attendant from Pike County named Elijah Melvin Perkins was found dead in his car in an apparent robbery-turned-murder, one of those cousins pointed the finger at Cauthen, telling police he was the killer. A gun belonging to Cauthen was allegedly found at the scene.

Cauthen felt betrayed. Authorities noted as much in the FBI wanted poster, printed in 1960, that had been pinned to a Warden bulletin board.

“The fugitive assertedly manifested a bitter attitude against the principle State witness at his trial and is alleged to have threatened to kill the witness, his cousin,” the poster stated.

This kind of rage was atypical for Cauthen, the FBI wrote, noting that “despite the manifestation of hostility toward the witness, Cauthen has been described as a very congenial individual with an agreeable personality and neat appearance.”

Cauthen was arrested four days after the murder. While confined to his cell, officers allegedly told Cauthen that a lynch mob was forming and would kill him if he didn’t confess to the crime. Cauthen moved from jail to jail four times due to threats before ending up a county over in Spalding County Jail, he would tell investigators.

Prosecutors told the court that Cauthen had confessed to robbing and strangling the victim, though he would later say he had been forced to make a statement that was wrongly used against him. He later claimed that he had been riding in a car with Perkins when people in another car drove up and assaulted both of them.

It mattered little. In a trial that lasted less than a day, Cauthen was found guilty by an all-white jury and sentenced to die. No witnesses were called by the defense — it was the first trial for Cauthen’s lawyer, who told the defendant that he took more to music than practicing law.

In fact, after losing Cauthen’s case, the defense attorney would never try another, reportedly moving instead to Miami Beach to live out his dream of playing the electric organ.

Carl Maxey, renowned civil rights attorney, called the trial little more than “a perfunctory execution.” Cauthen was convicted Feb. 23, 1959, and sentenced to die a month later. As he awaited execution, he said that jailers would taunt him, gleefully explaining how a man in the electric chair “wiggles and strains and screams for mercy.”

As Cauthen would later tell the story, a cousin — not the one who had accused him of murder — visited his cell three days before he was to die, and handed him a copy of the New Testament. He had reportedly never been a stringently religious young man, but imminent death compelled him to open that tiny pocket Bible.

The exact verse he came across is unclear, but the message stuck: God will save you.

According to the official story, he would break the lock of his cell that night, though Cauthen himself would tell an altogether more serendipitous tale, said Kathy Hawkins, Zirker’s granddaughter.

Hawkins was a small child living on the Zirker family farm when Williams was arrested, and was able to speak with Williams before his recent death, she told the Herald. As Williams told it to Hawkins, the door to his cell had not been locked properly, and in the wee hours of May 25, 1959, he was able to simply open the door.

A guard sat just within view, but with his back turned to Cauthen, miraculously never turning to see the man on death row as he crept out of his cell. Further, Cauthen told Hawkins that the jailhouse roof had been under construction, and a ladder led straight from the jail’s floor to a gap in the ceiling, with which he made his escape. Whether by divine intervention or mortal incompetence, he had slipped his bonds.

A search party was called and hunting dogs put on Cauthen’s trail, but it was too late. Cauthen jumped a freight train, lay low among the cargo, rode the rails and just kept riding. He wouldn’t get off for days and over 2,500 miles as the full length of the American countryside slid by him.

Cauthen finally pulled himself from the train in Quincy, where he hitched a ride with a truck full of farm laborers seeking work in Warden. Once in the town he would call home, he walked onto the sugar beet farm of John Zirker, an elderly ethnic German who immigrated from Russia when he was a child, and asked for work.

Warden was originally a small rural town, settled in the late 1800s by German-Russian emigres and incorporated in 1910. In the 1940s the area began to grow rapidly with the irrigation brought by the Columbia Basin Project, as the federal government started selling farm units. The population jumped from 78 in 1940 to 949 in 1960, according to state census data.

Though the Old World influence on the town would steadily decline in the coming decades, at the time many of the landowners were German-Russian immigrants like the Zirkers, according to residents from the period.

Most of the workers, meanwhile, were Hispanic, along with a smattering of African Americans, who came in search of work and often lived as Williams did on the properties of their employers, Hawkins said.

Some have reported that Cauthen had no idea where he was headed when he jumped on the train, while others have claimed he intentionally fled to Grant County, where he had been stationed with the armed forces. Regardless, Warden was about as far away from Georgia as a man could run without leaving the country or smuggling himself to Alaska, and Williams began a new life with a new name.

For four years, he found a tentative peace. Until, on a hot August day, the feds rolled into town, bringing Williams’ old life and old name with them.

With Williams located, the state of Georgia demanded his extradition to face the electric chair. In Grant County Jail, bail was set at $100,000, which a county official at the time said was the highest ever set in the county’s history. He would soon be transferred to Spokane to await the arrival of Georgia authorities, where his fate seemed sealed. The jig was up.

But the people of Warden, many of whom had fled Russia as the Soviets clamped down on the countryside, were not to be trifled with, and they fought back. The Zirkers and other emigres weren’t racially enlightened people at the forefront of the civil rights movement, Hawkins said, and often referred to their workers by racial slurs. But they considered Williams one of their own, and the tight-knit community refused to abandon one of their own.

Within days, a group of Warden residents hired Ephrata attorney C.E. Monty Hormel to defend Williams, “because of their interest in Williams as a good local citizen,” Hormel told the press. “We are not trying to make a racial issue out of it. We are pushing this matter because we believe Williams is a worthwhile man.”

By mid-September, Warden residents and the American Civil Liberties Union had retained a number of additional attorneys to represent Williams, including famous civil rights attorney Carl Maxey. Those attorneys and 25 Warden residents traveled to a hearing in Olympia to urge Gov. Albert Rosellini to refuse to send Williams to what they said would be certain death. Nearly half the population of Warden, about 400 in all, signed a petition asking the governor to grant Williams mercy.

As details of Williams’ Georgia trial came to light, they became one more in a long list of stories convincing northern audiences that the South was in the throes of a lynch mob mentality. While confirming their clients’ claims of an all-white jury, Williams’ attorneys found that, though African Americans made up almost half of Pike County’s population, no black people had been put on a jury there since Reconstruction.

A solicitor general from Georgia sent as prosecutor denied that racial animus had guided the case, saying there was no “‘lynch atmosphere’ in the county as charged by Cauthen because the people of that county didn’t know the victim.”

The residents of Warden didn’t waver, throwing hootenannies to raise funds for Williams’ legal fund and continuing to petition the governor. By mid-January, a federal judge in Spokane denied Williams’ writ of habeas corpus, stating that he did not believe he had jurisdiction over the case, putting Williams’ life solely in the hands of Rosellini.

Days after the court’s decision, Rosellini told a delegation of 43 Warden residents that his decision would be “a soul-searching one.”

On March 16, 1964, Rosellini found his answer. The governor, in a special news conference, said that “public interest and the best ends of justice would be served by refusing extradition.” It was the only extradition Rosellini ever declined as governor.

A day later, Williams, amazed to be alive, amazed to be free, returned to the Zirker farm “extremely grateful” to the people of Warden. He was home.

“It’s going to take me at least a couple of days to recover from this wonderful news,” Cauthen told the Herald at the time. “I’m still amazed at the support I received. I am deeply grateful to everyone. I never dreamed I’d ever be a free man again.”

Though Williams was released from jail and no longer faced certain death, he would never truly be free. No one was ever brought to justice for Perkins’ murder, and, until the day he died, Georgia could have sought his extradition again if he ever left Washington.

But within the state’s borders, Williams went about his life. When he passed away last June in Rosalia, 59 years after he was sentenced to die in Georgia, he was survived by his wife and son, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

According to Lawyer, a magazine published by the Seattle University School of Law, Williams would have a chance to thank Rosellini 45 years after he was released from jail, when the former governor was 98.

“I thank you and I’m glad to meet you, and I thank you,” Williams reportedly told Rosellini as he grasped the governor’s hand. Rosellini smiled broadly in return.

“I knew I did the right thing then, and I know that even better now,” the governor reportedly replied.

Even in his last days, Hawkins said, he carried around a pocket-sized copy of the New Testament with him, the same one he had been given days before he was to die and a day before he would escape with his life. Along with it, he carried with him an enduring gratitude for the community that saved his life.

“It all boils down to this,” Williams said, 55 years ago, as he returned to the farm. “I have had a lot of breaks in my life, but this was the greatest. It was by the grace of God that this has come about. Of all the places I could have gone, it could have wound up differently.”

Emry Dinman can be reached via email at edinman@columbiabasinherald.com.