It was March 23, 1945, when four white cops entered Hattie DeBardelaben’s property in Alabama, accusing her of making and selling untaxed whiskey.
The 46-year-old Black mother of seven children denied the allegation and welcomed the cops to search her property.
But the cops ended up killing her by punching her repeatedly and breaking her neck in front of her 15-year-old son, who was arrested for trying to defend his mother.
However, an FBI investigation conducted at the request of the NAACP determined she had died of a heart attack and closed the case a few months later. One of the cops involved in her death, Clyde Smith, later became sheriff of Autauga County.
The case remained under wraps for decades until last month when the National Archives and Records Administration released 69 pages of documents from the investigation under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act, which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019.
The cold case of Hattie DeBardelaben was the first set of records released under the act, providing closure for the victim’s grandchildren, who were never told by their parents how their grandmother died.
“I cried for a couple of days, because I couldn’t believe what had happened to my grandmother,” Mary DeBardelaben, 74, told AL.com.
“It was a cover-up,” her brother, Dan DeBardelaben, told CNN. “That’s what happened — these documents make it clear.”
The documents, which can be read here, here, and here, shed light on a horrific case of murder by law enforcement agents and the ensuing government coverup that unfortunately still exists today.
“The name Hattie DeBardelaben may be unfamiliar to most people, but her death at the hands of law enforcement officers in 1945 was sadly typical of the violence – and even lethality – that many Black Americans suffered in the Jim Crow South,” Margaret Burnham, co-chair of the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board, said in a statement.
“Although her death was investigated by federal agents at the time, the perpetrators were never held accountable. However, we hope that the release of these records after all these years provides some answers to her descendants while also illuminating a dark chapter in our nation’s history.”
The Murder
Clyde White, who was an Autauga County sheriff’s deputy at the time, told the FBI that he had received complaints that DeBardelaben was selling illegal whiskey, so he contacted agents from the federal Alcohol Tax Unit, which was the precursor to today’s Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives federal agency.
White said he pulled up to DeBardelaben’s farm with three ATU agents named John H. Barrenbrugge, J.C. Moseley and L.O. Smith.
White said they only found a quart of whiskey along with some empty jugs that smelled of whiskey and decided to arrest her for the whiskey and Edward for interfering with the arrest, even though he did not describe exactly how the boy interfered other than saying “these white sons of b_tches can’t search this house.”
White told the FBI agents that they never struck DeBardelaben or her son and nephew and that DeBardelaben walked to the car without limping or complaining.
He also claimed that DeBardelaben died suddenly in the back seat of the car as they were driving to the county jail in Platville.
But DeBardelaben’s 15-year-old son, Edward Lewis Underwood, provided the FBI with a completely different version of events, telling investigators that he had just come home from school when the law enforcement officers pulled up to the family farm in a rural area outside Selma and asked his mother if she had any whiskey to sell.
He said that his mother told the officers that she had no whiskey and that they were welcome to search the home even though they did not have a warrant.
But then her 16-year-old nephew, James Callier, came home from school, and the officers ordered him to sit on the ground, but it did not appear he heard them, so one of the officers walked up to him and punched him, prompting Callier to sit next to Underwood.
“Leave him alone. He is fixing to go home,” DeBardelaben told the cops in defense of her nephew, which is what led to her beating and death.
Edward described a horrific scene where the same cop who punched his cousin walked up to his mother and punched her, knocking her down and causing her to fall on a pot of boiling water she was using to wash clothes.
She tried to stand up, but then two of the ATU agents struck her again, causing her to fall against the pot of boiling water.
“She got up again and they both hit her again. This time, she fell on her knees with both her hands on the ground.”
The agents then lifted her from the ground and placed her on a chair, where she remained without speaking, “panting and grunting like a person whose breath was cut off.”
Edward said he called for his two older brothers, who were working in the field,d to come to the house, Johnnie and Bennie DeBardelaban, but when they approached the house, two of the cops pulled out their guns and ordered them to sit on the ground while the two other cops dragged their mother to the car, placing her in the back seat along with Edward.
As they were driving, Hattie pleaded with the men to stop to allow her to drink some water from a nearby stream, but they ignored her request and continued driving.
She then began vomiting, so they stopped the car and allowed her to vomit on the side of the road. When she was done vomiting, Edward pulled her back into the car, and they continued driving, but she then fainted.
They stopped the car again, and White walked to a creek, filled a bottle with water, and allowed her son to wipe her face and allow her to drink, but she was already dying.
“That’s my baby,” were her final words in reference to Edward, her youngest son, who was trying his best to help his mother.
By the time they arrived at the jail in Plattville, she was dead, so they locked Edward in a cell and contacted local undertakers to take his mother’s body to a funeral home.
The Cover-up
Dan Albright, a Black undertaker from a local funeral home in Platville, told the FBI he had been contacted by the sheriff to pick up the body from the jail at about 6:30 p.m. that evening. Albright said her body was still in the back seat of the police car and that she was “foaming at the mouth and nose just like a boar hog foams.”
He also said the sheriff had contacted Dr. James Tankersley, who examined her body while it was still in the police car and determined she had died of a heart attack despite signs she had broken her neck.
“The only thing I noticed that was different from other bodies was that whenever we picked up the body, the head would fall back,” Albright told investigators. “I said nothing to the doctor about the neck. After his examination, the doctor said she died from heart trouble.”
That evening, at the request of Edward, another Black undertaker named Fred Williams picked up the body from the initial funeral home in Plattville to transport to his funeral home in Selma, where he examined it the following morning and determined she did not die from a broken neck but arrived at that conclusion without dissecting her neck.
He also pointed out that it had been more than 12 hours since she had been killed, and rigor mortis had set in, which would have made it impossible to come to a full determination.
According to a 2016 medical study, it is impossible to make a full determination about a broken neck without dissecting the neck, stating the following:
First, it is essential to dissect the neck properly at postmortem examination. This entails the layer by layer dissection of the anterior neck following vascular decompression of the neck by removal of the brain and the viscera (2). The dissection of the neck is best achieved by a series of incisions that provide for maximal exposure of the ventral, lateral and submental portions of the neck. This dissection can often be extended to involve the face. Second, it is vitally important to proactively recognize the pitfalls and artifacts that may be apparent based upon the history, scene and circumstances surrounding the case. The prepared mind will be unlikely to fall into diagnostic traps related to misinterpretation of observations of no significance.
Rigor mortis, which is the stiffening of muscles after death, affects the neck within hours after death, peaking after 12 hours, according to a 2023 medical study.
The FBI also interviewed DeBardelaben’s doctor, a white man named J.S. Chisholm, who had treated her for 10 years, telling investigators that her health had always been fine until about a month earlier when she began complaining of shortness of breath and the swelling of her feet.
He said he diagnosed her with a heart murmur and told her she could probably live out the normal span of a lifetime, “but it was not at all unusual to have a person in her condition drop dead very suddenly, particularly if they had been subjected to any unusual strain or excitement.”
That was all investigators needed to close the case on June 30, 1945, determining the cops did nothing wrong, stating the following in their report.
Our investigation reflected that she had recently had a heart attack and had been under treatment by a local Doctor Who stated that her condition was such that any unusual excitement might cause her death. The Doctor Who examined her subsequent to her death discovered no evidence that DeBardelaben had been beaten or otherwise mistreated prior to her death and stated that her death was caused by a heart attack. The arresting officers denied having beaten the victim.
After reading the documents, Dan and Mary DeBardelaban, whose father was Bennie DeBardelaban, one of the young men working the fields when their mother was killed, finally understood why they were never told by their family how their grandmother had died, even while visiting her grave growing up. All of her seven children have since died.
“My dad and his brothers and cousins, you know, got to witness what actually happened,” Dan told AL.com.
“Seeing that, I’m sure, was so traumatic for my father and was one of the reasons that he never said a single word, nor did he or his other six sisters and brothers ever have a conversation with us about what took place.”
