On a May evening in 1936, a clique of umbrage-taking Detroit men escorted an oblivious fellow named Charles Poole on a one-way ride.
The men were united in the conviction that the racial, ethnic and religious purity of America was being diluted. They were itching to kill someone, and Poole was their unlucky – and unlikely – prey.
On one hand, he was white and American-born, like them. On the other, he was Catholic.
Poole, 22, and his wife, Becky, had a toddler daughter and were expecting a second child any day. The Detroit clique had heard third-hand – from a friend of an in-law – that Poole had beaten his pregnant wife, causing a miscarriage.
The men fetched Poole from home and told him he was being taken to a meeting about a new amateur baseball team. Instead, they drove him into the countryside.
Poole must have thought it was baseball team hazing as he was manhandled out of the car. But two men, Dayton Dean and Ervin Lee, pointed guns at him as the ringleader, Harvey Davis, delivered a stern lecture.
“You have beaten your wife for the last time,” Davis sneered.
There was an awkward pause.
“Davis stopped talking,” Dean later explained. “I looked around. I knew I was supposed to shoot him, so I started firing.”
Lee joined in, and Poole was killed and left there to molder.
On the ride back to town, Davis grumbled that quick-draw Dean had butted in on his moral homily.
“He said he had some more to say to Poole,” Dean said. “He didn’t expect me to shoot right off the reel – not so quick.”
The gang had gone off half-cocked in a number of ways.
Becky Poole had not been beaten, nor had she miscarried. In fact, she was in labor at the time of the shooting. And she loved her husband.
“Nobody could hate Charley,” the woman cried. “He never hurt anyone in his whole life.”
The irrational murder was an appropriate coming-out party for the Black Legion, a Midwest cousin of the Ku Klux Klan. It became famous briefly. Newspapers gave wild estimates of its membership, up to 5 million. A few thousand probably was closer to the truth.
Legionnaires dressed in black hooded robes topped by jaunty pirate hats, complete with skull and crossbones. Their enemies’ list was exhaustive, including all immigrants, blacks, Jews, Catholics, nontraditional Protestant faiths, labor unions, farm cooperatives and various fraternal groups.
Members adhered to “the tenets of the Christian religion, the maintenance of white supremacy, and principles of pure Americanism.”
Many members were uneducated southerners who had migrated north to factory jobs in the Iron Belt. Ringleader Harvey Davis, a Black Legion colonel, and triggerman Dean, a major, worked for the Detroit electric company.
A Detroit paper said the Black Legion was “straight from the heart of the Deep South of Carpetbag days.” The FBI called them hillbillies. The Detroit News tracked down the founder, Bill Shepard, a country doctor in Ohio, and found him to be a “harmless old coot who was always … talking a lot of sentimental twaddle about the old South and white supremacy.”
But not all Black Legionnaires were harmless hicks.
The membership roll included dozens of police officers, a Michigan legislator and the notoriously corruptible Wayne County prosecutor Duncan McRea who explained that he had “accidentally” signed a membership card.
Dayton Dean proved to be a dubious front man for “pure Americanism.” The husky Navy veteran, 36, had been divorced by his wife on the grounds of physical abuse and cruelty. He then lived in sin with another woman, until she chased him off after he molested her 14-year-old daughter.
Dean was filled with remorse when he learned that he’d made Becky Poole a widow over a bogus rumor. He called it “a horrible mistake,” and he agreed to reveal the Black Legion’s secrets to prosecutors.
Days before Poole was killed, Dean said, the same Detroit cabal had accosted a black man, Silas Coleman. They drove him out into the country, told him to run, then mercilessly shot him in the back.
Dean said that shooting was another brainstorm of Harvey Davis, who “wanted to see how it felt to shoot a Negro.”
The stool pigeon also revealed unsuccessful Black Legion murder plots against a Michigan newspaper editor, whose home was firebombed because he opposed a legionnaire politician, and against a suburban mayor who angered the organization by hiring blacks for city jobs.
Dean’s confession led to charges against more than 50 members of the Black Legion. He stunned his conferrers and his attorney by pleading guilty during a routine preliminary court hearing. He then immediately took the witness stand to publicly implicate the others.
“I shot Poole because I was supposed to,” he said. “I had no personal grudge.”
Dean testified against his former mates in a series of criminal trials in 1936 and ’37, leading to 46 convictions in four separate cases, including the Poole and Coleman murders. More than a dozen men were sent to prison for life. Execution was not an option in Michigan, resolutely opposed to capital punishment since 1846.
Dean did not get off easy for his testimony. He went to prison and never got out, dying of a heart attack in 1960 after 24 years locked up.
His legacy was the disintegration of the Black Legion. The Detroit News wrote its epitaph:
“Hooey may look like romance and adventure in the moonlight, but it always looks like hooey when you bring it out in the daylight.”
