Jim Crow on the chopping block
January 24, 2007 at 5:00 pm by Web Editor in News
Although he rose through the ranks of the Atlanta Police Department and retired as a major, the Peace Officers’ Annuity and Benefit Fund didn’t recognize Howard Baugh’s membership and denied him and other black officers their retirement benefits on the basis of their race.
He’s still waiting for the pension he deserves.
When he joined the homicide division in the early 1950s, Baugh had already been around death plenty, having carried the bodies of his fellow GIs off of Mount Suribachi during the battle of Iwo Jima. The first African-American on the department to be promoted to detective sergeant, he worked a security detail for Martin Luther King Jr. when the Civil Rights leader spoke at Wheat Street Baptist Church in 1960. He ended up working a lot of security around King.
"I told myself nothing would ever happen to him in this town," says the retired officer, now 82.
Four years older than "ML," Baugh grew up in Sweet Auburn, and was a neighbor and friend of the King family. His mother and King’s mother used to talk over the hedge bushes every day.
"I’d never known ML to be the kind of guy the rest of us were in the neighborhood," Baugh says. "Daddy King kept his mind occupied with the church."
When the young Baugh looked through the window of the King house once and heard King’s father telling him, "I’m gonna beat your ass until I make something out of you," Baugh said he was laughing so hard he caught the elder King’s attention. "’Send Howard over here,’" the pastor told a third party. ‘"I’ve got something for him, too.’"
Looking out for King later in life was professional for him and it was personal.
Looking out for Baugh and a dwindling population of other retired African-American peace officers is also personal for Civil Rights activist state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, D-Atlanta, and state Rep. Willie Talton, R-Warner Robins, a retired deputy sheriff. The lawmakers have co-sponsored a resolution that would require the state to pay retirement benefits to officers denied by Georgia’s Jim Crow era, when segregation was the law of the land — in this case specifically between the years of 1931 and 1976.
The legislation is a companion piece to a bill Brooks sponsored last year. Already signed into law by Gov. Sonny Perdue, the first part enables active-member African-American peace officers who did not receive benefits to reapply. The second piece targets an estimated 100 African-American retired officers such as Baugh who are still alive, who applied for the fund and were denied membership.
"They sent their money in and when they found out they were African-American, they sent it back," newly retired police officer Earl Westbrooks says of the Peace Officers’ Annuity and Benefit Fund. Westbrooks helped Brooks and Talton with the legislation.
For Brooks, it’s been a seven-year struggle to bring retired black officers into the pension system. "This is my passion for this session," he says. "This is No. 1 for me. These officers are dying."
Westbrooks estimates the 30-year officers would be entitled to $710 a month, and the bill would require the state to pay back the entirety of what these men are owed.
The fight has special meaning for Baugh. He has lately faced severe health problems, and last month he had his right leg amputated due to a diabetic condition.
"I’ve been waiting for them to pass this," he says.
The second piece of Brooks’ and Talton’s legislation passed unanimously last year in the House, but never made it out of the Senate Retirement Committee on the last day of the session. Because the new law would require a constitutional amendment, Senate approval means the issue would then have to go before the voters in the next statewide election, which is in 2008. If the voters signal the General Assembly to give the men their retirement pensions out of state coffers, the peace officers would get their money before the end of the decade.
"If we get House Resolution 30 passed and signed into law," Brooks says, "it will close the door on institutional racism that existed in this state."
Battling racism on the one side, derided on the other by hard-liners as a "black bourgeois," Baugh doesn’t harbor any bitterness. He says he did his best on the department he loved and for the people of Atlanta, including his beloved King family.
When he encountered John Lewis preparing to protest on the street during the 1960s, Baugh went to speak with the Civil Rights leader personally before any trouble started.
"John, are you going to jail?" Baugh asked Lewis.
"I’ve got on my jail clothes," Lewis told him.
So Baugh presided over the arrests of Lewis and his fellow student protestors in the most restrained way possible, he said.
"Howard," Lewis complained to him, "you’re taking the damn spark out of it!"
And all these years later Baugh says proudly, "But nobody got hurt."
– Max Pizarro
– Photo by Joeff Davis
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