After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law, I clerked for Judge Allgood in Birmingham. Among his judicial duties, he presided over every federal criminal prosecution in the Northern District of Alabama. Behind the scenes, he ran the national Democratic Party in Alabama. Although he did not attend Church, Judge Allgood was the most godly man I ever knew.
Judge Allgood, Robert Vance, a highly respected Birmingham lawyer, who was appointed to serve in the United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and other prominent patriotic Alabama people kept “segregation now, segregation forever" Alabama George Wallace from taking over Alabama’s National Democratic Party. Judge Vance was killed in his Birmingham home by a letter bomb.
In December 2000, Judge Allgood came to me in a dream and said he was thinking about getting into politics, and I said I didn’t think that was a good idea, but knowing him, I figured he would do it. I woke up in shock, because I detested politics. So, I blame Judge Allgood and God for everything I ever said and wrote about politics 😎 after I had that dream.
In 2016, when Donald Trump and his lemmings chanted, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”, I chanted “Lock them both up in adjoining cells." I told many Democrats that the Democratic Party is why Trump got elected in 2016, because they nominated the candidate he could beat, because she had dirt on Joe Biden, who could have beaten Trump, and nobody knew Hillary Clinton’s dirt yet.
In 2020, for the first time in my life, I voted very reluctantly for a major party candidate, Joe Biden, because he and the Democrats did not remind me of Adolph Hitler and his lemmings leading up to World War II, which Donald Trump and his lemmings did.
Alas, when I saw President Biden help Israel kill, maim, starve and displace the Gaza civilian population, I knew I would not vote for him again. When I saw Kamala Harris line up with Biden and Israel, I knew I could not vote for her. I do not vote for war criminals. I view the people running Hamas and Israel as war criminals, too.
I think the karma Biden, Harris and members of Congress who kept giving Israel money and guns to obliterate Gaza generated for America will be severe. I think America is no more “one nation, under God” than are Russia, Red China, North Korea, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Venezuela.
Most Christians know Jesus said as you sow, so shall you reap, people who live by the sword, die by the sword, and first take the beam out of their own eye and then you will be able to help someone else remove the speck from his/her eye.
If I were America’s president, after seeing what Israel was doing in Gaza, I cut Israel loose, knowing that makes me a one-term president, because I have to answer to God, not to a political party, news media, social media, death threats and voters.
I tell Israel on America national television, if it uses even one of its nuclear weapons, I will obliterate Israel and Palestine with nukes, hoping that will cause other nuclear powers to stand down instead of destroy humanity and the planet in a nuclear holocaust. And, there will be no Palestine for the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to fight over and start World War III.
I order public release of every file the American government has on UFOs, hoping that turns Americans’ focus to what their religions and their government don’t want the public to worry about.
I tell the American people that I have ordered my U.S. Attorney General to litigate against any state that requires reading or posting the Bible, or parts of it, in public schools, in violation of Amendment 1, which Amendment 14 applied to the states.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I say my Attorney General has my blessing to tell states they are free to neutrally teach in history courses the history and precepts of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Shamanism and other religions.
Back to Oz.
Anyone not trapped in Donald Trump’s cult should read Joyce Vance’s “More Lies About Project 2025” Substack newsletter today, because Project 2025 is a blueprint for a white Christian-right takeover of America. Here’s a link: https://joycevance.substack.com/p/more-lies-about-project-2025
Joyce is married to Judge Bob Vance’s son. Joyce was the US Attorney in Birmingham, Alabama, meaning she was in charge of every federal criminal prosecution in the United States Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
I hope to see Joyce start chanting Trump and his lemmings and Project 2025 are a white Christian supremacist cult, and they are very similar to Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party leading up to World War II, and they want to make America a right wing Christian Reich, and presently Donald Trump, who is no more a follower of Jesus than Adolph Hitler was, is their Führer.
Trump keeps saying he has nothing to do with Project 2025, but his vice president running mate J.D. Vance wrote the foreword for the Project 2025 book, which is yet another of countless examples of when Trump’s lips are moving, he is lying.
The Project 2025 people think they are pulling Trump’s strings, but he needs them to get back in the White House where he cannot be criminally prosecuted in federal court, and he knows a sucker is born every minute, and he pulls Project 2025 people's strings- he could care less about any of them, if they don’t click their heels and heil him.
To anyone who says Trump is not the Führer of a white supremacist American cult, I say, look at photos and film footage of white MAGA rally mobs, the January 6, 2021 white mob's attempt to overthrow the presidential election, the white mob rally where the sniper barely missed killing Trump, and white mob Trump-Vance rallies.
Examples.
Then look at photos and film footage of the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia white mob protest against removing statutes of the Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from public view. President Trump said those protestors were good people.
Example.
Here’s Judge Allgood’s chapter in A FEW REMARKABLE ALABAMA PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN:
HE USED TO DRINK MOONSHINE
I wish to tell a story about a wonderful man I came to know and love, Clarence W. Allgood. No kidding, that was his real name.
I met Judge when I was still in law school, still reeling from the sudden infant death of my son, and more recently from my father and his father’s stunning disapproval of my desire to return to the small south Alabama town, where they had been born and raised, to practice law with a man my father had known growing up, who also had lost a son, and who had offered me a lock-and-key law practice in his own office, use of his secretary, an office, and referring to me the many cases he then was referring to other lawyers, without asking for a dime back from me. I so wanted my father’s approval, and his father’s too, I suppose, that I was left on what felt like the edge of a great abyss, until a law school professor told me of a federal judge in Birmingham, my home town, who had unexpectedly had his law clerk resign and was looking for a replacement.
I wrote to the judge, got a reply back, asking me to pay him a visit, which I did right away. We mostly talked about fishing and hunting, and not much about lawyering or judging, except Judge told me he tried all the federal criminal cases in the Northern District of Alabama, and handled all appeals from the federal bankruptcy court and all appeals from denial of disability claims from the Social Security Administration, and sat on a few three-judge federal panels in special cases. I would later learn that he had invented and piloted the federal Debtor’s Court right there in Birmingham. This court allowed ordinary wage earners to seek court help in consolidating their otherwise unpayable debts, and pay them off on a percentage of face value at a monthly rate they could afford. By taking a referee’s commission off each case, Judge made his fortune; but upon writing the Debtor’s Court law to be passed by Congress, he put into it that referees would be salaried employees and not work on commission, as he felt the commission method would lead to abuse. From there, he was appointed to the federal bench, not having practiced law a day in his life. It turned out to be a brilliant appointment, as he came to be respected by the entire federal judiciary, as far as I could tell. But there is more about this remarkable man, which had nothing to do with his being a judge, piloting the federal Debtor’s Court, or going to night law school in Birmingham before that.
As a lad, Clarence developed a fondness for hopping freight trains. At about age fifteen, he was on a train he had hopped, and as it neared a place in Birmingham he wanted to get off, he jumped as he had done many times for the ground, but something happened and he tripped and his legs fell across the rails and were amputated just above the knees. To the hospital he was rushed, where he then languished in hell’s despair, wanting to die, he told me one day. Then, into his hospital room came a man he had never before seen, and this man began to belittle him for behaving in the way he was behaving. Stunned and outraged, young Clarence told the man he had a hell of a lot of nerve coming in there like that and getting on him about his attitude about losing his legs, when he, the accuser himself, had two legs on which to walk. Whereupon, this man who had come from out of nowhere did a standing two-legged jump up onto Clarence’s hospital bed and reached down and raised up his britches legs, and, lo and behold, there were two wooden legs!
In time, Clarence attended Auburn, where he met a young woman named Marie, whom he began to court and found she was high-spirited and he could not boss her around but it seemed she was able sometimes to boss him around, he told me another time. So, he nick-named her “Bully,” and he called her that as often as he called her Marie. I swear, Marie was as wonderful as he was, and she taught me how to cook real slow in a barbeque smoker the best leg of lamb I ever ate. I had my first taste of her lamb up at their getaway place in the country, in St. Claire Country, on which Judge had had a small lake built and stocked it with bluegill and shell cracker bream, crappie, bass and channel catfish. He nursed them with fish food he threw in the lake the way a farmer might nurse a calf with a milk bottle, whose momma had died. He caught and released, mostly, but sometimes he took enough for Marie’s skillet.
Every moonshiner in North Alabama knew Judge, if not from having come before him, then by hearing of him from another moonshiner who had. Judge had a fondness for moonshiners, having once had a taste for the brew himself, but he had to give it up, and drinking altogether, when he developed a digestive disorder, a hiatal hernia. I got the sense that he still missed picking up a jug every now and then, and I knew, because he told me, that he was not happy that his courtroom was used by US Treasury agents to prosecute moonshiners for not paying the federal alcohol stamp tax on their product. If they had bought the stamps, the State of Alabama would find out about it and prosecute them for making moonshine without a state license, which was not available, as no whiskey legally could be made in Alabama. When a local attorney was hired by some moonshiners to try to get the state prohibition laws declared unconstitutional in a three-judge court, on which Judge Allgood was to sit, he asked me to try to find some legal authority to support a verdict for the plaintiffs. Alas, I could not, and the case went for the State of Alabama. But nothing really changed, as Judge continued to sentence convicted moonshiners to probation, who then sent him lots of fan mail and some of them, without even being asked by anybody, took it upon themselves to patrol his farm and keep poachers off the place.
Judge had a way of putting convicted criminals into prison (bank robbers, car thieves caught taking cars across state lines, counterfeiters, etc.) that tended to gain their respect and led to him getting a lot of fan mail from them, too. He also got plenty of fan mail from their families. There were a couple of other things about Judge, which were told to me by people who knew him well. One was that he literally ran the Democratic Party in Alabama behind the scenes. Anybody who wanted to serve as a US Senator or in the House of Representatives, or to be the US Attorney, or the US Marshall, on in the Alabama Legislature, needed to get Judge Allgood’s stamp of approval. He was on intimate basis with John Sparkman, Lister Hill and Jim Allen, prominent US Congressmen. The other thing was that Judge was considered a sage, and a lot of important folks came to him in chambers seeking his counsel: lawyers, businessmen, even ministers. I heard ministers brought to Judge the parishioners they could not help, and if they did what Judge recommended, their lives got better.
When it was time for me to leave Judge, I was by then thoroughly mixed up, had contracted a terrible G.I. tract disorder, had lost my confidence, and was committed to go to work for my father’s company, which his father and his father’s brother-in-law had purchased from a local family just after the war, my father being a junior partner, so to speak, until he eventually learned enough to be ready to run and expand the business himself, at which time he bought out his father and uncle by marriage. Judge tried to talk me out of working for my father, said I could stay another term with him, if I wanted, but I didn’t listen and it was a sad thing for both my father and me. When I gave up on that misadventure four years later, my marriage now in tatters, my psyche ready for the State Mental Hospital I often felt, Judge told me to leave Alabama, get my act together somewhere else, then come back. For if people came to believe that I had psychiatric troubles, it would go very badly for me. I ignored that advice, too, went into the practice of law, gutting out the psychic trouble and got somewhat leveled out. But many years later, after a lot of other things had happened, it all caught up with me.
I don’t recall Judge ever talking to me about God but one time, which was in 1990, perhaps early 1991, before I fell apart nearly all the way, before I even knew I was going to fall apart nearly all the way. I had occasion to be in Birmingham, and I paid him a visit in chambers. He was glad to see me, wanted to talk. I was expecting something else, as the last time I’d seen him in chambers was when he had told me to leave the state back in 1973. But he must have felt I’d pulled through alright, because I’d practiced law over a decade, before leaving Alabama in 1986, for Santa Fe, New Mexico, trying to find help for my illness, which nothing I’d tried had helped: medicine, psychiatry, natural medicine, meditation, various forms of exercise, including yoga and tai chi, diets, etc. After a year in Santa Fe, I finally begged God to help me, and after that I started having experiences that were not of this world, and they’ve been going on ever since. It was my telling some folks once about how it all got started in Santa Fe that got me locked up and I thought maybe put away forever in early 1997. But that finality was not to be, even though the going was very rough for a good while after that.
Anyway, this story is about Judge, not about me, except to give some scruffy pedigree for the teller of this yarn that is only now getting to what I believe is the most interesting part, which begins with me in Judge’s chambers in 1990. He is very upset about the Eleventh Circuit setting up so many judicial sentencing guidelines that, if followed, render a federal judge into a robot. “But you know me, I figured out a way around it, but not even tell you how I do it!” he says with that crinkly smile I came to love so many years before. But after the smile leaves, I see another look in his eyes, and hear a tone in his voice, and see the tiredness and pain in his body and soul, and his loneliness: his beloved Marie had suddenly died of a stroke ten years or so before, in his arms, and since then he had lived alone. I know he is leaving.
In the meantime, a beautiful commemoration is written and published by legal folks in Birmingham, whose lives Judge has touched as much as he had touched my life. The authors call and interview many people, including past law clerks. I tell the story of the moonshiners, and some other stories I never feel they will publish, but they publish it and I am sort of the one really sticking out there. But Judge seems not to mind but is somewhat pleased by it all, after I write him to say I owe the writers one. Judge’s note back says he is getting old and is worried about the state of his soul, because he used to drink moonshine, cusses and doesn’t go to church. I write back, addressing him as “Clarence.” I’ve never dared do that before now, because only God, other federal judges and a federal judge’s spouse address a federal judge by first name. But something makes me do it, and then I get on him good, say after all the good he has done people, what does he mean by being worried for his soul? When he gets to the Pearly Gates, there is going to be a very large homecoming party thrown, very large. He writes back thanking me; says I always was one of his favorites (of his law clerks). I weep.
I guess it was about a year later that a friend in Birmingham calls to let me know Judge has passed on. I ask when is the funeral? A couple of days off. I say I will get a flight out the next day. I am now living near Denver, Colorado, and have been since 1988. When I, by the way, ask my friend if he knows the cause of death, he says that he thinks Judge killed himself with his own .38. I think to myself something like: Just like that tough old bird: his life in the last light, his mate gone, his body giving out, he probably had a lot of physical pain, the Eleventh Circuit was trying to strip his humanity and God-given wisdom out of him, he didn’t want to live out his days in a nursing home: like an old Indian brave who knew that his time had come, but who could not fall behind the tribe and let the animals have him to spare them having to look after him, he did it in a modern way.
I weep at his funeral, then go back to Colorado and write an eulogy somewhat like this one, send it to some folks in Birmingham, who had loved Judge, but hear nothing back. I had entitled the piece: JUDGE CLARENCE ALLGOOD: MY SPIRITUAL FATHER. He was a living saint, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a lot of other people, I would wager by the way they revered him. When later I asked it of him, he started coming to me in spirit visions, sometimes, and in dreams, to mentor me in difficult times and in times not difficult. I feel his presence all around me at this time, and I feel more than his presence. I hear angels singing. I see the black woman who raised me as if I were her own, even as she loved and served my white family for twenty-five years in our home, the other living saint I have known in this life. She did go to church, and there is a lot I could write about Sister Charlotte Washington, but I do not sense this is the time to do it. This is the time to write about Brother Clarence W. Allgood, who used to drink moonshine, cussed and did not attend church.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment