Odell Waller

Despite the uproar over the poll tax as a factor in jury selection, the tax remained in Virginia until the ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution outlawed it in 1964. Pauli Murray was deeply affected by her experience working on the case and was inspired to pursue her career in civil rights law. Governor Darden, influenced by the popular sentiment that the case had evoked, began a reform of the Virginia penal system, including the creation of an official Pardon and Parole Board with the authority to commute sentences.

Odell Waller (1917 – July 2, 1942) was an African-American sharecropper from Gretna, Virginia, executed for the fatal shooting of his white landlord, Oscar Wheldon Davis, on July 15, 1940. Waller maintained at his trial that the killing had been in self-defense, but was convicted by a jury of white citizens who had paid the poll tax, a measure that effectively barred blacks and poor whites from jury service.

The Workers' Defense League, a socialist labor rights organization, began a national campaign calling for the commutation of Waller's sentence, and was supported in its efforts by novelist Pearl S. Buck, philosopher John Dewey, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. President Franklin D. Roosevelt also made a private appeal on Waller's behalf to Virginia Governor Colgate Darden. Though the campaign won several postponements of the sentence, Waller was finally executed on July 2, 1942. The case failed to overturn the poll tax, but led to reform of Virginia's penal system and motivated Pauli Murray to begin her career in civil rights law.

On June 1, 1942, the US Supreme Court denied two of Waller's petitions for appeal, and the defense was soon left without further legal options. In a final attempt to win a pardon or commutation from the governor, activists staged events around the country, including a two-hour blackout of the lights in the primarily African-American neighborhood of Harlem in New York City. Governor Price's successor, Colgate Darden, received over seventeen thousand letters about the case.

He was executed by electric chair on the morning of July 2, 1942. At the time of his execution, Waller had been on death row for 630 days, then the longest death row stay in the state's history. His funeral was held on July 5 and was attended by 2,500 people. Only one white person, WDL Secretary Morris Milgram, attended. Other whites had been asked not to come; a reporter wrote of the exclusion that "[the black community] did not want 'Odell Waller's murderers' to look on his face in death".

On March 28, 1941, philosopher John Dewey joined the cause, sending Murray $5.00 for Waller's defense and giving permission to use his name in further fundraising. Dewey later co-signed an open letter comparing Waller to Dred Scott, a slave who had unsuccessfully sued for his freedom before the US Supreme Court. One of Dewey's letters to The New York Times about the case caught the attention of Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Pearl S. Buck, who also became involved in the case. She wrote in an open letter of her own that Waller "has ceased to be an individual, he has become a personification of all those to whom democracy is denied in our country".

At 6:30 AM on July 15, 1940, Odell drove to Davis's farm to get the wheat with Annie, relatives Archie Waller and Thomas Younger, and a friend named Buck Fitzgerald. He brought a .32 caliber pistol.

During Waller's trial, which began on September 19, 1940, he was represented by Thomas H. Stone of the small communist splinter organization Revolutionary Workers League (RWL). The RWL's members had been expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1934 for their Trotskyist beliefs, and the organization was unpopular due to its opposition to World War II. The group compared the trial to that of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American young men accused of rape in Alabama under suspicious circumstances, and began to criticize the racism and economic conditions of Waller's rural Virginia county. Historian Richard B. Sherman argues that the group brought negative publicity to Waller's trial from the start by creating the perception that "radical outsiders" were behind his defense. A socialist labor rights organization, the Workers' Defense League (WDL), offered to take over the defense and public campaign to avoid the stigma of communism from influencing Waller's case, but the RWL rebuffed them.

The testimony of Henry Davis and Oscar Davis's sons proved damning, and several witnesses also testified that they had heard Waller declare he would come home with his wheat or kill Oscar Davis. In an analysis of the transcript, Sherman proposes that the phrasing of these witnesses was so similar that they may have been coached by prosecutors, but the defense counsel did not pursue this possibility. On September 27, 1940, after less than an hour's deliberation, the jury found Waller guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to death, a verdict praised by the Virginia press covering the trial. His execution was scheduled for December 27 of that year.

After the trial, the RWL agreed to pass responsibility for the public campaign and legal appeals to the WDL, provided that the case continue to be handled "on a class struggle basis", with attention to national issues as well as Waller's specific situation. Eager to help Waller, the WDL reluctantly agreed to the terms. The organization assumed control of the case in November 1940 and immediately began fundraising on Waller's behalf. Pauli Murray, a young woman new to the organization, was dispatched on a national fundraising tour, accompanied at times by Annie Waller.

During the Great Depression, the Wallers fell behind on the mortgage for their farm, and after Willis died in 1938, the bank foreclosed. Annie and Odell then agreed to become sharecroppers for a white landlord, Oscar Davis. The relationship quickly soured. Davis was also a sharecropper, and when his own landlord reduced Davis' land allotment, Davis reduced that of the Wallers to only 2 acres (0.81 ha; 0.0031 sq mi). The Wallers accused Davis of failing to pay Annie an agreed $7.50 for taking care of Davis' ill wife for three weeks; when the Wallers subsequently refused to work in Davis' fields, Davis evicted them. Following the eviction, someone on the Davis farm mutilated one of the Wallers' dogs. After Annie's cousin Robert helped her harvest the farm's wheat, Davis took the whole crop rather than give the Wallers their share. In April 1940, Odell had taken a job constructing electrical lines in Maryland, but he returned on the weekend of July 13–14 to investigate the worsening situation.

Odell Waller was born in 1917 to Dollie Jones and an unknown father, who died shortly after his birth. Jones gave the boy to her sister Annie Waller and Annie's husband, Willis Waller, to adopt, and Odell considered Annie his mother. Odell completed three years of high school, but was later forced to leave school to work on the farm. From 1935 to 1938, he was convicted of seven offenses, including assault, reckless driving, bootlegging, and carrying a concealed razor. In January 1939, he married a woman named Mollie.