January 23, 2016: Running for President in the Iowa Caucus, Donald Trump makes a campaign speech at Dordt College in Sioux Center, and says, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"
Not that he wouldn't go to prison, but that he wouldn't lose any voters. He was probably right: As it turned out, his voters have forgiven everything he's ever done.
Most likely, Trump has never heard of J. Thomas Heflin. But they would have liked each other.
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March 27, 1908: A white man throws a black man off a streetcar in Washington, D.C., and then shoots him in the head.
The white man's name was James Thomas Heflin. He was reportedly on his way to deliver a message about "temperance" at a local church. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Previously, he was the Secretary of State of the Southern State of Alabama.
Before that, he was one of the drafters of the Alabama Constitution in 1901, Heflin said, “God Almighty intended the Negro to be the servant of the white man,” and often boasted that his father enslaved more people than anyone else in Randolph County. And, like pretty much every person elected to public office in Alabama at the time -- including Hugo Black, who was elected to the U.S. Senate, and later appointed to the Supreme Court, where he turned coat and supported civil rights -- Heflin was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1908, in the District of Columbia, the streetcars were not racially segregated. For "Cotton Tom" Heflin, that wasn't the issue. He claimed that he had heard the black man, Lewis Lundy -- his name is sometimes listed as "Louis Lundy" -- use a profanity that the white people, including the white women, on the streetcar could hear. That's why Heflin did what he did.
He was immediately arrested. And yet, a newspaper reported that Heflin received a bouquet of roses from a local Baptist minister, with an accompanying note stating that the clergyman “approved highly of his courageous chivalry.”
After being released on bond the following day, Heflin returned to Congress, and was greeted enthusiastically by his colleagues, who vowed to “do everything possible to aid” him. In response, the Congressman publicly said of shooting Mr. Lundy, “I only did what any other gentleman would do.”
Lundy wasn't the only victim: A white bystander, Thomas McCreery, was wounded by a stray bullet fired by Heflin. Both men lived. Lundy had not yet recovered sufficiently to testify against Heflin at his trial. As a result of that, and of Heflin agreeing to pay McCreery's legal expenses, the charges against him were dropped. Lundy eventually recovered enough to file a lawsuit against Heflin, but it was dismissed.
In subsequent campaigns, Heflin bragged of the shooting as one of his major career accomplishments. In 1920, after the death of Senator John Bankhead, Heflin won the special election to succeed him, and won a full term in 1924.
In 1928, he broke with the Democratic Party for its nomination of Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, a Catholic, for President, choosing instead to supporter Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, the nominee of the Republican Party, "the Party of Lincoln," rather than support a non-Protestant. He went on a speaking tour during the campaign, funded by the Klan, denouncing Smith, the national Democratic Party, and Catholicism.
This was too much even for the Democratic Party of the State of Alabama: Instead of Heflin, they nominated John Bankhead II, the son of the man he succeeded. Heflin ran an independent campaign, but Bankhead won. Much like Donald Trump nearly a century later, Heflin claimed there was voter fraud.
John's brother, William Bankhead, was the Speaker of the House from 1936 until his death in 1940. And William was the father of actress Tallulah Bankhead.
Heflin had been the nephew of a Congressman, Robert S. Heflin; and his own nephew, Howell Heflin, became the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and served in the Senate from 1979 to 1997, where he was usually called "Judge Heflin" by his friendly colleagues. Unlike his uncle, he was not a white supremacist.
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March 27, 1908 was a Sunday. No sports were active at the moment: Baseball was in Spring Training, and the Stanley Cup had been decided on March 14, when the Montreal Wanderers beat the Toronto Hockey Club.
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