Alabama lawmen killed a Black woman during a search for whiskey. Her granddaughter is finally getting answers

Mary DeBardelaben once made a promise to her grandmother’s portrait hanging on the sage green wall in her living room.

One day, she vowed, she’d find out just how her grandmother, Hattie DeBardelaben, died in the back of a police car in rural Alabama in March 1945. She promised to uncover why four law enforcement officers searching for illegal whiskey beat her to death.

And she promised to learn why her grandmother’s son — Mary’s father — had never uttered a word about the brutal assault in Alabama’s Autauga County.

Not a lot was known about what happened that day. Over the years, Mary DeBardelaben reached out to an organization that documented civil rights abuses in the Jim Crow era but without much success.

All that changed late last month, when a mailman delivered a bulky manila envelope to her home in the Atlanta suburb of Ellenwood, Georgia. It was stuffed with 69 pages of federal documents detailing Hattie DeBardelaben’s final moments.

Mary DeBardelaben curled up on her burgundy couch under the sepia-toned portrait and sobbed.

“I cried for three days straight when I got the documents and read descriptions of what happened to her,” Mary DeBardelaben says, her eyes welling with tears. “I was drained, I just couldn’t function.”

After she read all the documents, she gazed up at the portrait with a new wave of compassion.

“I told her, ‘Grandma, I know I kept promising to do something to bring your death to light … this is it, ‘” she told CNN. “Now I finally know what happened. And other people are going to know, too.”

Last month, some 79 years after her death, the National Archives and Records Administration released pages of documents about what happened to Hattie DeBardelaben. She was 46 when she died.

They were the first set of documents made public under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019. The act established a board made up of private citizens appointed by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the US Senate. They are tasked with reviewing and releasing investigative records from unresolved cold cases in the US from between 1940 and 1979. More cases will be released in the coming weeks.

A week prior to the documents’ release, both the review board and the NARA notified Mary DeBardelaben’s family of their plans.

She says she collapsed on the floor in tears when she opened the letter and learned she’d finally get answers about her grandmother’s death.

“I said yes, absolutely, I want to see the records,” she says. On October 26, the thick envelope arrived.

The review board says it hopes these long-hidden documents will provide answers to descendants about the fate of their ancestors and shed light on a dark chapter in the nation’s history.

“The name Hattie DeBardelaben may be unfamiliar to most people, but her death at the hands of law enforcement officers in 1945 was sadly typical of the violence — and even lethality — that many Black Americans suffered in the Jim Crow South,” review board co-chair Margaret Burnham said in a statement. “Although her death was investigated by federal agents at the time, the perpetrators were never held accountable.”

Federal documents show that a visit from authorities escalated into a fatal beating — followed by an alleged coverup.

Around 2:30 p.m. on March 23, 1945, Hattie DeBardelaben was washing clothes in the backyard of her family home in Autaugaville, according to the documents. The town is midway between Montgomery and Selma, where 20 years later police would brutally beat civil rights marchers, horrifying Americans and leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Three federal officers and a sheriff’s deputy arrived from a neighboring plantation, where they’d confiscated illegal whiskey. At the time, Jim Crow laws in some Southern states restricted selling alcohol to Black people, making it harder for them to obtain liquor legally.

The law enforcement officers asked Hattie DeBardelaben if she was selling the chicken roaming the yard. No, she said. They then accused her of selling bottles of “wildcat” whiskey, which she denied.

During the exchange, one of the officers struck Hattie DeBardelaben’s nephew, and she asked them to stop. Instead, two of the officers struck her several times, knocking her over a pot of boiling water, according to the nephew’s affidavit included in the documents. When she tried to get up, they knocked her down again.

Hattie DeBardelaben’s son, Edward, called out for his two brothers who were in the field planting corn. Police met the brothers — including Bennie, Mary’s father — with guns drawn and ordered them to sit on the ground and not move.

As Hattie DeBardelaben panted, moaned and begged for her life, the officers hauled her into the back of the police car, where she started throwing up. Edward, who was sitting with her in the car, held up her dress to contain the vomit. She died on the way to the county jail, according to the records.

The undertaker noted her head “sagged” when she was brought in, indicating a broken neck. The deputy sheriff, Clyde White, signed a statement denying DeBardelaben was a victim of police brutality. In the statement, he said he went to her house after receiving complaints that she was selling whiskey, but a search of the house yielded no alcohol.

A White doctor determined she had a history of heart attacks and declared that as the cause of death, the statement says.

Hattie DeBardelaben’s eight children, including Mary DeBardelaben’s father, Bennie, are all deceased. She also had 27 grandchildren — 20 of whom are still alive — and 36 great-grandchildren.

Mary DeBardelaben’s living room is dotted with traces of her grandmother. Another portrait shows her face surrounded by miniature images of her eight children.

On a glass table near the kitchen is a black binder labeled “family heritage book.” It’s a file of everything Mary DeBardelaben knows about her grandmother, including old newspaper clippings and a photo she calls her favorite.

The portrait is in black and white, and highlights her grandmother’s round face and slicked-back, jet black hair. As in the other photos, Hattie DeBardelaben stares at the camera without any hint of a smile.

Growing up, Mary DeBardelaben says, her father barely talked about his mother. He moved to Birmingham after she died because he was terrified the officers involved would retaliate against him.

She often accompanied him as he visited his mother’s grave site at a church cemetery in Autaugaville, Alabama, dusted the headstone and placed flowers. He never said a word about the devastating afternoon that ended with his mother dead.

“I now understand the trauma he must have gone through,” she says. “Now I know why it was so difficult for him to tell us what happened.”

In the weeks after Hattie DeBardelaben’s death, there was correspondence between law enforcement agencies but no arrests.

The documents include letters from the NAACP to the FBI and the Department of Justice urging them to investigate the death. An assistant US attorney general at the time, Tom C. Clark, wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, asking him to take action.

Alabama’s then-governor, Chauncey Sparks, even referred the case for investigation, but a state grand jury declined to indict. White, the deputy sheriff, went on to become the Autauga County sheriff, according to the documents.

Mary DeBardelaben says she’d be open to meeting with White’s family to share the “magnitude of pain and devastation” his actions caused to generations of her grandmother’s relatives.

Almost eight decades later, she and her siblings, Dan and Barbara DeBardelaben, tell CNN the documents have answered a lot of questions about their grandmother’s death.

“It was a cover-up,” Dan DeBardelaben says. “That’s what happened — these documents make it clear.”

But even though the family has received some closure, Mary DeBardelaben says a symbolic, posthumous arrest of the men who allegedly killed her grandmother would be a small semblance of justice. Or an apology from the government for its lack of action, she says.

Mary DeBardelaben turns 75 this month. Knowing more about her grandmother’s final moments is the most memorable gift she could receive for her milestone birthday, she says. And this Thanksgiving, she plans to share the details with other relatives who will join her and her siblings for the holiday.

“My nieces and nephews, when they find out what happened to her, they’re going to be upset,” she says. “But I want to present it in a different way. I don’t want them to hate White people. I want them to understand that was happening back then.”

And like she has in the past when she wants to feel her grandmother’s spirit, she plans to sit on the couch under her portrait when she breaks the news.