Charles Mangum was one of a kind

By Darrell Laurant

Published: August 13, 2008

Part of what happens when you remain at one newspaper as long as I have is that you become part of the institutional memory. It’s unavoidable — it grows up around you like moss.

And that’s why I wind up writing so many stories about people who have recently died. Sometimes, I feel like the obituary writer for The New York Times who once noted: “God is my assignment editor.”

See Charles Mangum’s obituary online

The thing is, it would be hard for a new reporter to get a handle on Charles M.L. Mangum, who recently passed away in North Carolina.

A long-time attorney in Lynchburg, Mangum had kept a low profile in recent years. When I first came to town in the late ’70s, however, he was Lynchburg’s Al Sharpton.

Mangum had arrived more than a decade earlier and immediately plugged himself into the most inflammatory criminal case in local history. The defendant was Thomas Wansley, who had been convicted as a black teenager in the rape of several local women and sentenced to death. (Rape was then a capital crime in Virginia).

There were many people who, for various reasons, believed fervently that Wansley had been railroaded. One of them was William Kunstler, the flamboyant New York City attorney who represented such diverse clients as the Chicago Seven and John Gotti.

Kunstler came to Lynchburg in 1963 and spoke at a prayer meeting at Rivermont Baptist Church.

“I’m not here because this is an unusual case,” he told a cheering crowd. “I’m here because it is a usual case.”

Mangum became part of Kunstler’s defense team, along with another New Yorker, Philip Hirschkop. Together, they identified more than 100 procedural errors in Wansley’s first trial and petitioned for a stay of execution. It was granted.

More appeals followed, and eventually a federal judge decreed that Wansley should have a new trial. In that case, Kunstler told Lynchburg Circuit Court Judge Raymond Cundiff that his client should be released on bail.

Cundiff refused, declaring that to release Wansley “would be to endanger every woman in the state of Virginia.”

Kunstler snapped back: “The only thing worse than a crooked lawyer is a crooked judge.”

Pandemonium erupted, and Cundiff ordered the courtroom cleared. Four spectators, including future Lynchburg mayor M.W. Thornhill Jr., were dragged out forcibly.

“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” Mangum once recalled. “Then Mr. Kunstler and Mr. Hirschkop got up and sat down in the spectator section and dared the judge to arrest them. That left only me standing there.

“Judge Cundiff looked down at me and said: ‘Well, Mr. Mangum, don’t you want to say something?’ All I wanted to do was go to the bathroom.”

At the time, Mangum had an office on the second floor of the Community Funeral Home. He had to stay here. Kunstler, whom he described as “like a legal paratrooper who dropped in, did a case, and then flew off somewhere else,” didn’t.

And Mangum, who attended North Carolina A&T with Jesse Jackson, soon learned to walk that line. He made waves, and he made headlines, but generally within the context of an established group like the NAACP, for which he served as both Lynchburg and state president.

He also founded the Piedmont Area Journal, a local black newspaper, and ran it the way he saw fit. The Journal once ran a blank space on the front page with the notation: “This article was not submitted on time.”

In 1984, Mangum released a series of “position papers” accusing various segments of city government of racism and inadequate hiring of minorities. He twice ran for City Council. With Garnell Stamps, Junius Haskins and others, he became the “go-to guy” for those who felt the sting of being in the minority.

Nevertheless, it always seemed to me that Mangum never got over having his law license suspended in 1993. The Disciplinary Board in Richmond praised his “laudable efforts” in the cause of civil rights, and did not accuse him of misappropriating funds. Rather, his license was pulled because of “failure to act diligently and to adequately maintain trust account records.”

Mangum always said that he had been singled out and made an example of because of that very civil rights record that was lauded. Obviously, it no longer matters.

Thomas Wansley died a few years ago, William Kunstler followed. And now Charles Mangum, whose funeral is todayin his hometown of Statesville, N.C.