But North Carolina’s first use of its new machinery did not go well. On January 24, 1936, the tarheel state proceeded to kill Allen Foster, a mentally impaired black youth from Alabama who had been convicted of raping a white woman after straying from a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Foster’s distraught mother had done all she could to save him, slipping desperate notes to Governor J.C.B. Ehringhaus. “I hate to worrie you so much but I just can’t help it Gov.,” she wrote in one of them. “If it is just some way [he] could get life sentence and not be killed. I want to him to live that all I got to live for in this world. Please save him from that Gas please. I taught him all I could and all I knowed about the white people law.”62 But Ehringhaus was unmoved.
On the day of the scheduled execution, the bold headline in the Raleigh newspaper read: “TERRIFIED NEGRO FACES FIRST GAS DEATH HERE.” Foster was quoted as saying, “The soul can be ready, but the flesh ain’t, and I’m worried.” The story by reporter John Parris, who was allowed to spend the eve of the execution on death row with Foster and his fellow condemned inmates, recounted:
Foster had a last word too, before he “catches the train to heb’n.”…
“You all shore bin good to me,” he began. His voice was clear.
“I certainly does appreciate everything you all’s done for me. You’ve been tellin’ me to find God. I’ve found God, and I’ll always keep him dere in my heart.”63
Two dozen white newspapermen and other witnesses watched as the twenty-year-old prisoner—whom one reporter described as a “husky dusky Negro”—entered the freezing white chamber in cotton boxer shorts and was strapped, shivering, into the high-backed oak chair, as someone taped the cold stethoscope to his bare chest. The temperature in the death cell hovered at 32 degrees. His “kinky hair” had been shaved and his clothes removed to hasten his death and prevent any deadly cyanide from lingering after the execution. As everyone left the room, Foster said something that was inaudible to most of the witnesses, and he also appeared to raise a clenched fist in an uppercut. Then he said goodbye to his mother and shouted his innocence.
The executioner, R.L. Bridges, pulled his string, releasing the eggs into the bath of sulfuric acid and discharging the gas. As fumes swirled around him, the youth drew in what one reporter called a mouthful of “concentrated hell” as if it were cigarette smoke. For the next ten minutes his head dropped, his eyes rolled, his body convulsed, and he continued to keep trying to speak. Halfway through the process, a horrified witness, Dr. Ransom L. Carr of Duplin County, exclaimed, “We’ve got to shorten it or get rid of it entirely.”
Authorities later acknowledged it had taken more than eleven agonizing minutes to kill him. Foster’s heartbeats were monitored by Dr. George S. Coleman, the dean of Duke University’s School of Medicine. The physician later said Foster had been fully conscious for at least three minutes, thereby contributing to many of the witnesses’ anger and revulsion.64 One witness, the Raleigh newsman W.T. Bost, who in his day had observed 160 executions and five lynchings, said, “It was the most barbarous thing I have ever seen.” The coroner said, “Never again for me. It’s slow torture—that’s what it is.”
In the end, what would be most remembered about the execution were the words the dying prisoner had called out. According to the most celebrated version of the story, he had pleaded, “Save me, Joe Louis! Save me, Joe Louis! Save me, Joe Louis!” as if begging for the great African-American boxing champion to intervene. Decades later, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would cite the episode in one of his books.65
After death was pronounced, the witnesses were made to wait for another twenty-four minutes until the gas was removed from the chamber and the body was removed. A reporter said witnesses were so shocked and repulsed that “they forgot that the Negro in the chair was paying the penalty for raping a white woman.” But Dr. Charles Peterson, the father of the gas chamber law, stoically pronounced, “I am satisfied that Foster’s death was painless. I am positive that the new method is more humane than electrocution.”66
In the wake of the botched Foster execution, the Raleigh News & Observer commissioned an organization known as Science Services to make a scientific report regarding the effects of execution by lethal gas on a human being. The resulting study reported:
Internal asphyxia, or suffocation of the tissues, is what occurs in death by hydrocyanic acid gas…. The body, however, is not deprived of air as in ordinary suffocation, say by strangling. There is plenty of oxygen in the blood of a person poisoned by hydrocyanic acid. But the protoplasm—the essential of living cells—cannot absorb the oxygen that is available…. Cyanide poisons the central nervous system, first stimulating it and producing convulsions and then causing paralysis. Paralysis of the breathing center in the nervous system is the immediate cause of death. So persons poisoned by hydrocyanic acid stop breathing several minutes before their hearts stop beating.
According to the expert report, electrocution was by far the more humane method of execution than hanging or lethal gas, for unconsciousness was immediate and death almost certainly followed very soon thereafter.67
In preparing for their second gas execution, North Carolina officials consulted with chemists in Colorado in a frantic effort to avoid a repeat disaster. One of the chief recommendations was for them to raise the death chamber temperature in order to achieve more vigorous vaporization and thereby reduce the amount of suffering. Another was to alter the mixture of the hydrocyanic solution to the “Colorado formula”—fifteen one-ounce pellets of potassium cyanide, three pints of sulfuric acid, and three quarts of water (in effect, a lot more cyanide, less acid and more water).68
North Carolina’s second gassing, of Ed Jenkins, a forty-year-old white man convicted of murder, took seven and a half minutes from the springing of the trap until death was pronounced, thus amounting to a significant improvement, but still not an ideal standard. Nevertheless, most physicians and prison officials were later quoted as saying that Jenkins hadn’t suffered; his death was painless and humane. Oscar Pitts, the state’s acting director of the State Penal Division, announced, “Lethal gas has come to stay in North Carolina.”69
Thus the state appeared ready to repair its tainted image and poised to proceed efficiently with smooth and rapid executions. Barely a week after the second gassing, three black men were scheduled to be put to death in the chamber, one by electrocution and the other two (J.T. Sanford and Thomas Watson) by lethal gas, thereby affording citizens some basis of comparison between the two methods and against the record of the previous two gassings.70 After the first subject, William Long, was dispatched in the electric chair, the electrical equipment was removed and the sulfuric acid and white cyanide pellets were readied. Sanford was brought into the chamber in his boxer shorts and strapped into the chair as stethoscopes were taped to his chest.