page_title: Odell Waller
section_title: Impact of the case
hierarchical_section_title: Odell Waller / Impact of the case
caption_attribution_description: English: "Pauli Murray"
context_page_description: Odell Waller 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 unsuccessfully 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.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: Pauli Murray was inspired by the Waller case to become a civil rights lawyer.
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