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Book Review
Murder on Shades Mountain
The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham
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| Author Melanie Morrison talks about 1930s Birmingham at Loganberry Books, June 24, 2018 |
One early August afternoon in
Depression-era Birmingham, Alabama, Willie Peterson, an unemployed miner of
modest stature suffering from tuberculosis, was walking down the street in the
midst of finishing some household errands, when the sole survivor of a
sensational double murder fingered him as the rapist-murderer of her sister and
their friend.
Very shortly this random black man
would be arrested, nearly lynched, shot and almost killed while in police
custody by a vicious relative of the survivor, tried twice for murder, and
sentenced to death by electrocution.
I wasn’t too many pages into
Melanie Morrison’s riveting account of Peterson’s legal lynching before realizing
that I was reading history disguised as suspense. The author’s extensively
researched narrative puts the reader smack in the middle of an all-too familiar
American saga of a salt-of-the earth guy who happened to be in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
Peterson was a church-going deacon
of modest mien, far from the kind of fellow you would expect to be accused of
such a heinous crime. But he was in a region where Jim Crow was so rigidly
enforced that, even though the chief of police, the county sheriff, a
prosecutor who said “that Negro ain’t no more guilty than I am,” the editors of
the white Birmingham papers, and the president of the Birmingham Bar
Association, all professed a belief in Peterson’s innocence, a jury took only
30 minutes to convict him.
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| Author Melanie Morrison, r, with sister, Cleveland resident Stephanie Hrbek, former director of Near West Theater, at Loganberry Books, June 24, 2018 |
Peterson’s story resonates on
several levels, thanks to Morrison’s deft story telling. It is a personal
account, though she was born eighteen years after the crime: her father dated the
younger sister of two of the victims. It also offers keen insights into some of
the more easily overlooked aspects of white privilege, as when she points out
that the revered novel To Kill a
Mockingbird is essentially a “white savior narrative that portrayed black
people as guileless victims without agency or a supportive black community.”
And it provides a public service, evocative of William Faulkner’s observation that
the past is not even past — most useful at this time — when she writes in an Afterword
to her deceased father:
“[W]e who are white must always critically
interrogate the stories we have inherited from our forbears … Because white
Americans remain largely ignorant about the manifold organizations, movements,
and uprisings — led by people of color — that resisted racism in every region
and every era of this country’s history. … Because the white savior myth not
only masks the rich history of resistance and reform, it diverts attention from
the real work white people need to do in collaboration with people of color.”
Peterson’s long overlooked story
should have a special resonance for many black Clevelanders. So many thousands
and thousands of black men and women emigrated here after 1915 from Alabama’s
industrial and rural areas that, as Kimberley Phillips pointed out, Cleveland came to be known in some circles as
AlabamaNorth.
In addition to being a compelling
read, Murder on Shades Mountain
provides a ground level portrait of the workings of structural racism, an
insightful critique of white savior stories, and offers us valuable vignettes
of the brilliant and legendary attorney Charles Hamilton Houston, and such
other key historical figures as the Scottsboro Boys and Walter White.
Murder on Shades Mountain is a reminder
that “the civil rights movement was not born in the 1960s” and that its work is
far from complete.
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1 comment:
This post has been updated to correct the Faulkner quote above, which I had misattributed to James Baldwin. Thanks, Afi, my erudite journalist/scholar/musician friend.
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