Morrison Melanie S. Morrison

Murder on Shades Mountain (eBook, PDF)

The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham's black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death.In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath-events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father-who dated Nell's youngest sister when he was a teenager-Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson's unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. März 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822371670
• Artikelnr.: 54664541

Autorenporträt

Melanie S. Morrison, founder and executive director of Allies for Change (www.alliesforchange.org), is a social justice educator, author, and activist with thirty years' experience designing and facilitating transformational group process. Morrison is author of The Grace of Coming Home: Spirituality, Sexuality, and the Struggle for Justice and her writing has appeared in numerous periodicals. As a keynote speaker at national and regional conferences, she addresses racial, disability, and sexual justice. In 1994 Morrison founded Doing Our Own Work, an antiracism intensive for white people that has attracted hundreds of participants across the country. She has a master of divinity from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, Morrison pastored congregations in Michigan and the Netherlands. As adjunct faculty, she has taught antiracism seminars at Chicago Theological Seminary and the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She lives in Okemos, Michigan.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction  1
Part I. Danger in the Magic City
1. August 4, 1931  15
2. A City Beset by Fear  25
3. Reign of Terror in the Black Community  34
4. Fear, Loathing,and Oblivion in the White Community  45
Part II. Trials and Tribulations
5. The Arrest: September 23, 1931  55
6. Attempted Murder  67
7. Grand Jury Testimonies  76
8. The NAACP Comes to Life  85
9. Mounting the Defense  94
10. House of Pain  113
11. "A Temporarily Dethroned Mind"  116
12. "An Outrageous Spectacle of Injustice"  119
13. A Tumultuous Year  122
Part IV. Never Turning Back
14. Staying on the Firing Line  131
15. Charles Hamilton Houston  134
16. A Lynching in Tuscaloosa  142
17. Moving the Case Forward  150
18. No Negroes Allowed  162
19. A Flood of Letters  168
20. A Multitude of Regrets  172
21. Grave Doubts as to His Guilt  178
22. Jim Crow Justice  185
Epilogue. The Community That Kept Faith  193
Afterword. Letter to My Father  197
Acknowledgments  203
Notes  209
Bibliography  233
Index  241