Review of he calls me by lightning

A few years back, I thought to write a history of the civil rights movement in a small Southern city where the freedom struggle had been unique, if not downright bizarre. A legendary academic editor snapped up my proposal. A few days later, personal concerns forced me to abandon the project. The Legend was neither amused nor sympathetic. “I am not interested in any more books about the civil rights movement in East Jesus anyway,” the Legend decreed. “We don’t need any more community studies of Podunk, Ala.”

Not only was this patent sour grapes, the editor’s historiography was hogwash. We know far too little about local movements beyond the lustrous necklace of names Julian Bond called “the master narrative.” As Zora Neale Hurston says of love, the struggle may seem to have sailed on the certitude of tides but, like the sea, it took its shape from every shore that it met, and every shore was different. Any valid synthesis of the civil rights movement awaits many specific histories. This will be obvious to readers of “He Calls Me by Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty.” S. Jonathan Bass’s 40-year yarn of freedom politics and Southern justice in Bessemer, Ala., proves there is much more we need to remember.

In popular memory, the civil rights movement unfolds like the Civil War. Armies that clash at Montgomery in 1955 meet again at Little Rock two years later. Shock troops of the 1960 sit-ins march as swiftly as Sherman through Greensboro, Durham, Charlotte, and on to Atlanta and Rock Hill. When Freedom Riders fall at the Battle of Anniston in 1961, their bloodstained banner is carried forward by volunteers from Nashville and then the nation. Front-page conflagrations compel Kennedy to send troops; terrified segregationists fear a Second Reconstruction.

Defeated in the Albany campaign of 1962, the commander King recoups and in the spring of 1963 wins the Battle of Birmingham. The soldiers of Freedom Summer soon invade Mississippi; they incur losses but seize the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1965, King’s troops suffer on the Selma bridge to win the Voting Rights Act. The following year, renegades begin chanting “Black Power,” and the South — all but Memphis, that is — sinks into the ocean, its descent illuminated by cities aflame North and West. Amid the confusion, James Earl Ray stars as John Wilkes Booth and the Great Leader falls. King’s crucifixion sounds a new birth of freedom; the white republic forsakes its obsession with the color of our skin and fixes instead upon the content of our character.

Like many grand theories, this panorama works everywhere except where you actually know what happened. The bigger the frame, the farther actual history floats away, unless local specifics stake it to earth. And neither the “master narrative” nor subsequent attempts to reframe it work in Bessemer, as the historian Bass’s tale well-told reveals. Bass, the author of “Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’” examines the death penalty conviction of a black youth in the 1957 killing of a white police officer, and the 44-year legal saga that followed.

On July 12, 1957, the 17-year-old Caliph Washington drove home from a double date in Bessemer, a poverty-forged caldron of corruption, vice, violence and racism. Officer James (Cowboy) Clark, fishing for illegal whiskey runners, almost rammed Washington’s two-tone Chevy from behind and then pursued the youth without using his siren or flashing light, firing his pistol at the fleeing car.

In terror of white vigilantes, Washington sped up, ducked into a black neighborhood, tried to elude his pursuer but skidded his car into a tree. Stepping out, he saw Clark’s squad car; no comfort since Washington had recently survived a severe pistol-whipping by the police. When the angry white cop drew close with his pistol drawn, they struggled over the gun, which discharged, killing Clark. There was physical evidence — according to defense lawyers, “almost to a mathematical certainty” — that the fatal shot was not aimed at Clark but instead ricocheted off the car. “You better get from out of that car,” a neighbor yelled. “These white folks will kill you.” The young man took the cop’s fancy pistol and fled into the woods.

“In the minds of most whites,” Bass writes, “crime was not the most serious threat to law and order in Alabama; it was the prospect of black political and social equality and the loss of white status and power.” In 1954, the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision threw Southern segregationists into political apoplexy. The Montgomery bus boycott ended after 381 days when the court struck down the segregation laws; Klan terrorists bombed Dr. King’s house and the homes of other boycott leaders. On Christmas Day in 1956, someone also dynamited the home of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham. “The echo of shots and dynamite blasts,” the editors of The Southern Patriot wrote in 1957, “has been almost continuous throughout the South.”

In this atmosphere of war, Bessemer police unleashed a vicious house-by-house search for Caliph Washington. They shot livestock and citizens, beating and arresting anyone who knew Washington. They pounded an elderly woman with a rifle butt, killing her. They murdered a youth they thought looked like Washington. The deputies finally accosted someone who knew that Washington had absconded from Alabama to Mississippi and boarded a bus. When they snatched him off the Greyhound, Washington had a paper sack holding Cowboy Clark’s pearl-handled six-shooter.

Martin Luther King during the Montgomery bus boycott. Credit Gene Herrick/Associated Press

Bass unearths the heretofore undocumented story of Caliph Washington and his trek through the depths of Jim Crow justice. The complex lives that populate his jailhouse journey from segregation through civil rights braid the movement’s gains and limitations into a red thread tracing the current crisis of race and criminal justice. The civil rights movement in these pages sputters while it marches into yet another new South and charts progress that fails to change the fundamental shape of power. As James Baldwin instructs, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” “He Calls Me by Lightning” insists that we face the cost of lives that don’t matter to a persistent racial caste system. It reminds us that human endurance and irrepressible love outlast the glacial pace of change, and proves how much we do not yet know about our history.