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Summary
Summary
Caliph Washington didn't pull the trigger but, as Officer James "Cowboy" Clark lay dying, he had no choice but to turn on his heel and run. The year was 1957; Cowboy Clark was white, Caliph Washington was black, and this was the Jim Crow South.
As He Calls Me by Lightning painstakingly chronicles, Washington, then a seventeen-year-old simply returning home after a double date, was swiftly arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. The young man endured the horrors of a hellish prison system for thirteen years, a term that included various stints on death row fearing the "lightning" of the electric chair. Twentieth-century legal history is tragically littered with thousands of stories of such judicial cruelty, but S. Jonathan Bass's account is remarkable in that he has been able to meticulously re-create Washington's saga, animating a life that was not supposed to matter.
Given the familiar paradigm of an African American man being falsely accused of killing a white policeman, it would be all too easy to apply a reductionist view to the story. What makes He Calls Me by Lightning so unusual are a spate of unknown variables--most prominently the fact that Governor George Wallace, nationally infamous for his active advocacy of segregation, did, in fact, save this death row inmate's life. As we discover, Wallace stayed Washington's execution not once but more than a dozen times, reflecting a philosophy about the death penalty that has not been perpetuated by his successors.
Other details make Washington's story significant to legal history, not the least of which is that the defendant endured three separate trials and then was held in a county jail for five more years before being convicted of second-degree murder in 1970; this decision was overturned as well, although the charges were never dismissed. Bass's account is also particularly noteworthy for his evocation of Washington's native Bessemer, a gritty, industrial city lying only thirteen miles to the east of Birmingham, Alabama, whose singularly fascinating story is frequently overlooked by historians.
By rescuing Washington's unknown life trajectory--along with the stories of his intrepid lawyers, David Hood Jr. and Orzell Billingsley, and Christine Luna, an Italian-American teacher and activist who would become Washington's bride upon his release--Bass brings to multidimensional life many different strands of the civil rights movement. Devastating and essential, He Calls Me by Lightning demands that we take into account the thousands of lives cast away by systemic racism, and powerfully demonstrates just how much we still do not know.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This account of 17-year-old Caliph Washington's wrongful conviction for a 1957 murder serves as a piercing primer on racism in the American justice system. On July 12, 1957, on a deserted Alabama highway, there was a deadly encounter between 17-year-old Caliph Washington, a black teenager, and James "Cowboy" Clark, a white policeman. Convicted of murder and sentenced to execution the following October, Washington was ultimately released on Mar. 17, 1971. Historian Bass (Blessed Are the Peacemakers) keeps a sharp focus on the town of Bessemer, Ala., known for a "general climate of violence" and corruption, as he proceeds through Washington's multiple trials and appeals in his lengthy trek through local, state, and federal jurisdictions. The book includes detailed accounts of legal maneuvers and decisions, complemented by biographical sketches of just about everyone involved-judges, lawyers, prosecutors, policemen, politicians, fellow prisoners, and Washington's family and friends. A casual reader may get lost in the thicket, but the details-such as the technical workings of the electric chair or a discussion of the salaries of prison guards-are eye-opening and carve out deeper complexities of the American justice system. 25 illus. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An examination of an infamous 1957 conviction of a young, black Army veteran for the murder of a white police officer that more broadly delineates the struggle for civil rights.In addition to digging up significant details on this important but little-known case, Bass (History/Samford Univ.; Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail", 2001) seamlessly weaves in a larger history of civil rights. On July 12, 1957, when James "Cowboy" Clark stopped black motorist Caliph Washington in the excessively corrupt city of Bessemer, Alabama, a struggle ensued. Clark ended up dead, and Washington fled, soon to be captured in Mississippi. Did Washington intentionally shoot longtime officer Clark during a struggle over Clark's gun, or could the struggle be considered self-defense due to Washington's fear that Clark intended to murder him out of racial hatred? Since the Alabama court system wanted to display at least the veneer of justice to the outside world, Washington went to trial. However, he received second-rate lawyering and faced an all-white jury. While on death row, Washington won a new trial due to courtroom irregularities. A second jury convicted Washington, who returned to death row. Under normal circumstances in Alabama, Washington would have been executed quickly at that juncture. However, the newly elected governor, George Wallace, despite his renown as a segregationist, felt uncomfortable with the death penalty, so he granted Washington reprieve after reprieve, which led to a second overturning of the guilty verdict. A third jury, no longer all-white, also convicted Washington. Appellate maneuvering continued for years until, finally, a judge ordered Washington's release in 1971. The state refused to drop the case, but a fourth trial never occurred, and Washington lived an exemplary life of faith and family until his death in 2001. Throughout a skilled recounting of Washington's travails, Bass offers extended riveting passages about the broader battle for civil rights in Alabama. A stirring book that explores numerous aspects of racism in Alabama and the nation as a whole. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the 1950s, the small Alabama town of Bessemer was notoriously corrupt, as local politicians, police, and ordinary citizens all wet their beaks in seeking illicit profits. Although the majority of the population was black, this was still the Jim Crow era and whites dominated all aspects of government, especially the police and court systems. On July 12, 1957, after a brief car chase, a white police officer, James Clark, died from a single bullet wound that ravaged his internal organs. The supposed murderer, a 17-year-old African American, Caliph Washington, fled the scene but was captured, quickly convicted, and sentenced to death. Thus began a decades-long struggle in the courts that played out against the context of the civil rights movement and the slow dismantling of white supremacy in this southern enclave. Bass, a professor of history at Alabama's Samford University, examines the prolonged legal and political battle to save Washington, and the broader social milieu in which the case unfolded, showing both insight and compassion. His chronicle includes a fascinating cast of characters, including police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and, most vividly, the arch-segregationist governor George Wallace. This is an outstanding look at both an apparent travesty of justice and the system that produced it.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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. "1 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 pistolwhipping 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 pearlhandled six-shooter. Telling Washington that they had arrested his parents and would not release them until he confessed, Bessemer police grilled the youth, threatening to kill him. Not advised of his rights, Washington signed a confession. An all-white jury quickly convicted him and sentenced him to "ride the lightning" in "Big Yellow Mama," Alabama's electric chair. After a failed appeal in 1959 put him back on Death Row, Gov. George Wallace, the racist demagogue who was oddly queasy about capital punishment, stayed his execution 13 times, a cruel mercy that led to the overthrow of the sentence. A third jury handed down a guilty verdict as well, but, after years of appeals, a judge in 1971 ordered him released. The state of Alabama let him go but declined to dismiss his conviction and the possibility of incarceration hung over his head until he died in 2001, leaving behind an adoring family and three decades of exemplary ministry in Bessemer. 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. ? "You better get out of that car,' a neighbor yelled. 'These white folks will kill you.' TIMOTHY B. TYSON is the author of "Blood Done Sign My Name" and, most recently, "The Blood of Emmett Till."
Library Journal Review
Bass (history, Samford Univ.; Blessed Are the Peacemakers) tells the story of Caliph -Washington, a 17-year-old former solider accused of killing a white police officer in an Alabama still under the strictures of Jim Crow. The author relates Washington's powerful but unknown story as a young black man within the confines of an inequitable criminal justice system. At the same time, Bass accurately sketches the corruption, racism, and terror that led to Washington's guilty sentence by an all-white jury. The result is a masterly book that is well written and thoroughly researched. Washington's long efforts to obtain legal representation and justice are reminiscent of other works that have revealed legal injustices such as Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow and Gilbert King's Devil in the Grove. VERDICT By illuminating Washington's story of courage in the face of an unjust legal system, Bass writes an important book for those concerned about civil rights in this new era of challenges to them.-Amy -Lewontin, -Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. xi |
| 1 Steal Away | p. 1 |
| 2 A Hell of a Place | p. 15 |
| 3 "These White Folks Will Kill You" | p. 29 |
| 4 "In Bessemer, Anything Can Happen" | p. 51 |
| 5 A "Well Bound Book" | p. 71 |
| 6 "Because It Was Self-Defense" | p. 91 |
| 7 A Violent and Accidental Death | p. 107 |
| 8 "There Are Lots of Ways to Fight" | p. 121 |
| 9 "I Just Say I Am Innocent" | p. 137 |
| 10 "You Belong to the State of Alabama" | p. 149 |
| 11 "Please Spare My Life" | p. 163 |
| 12 Called by Lightning | p. 183 |
| 13 A Thunderous Arrival | p. 201 |
| 14 Whereabouts Unknown | p. 217 |
| 15 Sinners to Convert | p. 235 |
| 16 Segregation's Last Stand | p. 253 |
| 17 "Sojourn in the Shadow of Death" | p. 269 |
| 18 "In a Wasted Land of No Want" | p. 285 |
| 19 "He Still Ain't Dead" | p. 307 |
| 20 "Set Me Free Dear Jesus" | p. 329 |
| Conclusion The Salvation Club | p. 345 |
| Note on Sources | p. 357 |
| Bibliography | p. 361 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 386 |
| Credits | p. 389 |
| Index | p. 393 |