Wages of Rebellion (28 page)

“This whole street is rich with this history,” he said. “But nobody wants to talk about this slavery stuff. Nobody.”

Stevenson said he wants to start a campaign to erect monuments to that history on the sites of lynchings, slave auctions, and slave depots.

“When we start talking about it, people will be outraged,” he said. “They will be provoked. They will be angry.”

The Confederate memorials, plaques, and monuments we passed, Stevenson said, “have all appeared in the last couple of decades.” A massive Confederate flag, placed by the “Sons of Confederate Veterans,” was displayed on the highway into the city. Whites in Montgomery, which is half black, had recently reenacted the inauguration of Confederate president Jefferson Davis by parading through the streets in Confederate uniforms, holding Confederate flags, and surrounding a carriage that carried a man dressed up as Davis. They held the ceremony of the inauguration on the steps of the state capitol.

At the same time, Alabama sentences more people to death per capita than any other state. With no state-funded program to provide legal assistance to death-row prisoners, half of the condemned are represented by court-appointed lawyers whose compensation is capped at $1,000. Few of the condemned ever have an adequate defense. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “In a state with a population that is 27% black, nearly half of Alabama’s death row is black and 83% of the 757 people executed by Alabama since capital punishment began in the state have been black.”
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Stevenson’s career as a lawyer for death-row prisoners began with a collect call from Herbert Richardson, a death-row inmate at Holman State Prison. Richardson, a disturbed Vietnam combat veteran, had left an explosive device on the porch of an estranged girlfriend. It killed a young girl. His execution was to be held in thirty days. Stevenson, after a second phone call, filed for an emergency stay of execution, which the state rejected.

“He never really got representation until we jumped in,” Stevenson said.

Stevenson went to the prison on the day of the execution, which was scheduled for midnight. He found his client surrounded by a half-dozen family members, including the woman who had married him the week
before. Richardson repeatedly asked Stevenson to make sure his wife received the American flag he would be given as a veteran.

Although “it was time for the visit to end,” Stevenson recalled, the visitation officer was “clearly emotionally unprepared to make these people leave.” When the officer insisted, Stevenson said, Richardson’s wife grabbed her husband. “[His wife] says, ‘I’m not leaving.’ Other people don’t know what to do. They are holding on to him.” The officer left, but her superiors sent her back in. “[The officer] has tears running down her face. She looks to me and says, ‘Please, please help me.’ ”

Stevenson began to hum a hymn. The room went still. The family started singing the words. Stevenson went over to the wife and said, “We’re going to have to let him go.”

She did.

He then walked with Richardson to the execution chamber.

“Bryan, it has been so strange,” the condemned man said. “All day long people have been saying to me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ I got up this morning, ‘What can I get you for breakfast? What can I get you for lunch? What can I get you for dinner? Can I get you some stamps to mail your last letters? Do you need the phone? Do you need water? Do you need coffee? How can we help you?’ More people have said what can they do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than they ever did [before].”

“You never got the help you needed,” Stevenson told him. And he made Richardson a promise: “I will try and keep as many people out of this situation as possible.”

Richardson had asked the guards to play “The Old Rugged Cross” before he died. As he was strapped into the electric chair and hooded, the hymn began to blare out from a cassette player. Then the warden pulled the switch.

“Do you think we should rape people who rape?” Stevenson asked as we stood in the square. “We don’t rape rapists, because we think about the person who would have to commit the rape. Should we assault people who have committed assault? We can’t imagine replicating a rape or an assault and hold[ing] on to our dignity, integrity, and civility. But because we think we have found a way to kill people that is civilized and decent, we are comfortable.”

Stevenson turns frequently to the Bible. He quoted to me from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says of the woman who committed adultery: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” He tells me an elderly black woman once called him a “stone catcher.”

“There is no such thing as being a Christian and not being a stone catcher,” he said. “But that is exhausting. You’re not going to catch them all. And it hurts. If it doesn’t make you sad to have to do that, then you don’t understand what it means to be engaged in an act of faith.… But if you have the right relationship to it, it is less of a burden, finally, than a blessing. It makes you feel stronger.”

The South, indeed much of the country, is becoming increasingly inhospitable to stone catchers.

O
n a windy afternoon I took a taxi to a depressed section of North Memphis to visit an old clapboard house that was once owned by a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle. Oral history—and oral history is all anyone has in this case, since no written documents survive—holds that Burkle used his house as a stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves in the decade before the Civil War. The house is now a small museum called Slave Haven. It has artifacts such as leg irons, iron collars, and broadsheets advertising the sale of men, women, and children. In the gray floor of the porch is a trapdoor that leads to a long crawl space and a jagged hole in a brick cellar wall where fugitives could have pushed themselves down into the basement. Escaped slaves were purportedly guided by Burkle at night down a tunnel or trench toward the nearby Mississippi River and turned over to sympathetic river traders who took them north to Cairo, Illinois, and on to freedom in Canada.

Burkle and his descendants had good reason to avoid written records and to keep their activities secret. Memphis, on the eve of the Civil War, was one of the biggest slave markets in the South. After the war, the city was an epicenter for Ku Klux Klan terror that included lynching, the nighttime burning of black churches and schools, and the killing of black leaders and their white supporters, atrocities that continued into the twentieth century. A vigilante gunman in Memphis
assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. If word had gotten out that Burkle used his home to help slaves escape, the structure would almost certainly have been burned and Burkle or his descendants, at the very least, driven out of the city. The story of Burkle’s aid to slaves fleeing bondage became public knowledge only a couple of decades ago.

The modest public profile of the Burkle house stands in stunning contrast with the monument I visited in the center of Memphis to native son Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest, who is buried in Forrest Park under a statue of himself in his Confederate general’s uniform and mounted on a horse, is one of the most odious figures in American history. A moody, barely literate, violent man—he was not averse to shooting his own troops if he deemed them to be cowards—he became one of the wealthiest men in the South before the war as a planter and slave trader.
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As a Confederate general, he was noted for moronic aphorisms such as “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.”
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Forrest was, even by the accounts of those who served under him, a butcher. But he was also a brilliant cavalry commander who could move large numbers of troops over long distances to mount disastrously effective surprise assaults on Union troops. The historian Shelby Foote said that the Civil War produced two geniuses—Forrest and Abraham Lincoln.
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Forrest’s penchant for warfare, however, was accompanied by a penchant for killing. He ordered a massacre at Fort Pillow in Henning, Tennessee, of some 300 black Union troops, although they had surrendered and put down their weapons, as well as the women and children who had sheltered in the fort.
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Following the war, Forrest was the first leader, or “Grand Wizard,” of the Ku Klux Klan, and on the huge plantation he owned outside of Memphis he took advantage of the new convict lease system, which would last thirty years, to use black convicts as laborers—slaves in all but name.
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Forrest, like many other white racists of the antebellum South, is one of many Confederate leaders who is enjoying a huge renaissance. When the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Shelby County Historical Commission in 2012 put up a 1,000-pound granite marker at the entrance to the park that read F
ORREST PARK
, the city, saying the groups had not obtained a permit, removed it with a crane. The dispute
over the park name that was then raging in the Memphis City Council exposed the deep divide in Memphis and throughout much of the South between those who laud the Confederacy and those who detest it, a split that runs like a wide fault down racial lines. Blacks, who have called for the park to be named after the crusading black journalist Ida B. Wells, whose newspaper was based in Memphis, have been rebuffed.

Wells was one of the nation’s most courageous and important journalists. She moved to Memphis as a young woman to live with her aunt. Her investigations revealed that lynching was fundamentally a mechanism to rid white businessmen of black competitors. When Thomas Moss of Memphis, a black man who ran the People’s Grocery Co., was murdered with his partners by a mob of whites and his store was looted and destroyed, Wells was incensed. “This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was,” she wrote. She noted “that the Southerner had never gotten over this resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income” and said that whites were using charges of rape against black business owners to mask this resentment. The lynching of Moss, she wrote, was “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down.’ ”
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White mobs destroyed Wells’s newspaper,
Free Speech
, which railed against white vigilante violence, the inadequate black schools, segregation, discrimination, and a corrupt legal system that denied justice to blacks. Wells was forced to flee the city, becoming, as she wrote, “an exile from home for hinting at the truth.”
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The split in Memphis between those who hold up authentic heroes—people who fought to protect, defend, and preserve life, such as Wells and Burkle—and those who memorialize slave traders and bigots such as Forrest characterizes the ethic of vigilante violence. Honoring figures like Forrest in Memphis while ignoring Wells is like erecting a statue to the Nazi death camp commander Amon Goeth in the Czech Republic town of Svitavy, the birthplace of Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,200 Jews. This capturing of the past by American vigilantes, now well under way, will have disastrous consequences, as it did in Yugoslavia. Intolerance that leads to violence is being bred with the steady rise of ethnic
nationalism over the past decade and the replacing of history with fabricated stories of lost glory. Violence becomes in this perverted belief system a cleansing agent, a way to restore a lost world.

There are ample historical accounts that disprove the myths espoused by the neo-Confederates, including books such as the volume
Race, Slavery, and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory
, edited by James Oliver Horton and Amanda Kleintop, along with numerous original documents, including South Carolina’s “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” In that document, issued four days after South Carolina seceded from the Union, the state sited the election of a new president “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery” as justifying its secession.
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But facts hold little sway with those who insist that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states’ rights and the protection of traditional Christianity. These records are useless in puncturing the collective self-delusion, just as documentary evidence does nothing to blunt the self-delusion of Holocaust deniers. Those who retreat into fantasy cannot be engaged in rational discussion, for fantasy is all that is left of their tattered self-esteem. Attacks on their myths as untrue trigger not a discussion of facts and evidence but a ferocious emotional backlash. Such challenges of the myth threaten what is left of hope.

Achilles V. Clark, a sergeant with the 20th Tennessee Cavalry under Forrest during the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow, wrote to his sister after the attack: