Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose

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СКАЧАТЬ to solve the killings – just as he had already done time and again, the Ledger pointed out, since Ferne Jackson’s death the previous September. ‘We are going to solve this problem,’ Mickle said. ‘We are going to make arrests.’ Next day, the paper published a lengthy attack on Mickle, the CPD and its chief Curtis McClung, in the form of a letter from one E. Jensen:

      We the people of Columbus, Georgia are sick! We have a terminal disease called fear, and soon, it will be the death of us all. But the trouble is, it’s justified. My fear stems not so much from the criminal element, but … the ineptness of local law. We are now on centre stage. The world is watching us through the networks. And what do we do? We let the world see our sloppy police work and our praying Mayor! Mickle, get up off your knees and do something!

      Stung by the criticism, the CPD tried to mount its own public relations campaign, briefing reporters about the long hours its staff were working and their total commitment to finding the killer. At the behest of Georgia’s Governor, the police were forced to cede their autonomy and set up a joint ‘task force’ with the state-wide detective agency, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Twenty GBI agents and support staff moved into a special office that took up the entire basement of the Government Center, bringing with them Columbus’s first crime computer system. Ronnie Jones, the CPD’s chief homicide detective, told reporters that task force members were making huge personal sacrifices; for his own part, he said he was working up to twenty hours each day, while the strangler had invaded his dreams. For the first time in eight years, Jones revealed, he had gone so far as to disappoint his wife by cancelling their annual wedding anniversary holiday in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

      If shared mentalities are partly formed by shared historical memories, among the white citizens, cops and politicians who strove to deal with the stranglings, there was none more potent than the Reconstruction period. Accounts of this era, after the end of the Civil War in 1865, in the local histories of Columbus describe it in extravagant language, suggesting that until the stranglings, Reconstruction had been the city’s deepest wound. They are, of course, written from a white perspective. On the violence and death meted out to African-Americans, the Columbus histories are silent. In their pages, post-war lawlessness and injustice in the South involved whites only as victims.

      Like the Lost Cause legend, this narrative, with its wayward, marauding Negroes, ‘carpet bagger’ Northern radicals and ‘scalawag’ Southern collaborators, is not unique to Columbus. For decades, the myth of punitive vengeance by the Civil War’s victors dominated American historiography, even in the North. Its acceptance helped to legitimise the white supremacist oppression of the Jim Crow era, and was further fuelled by works such as Thomas Dixon’s bestselling 1905 novel, The Clansman. Dixon characterised Reconstruction’s aim of achieving legal equality as ‘an atrocity too monstrous for belief’, using the language of visceral racial hatred. Underlying it was the familiar Southern rape complex. In Dixon’s view, the decision to award the vote to the ‘thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour’, had rendered every Southern woman at risk of barbaric violation.

      In 1914, D.W. Griffith made cinematic history with his film based on Dixon’s book, The Birth of a Nation. Screened at the White House for Woodrow Wilson and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, Edward D White, it depicted a version of Reconstruction that bore only the most distant relationship to the truth. A contemporary scene-by-scene review in Variety provides a representative taste: ‘Soon the newfound freedom of the former slaves leads to rude insolence. Black militiamen take over the streets in a reign of terror. Flashes are shown of helpless white virgins being whisked indoors by lusty black bucks. At a carpetbaggers’ rally, wildly animated blacks carry placards proclaiming EQUAL RIGHTS, EQUAL MARRIAGE.’

      Much of the film concerns the efforts of Gus, one such ‘buck’, to defile the innocence of the virginal ‘Little Sister’. Terrified, she tries to flee the pursuing Gus, while the orchestra (in the words of a later critic) ‘plays hootchy-kootchy music with driving tom-tom beats, suggesting … the image of a black penis driving into the vagina of a white virgin’. Just as he is about to catch her, she opts for the preferable fate of tumbling over the edge of a cliff. Needless to say, her death is avenged by the heroic redeemers of the Ku Klux Klan, who lynch Gus against a superimposed image of Little Sister in her coffin. At the film’s climax, a massed Klan cavalry ‘pour over the screen like an Anglo-Saxon Niagara’, to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.

      Across the South, writes the Klan’s historian Wyn Craig Wade, The Birth of a Nation was greeted as a ‘sacred epic’, while the film ‘united white Americans in a vast national drama, convincing them of a past that had never been’. No moving picture had ever achieved a fraction of its audience and impact before. Against this backdrop, Columbus’s parochial, local version of the Reconstruction story is not particularly original, and is somewhat less vivid. But for future race relations in the city, it lacks neither relevance nor power. In paragraphs representative of prevailing white sentiment, Nancy Telfair begins the pertinent chapter of her 1928 History of Columbus, Georgia with a ringing condemnation of the South’s treatment in the immediate wake of defeat in 1865:

      Half a million negroes had been given their ‘freedom’, and were drunk with the sound of the word. Thousands of Yankee soldiers had been stationed throughout the state for the purpose of seeing that the negroes received the rights so tumultuously thrust upon them.

      Besides these, were the ‘carpet baggers’, who were said to carry their worldly goods in their carpet bags, and the ‘scalawags’, low-class Southerners, who were hand in glove with their Yankee confreres in stirring up racial hatred to result in their own affluence and aggrandizement … there were yet crowds of worthless, lazy darkies in the towns, who lived only by stealing from whites and acted as henchmen for the ‘carpet baggers’ and ‘scalawags’ whose power was constantly increasing.

      Reconstruction, adds Etta Blanchard Worsley in her later, but equally unapologetic Columbus on the Chattahoochee, published at the dawn of the civil rights era in 1951, was a time when Northern radicals sought to impose ‘punitive measures’ on the broken South. What were these measures? According to Worsley, the worst was the idea that ‘the Negroes, though uneducated and not long out of darkest Africa, must have the vote’. The Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment ‘took from the states control of their suffrage by bestowing the ballot on the Negro’.

      The burning sense of grievance implanted during Reconstruction and magnified in its later retellings had distinct implications for both the rule of law and the idea that the races should be equal under it. The Southern view that parts of the Constitution had been imposed by force, and were therefore illegitimate, had a consequence: decent people could reasonably see the law as something that need not always be obeyed, or as an instrument to be manipulated. Occasionally, even acts of terrible violence that were patently illegal might be justified.

      No less a figure than Columbus’s one-time Georgia Supreme Court Justice, Sterling Price Gilbert, expresses these thoughts in his memoir A Georgia Lawyer. Echoing Telfair, he describes Reconstruction as ‘cruel and oppressive’, and continues with a eulogy to the Klan, which he compares to the French Resistance:

      These [Reconstruction] measures were often administered in a vindictive manner by incompetent and dishonest adventurers. This situation brought into existence the Ku Klux Klan which operated much like the ‘underground’ in World War Two … it is credited with doing much to restore order and protection to persons and property. The Ku Klux Klan of that day resembled the Vigilantes who operated in the formative days of our Western states and territories. The methods of both were often primitive, but many of the results were good.

      Those Klan methods had been described over twelve volumes of testimony to a joint select committee of the two houses of Congress in 1871–72. Established in response to a mass of reports that the Klan had brought large tracts of the South close to anarchy, the committee’s СКАЧАТЬ