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WORK TITLE: He Calls Me by Lightning
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Birmingham
STATE: AL
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.samford.edu/arts-and-sciences/directory/Bass-S-Jonathan * http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294992747
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Alabama at Birmingham, B.A., M.A.; the University of Tennessee, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, and writer. Sanford University, Birmingham, AL, 1997–, professor and chair of history.
AWARDS:Pulitzer Prize nomination, for Blessed are the Peacemakers.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
S. Jonathan Bass is a historian and the author of books focusing on the civil rights era. His expertise includes recent America and the South, civil rights, and Alabama. He also has a strong interest in legal history.
Blessed Are the Peacemakers
Bass is the author of Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The book provides a comprehensive history of Dr. King’s open letter from jail during the midst of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s. Considered among the most important written documents of the civil rights protest era, the letter was addressed to eight white clergymen in Birmingham, Alabama. King wrote the letter in response to clergymen’s efforts to discourage King from conducting a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham. The clergymen’s stated goal was to avoid the violence that they fully expected to occur if the demonstration took place.
Bass’s history of the letter focuses on a number of wide-ranging topics and issues. Bass delves into how King, along with collaborators in the movement, planned and wrote the letter and then distributed it. The book explores the profound impact the letter had both on the movement and the nation as a whole. Bass also tells the story of the eight clergymen with an additional look at how the Southern clergy in general responded to the racial crisis that was taking place in America’s Deep South. “Understanding their viewpoints and examining the lives and careers of these white ministers reveals a great deal about the role that church and synagogue played during the civil rights era for the 1950s and 1960s,” writes Bass in the introduction to Blessed Are the Peacemakers. Bass goes on to note that more than anything, their story shows how complex race relations were in the South and the dilemma faced by moderates on race relations.
“Bass tries to set the record straight and provide ‘a balanced and generally objective study’ of the complex circumstances” surrounding the letter and its impact, wrote Mary T. Gerrity in Kliatt. Katherine Mellen Charron, writing in Southern Cultures, remarked: “The greatest strength of Blessed Are the Peacemakers is that it illuminates the complete history of King’s iconic prison epistle. Bass unequivocally demonstrates that the ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ was first and foremost a press release.”
He Calls Me By Lightning
In his next book, He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty, Bass tells the story of a wrongfully convicted man during the civil rights era whose story has largely been forgotten. In the process, Bass provides new insight into the era of the civil rights movement. The history revolves around Caliph Washington, a black man living in the Jim Crow South in Bessemer, Alabama. The year was 1957, and Officer James “Cowboy” Clark had been shot and was dying. Although the seventeen-year-old Caliph was not the murderer, he feared that, as a black man, he would get accused and prosecuted for the crime. As a result, he ran away from the scene.
Bass recounts how Caliph was coming home from a date when he came across the crime scene. Bass was arrested, charged with murder, and found guilty by an all-white jury. He was sentenced to death. Bass delves into the thirteen years Caliph spent in prison, including finding himself on death row several times waiting to be executed as his case continued to go through the courts. In the course of telling this story, Bass points out that Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, actually saved Caliph’s life by staying his execution several times.
In Bass’s recounting of Caliph’s ordeals, he also profiles Caliph’s lawyers: David Hood, Jr. and Orwell Billingsley. The book also tells the story of Christine Luna, schoolteacher and activist. An Italian American, Christine married Caliph after he was finally released. He Calls Me By Lightning features “a fascinating cast of characters, including police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and, most vividly, the arch-segregationist governor George Wallace,” wrote Jay Freeman in Booklist. Calling the book “a skilled recounting of Washington’s travails … [with] extended riveting passages about the broader battle for civil rights in Alabama,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor went on to deem He Calls Me By Lightning “a stirring book that explores numerous aspects of racism.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Bass, S. Jonathan, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), c. 2001.
PERIODICALS
Baptist History and Heritage, winter-spring, 2001, John H. Barhill, review of Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” p. 316.
Booklist, April 1, 2017, Jay Freeman, review of He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty, p. 4.
Journal of Negro History, winter, 2001, review of Blessed are the Peacemakers, p. 86.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of He Calls Me By Lightning.
Kliatt, July, 2002, Mary T. Gerrity, review of Blessed Are the Peacemakers, p. 42.
Library Journal, March 1, 2017, Amy Lewontin, review of He Calls Me By Lightning, p. 91.
Publishers Weekly, March 6, 2017, review of He Calls Me by Lightning, p. 52.
Public Relations Quarterly, fall, 2007, Hugh M. Culbertson, review of Blessed are the Peacemakers, p. 3.
Southern Cultures, summer, 2002, Katherine Mellen Cultures, review of Blessed Are the Peacemakers, p. 110.
ONLINE
BookPage, https://bookpage.com/ (May 16, 2017), Carla Jean Whitley, review of He Calls Me By Lightning.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (May 19, 2017 ), Timothy B. Tyson, review of He Calls Me By Lightning.
Samford University Website, https://www.samford.edu/ (November 25, 2017), author faculty profile.
S. Jonathan Bass is a professor at Alabama’s Samford University and the author of Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
S. Jonathan Bass
Professor and Chair, University Historian
Howard College of Arts and Sciences
History
Office: Beeson Hall 103A
Email: sjbass@samford.edu
Phone: 205-726-4133
Fairfield, Ala., native S. Jonathan Bass holds a B.S., M.A. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee. He joined Samford's faculty in 1997. His book, "Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight white religious leaders and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Degrees and Certifications
B.A., University of Alabama at Birmingham
M.A., University of Alabama at Birmingham
Ph.D., The University of Tennessee
Expertise
Recent America and South
Civil Rights
Alabama
Legal History
pg. 8
He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
Jay Freeman
113.15 (Apr. 1, 2017): p4.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty.
By S. Jonathan Bass.
May 2017. 320p. illus. Norton/Liveright, 526.95 (9781631492372). 342.
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.--Jay Freeman
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Freeman, Jay. "He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491487794&it=r&asid=d9d435f6516d72078315bcafe96eff81. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491487794
He Calls Me by Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
264.10 (Mar. 6, 2017): p52.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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. Liveright, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-63149-237-2
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)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"He Calls Me by Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 52. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973679&it=r&asid=e4093308eca75ee2592d3591e893fe56. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A484973679
Bass, S. Jonathan. He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
Amy Lewontin
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p91.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Bass, S. Jonathan. He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty. Liveright: Norton. May 2017.320p. illus. notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9781631492372. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9781631492389. HIST
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
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lewontin, Amy. "Bass, S. Jonathan. He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 91. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702158&it=r&asid=0ff4c41531ac0cfdf9bcc46ae21fc29c. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702158
Bass, S. Jonathan: HE CALLS ME BY LIGHTNING
(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Bass, S. Jonathan HE CALLS ME BY LIGHTNING Liveright/Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 5, 2 ISBN: 978-1-63149-237-2
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bass, S. Jonathan: HE CALLS ME BY LIGHTNING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234601&it=r&asid=dc61b25ea214859862622945a963231f. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234601
Blessed are the Peace Makers
Hugh M. Culbertson
52.3 (Fall 2007): p3.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Public Relations Quarterly
Blessed are the Peace Makers, S. Jonathan Bass, Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8071-2655-1. 322 pages, $39.95.
Contemporary writings suggest the idealistic public relations professional plays at least two roles. The first is as boundary spanner, bridging gaps and facilitating mutual understanding and cooperation--or at least, peaceful co-existence--among groups with differing viewpoints and goals. The second is a member of dominant coalitions groups within client organizations that make policy decisions and lead in implementing them.
Clergy in a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple certainly do these things. PR practitioners can learn a great deal from clergy--and from Bass's readable book that discusses Rev. Marin Luther King's famous. "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" --a document that ranks close behind the civil rights leader's "I Have a Dream" speech in providing impetus for the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Bass, a history professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, discusses in fascinating detail the strategies and tactics of King's Southern Leadership Conference. Also, he plows new ground by focusing heavily on the eight white Birmingham clergy to whom King addressed his famous letter. Many came--unjustly, in Bass's view--to see these preachers as villains.
The targeted clergy included two Methodists, two Episcopalians, and one each from the Baptist, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and Reformed Jewish faiths. Truly they were "caught in the middle" between rabid segregationists in their congregations and SCLC-led activists. Seeking peaceful compromise, they endured death threats from Ku Klux Klan sympathizers and condemnation from integrationists. Factions within their churches sometimes sought their ouster when they left town on vacations or business trips. And their flocks threatened to break apart in some cases.
In early 1963, Birmingham, a grimy steel town with a large Afro-American population, had become the focus of King's crusade. The city featured much poverty, a high rate of violence, blatant discrimination, and segregation with "whites only" and "blacks only" signs over lunch counters, restaurants and numerous other locations. Active Ku Klux Klan chapters functioned in the area. A thuggish, bigoted political leader, Eugene "Bull Connor," Could be counted on to attract press attention by using fire hoses and police dogs to break up demonstrations and "put Blacks in their place." And a wide array of churches and synagogues combined law-and-order appeals with a very gradualist approach to civil rights.
King and his SCLC colleagues came to Birmingham to encourage and support lunch counter sit-ins, demonstrations, and other acts of peaceful civil disobedience. They arranged a march with at least 50 official protesters through the streets of Birmingham on Good Friday, April 12, 1963. The date had great symbolic value as King and fellow SCLC members sought to emulate Jesus Christ's walk to his death. Denied a permit to march, they hoped to be arrested for maximum publicity value. Connor followed this script in his usual flamboyant style and escorted King, amid popping flash bulbs, to a solitary jail cell where he remained for eight days.
There he wrote his famous letter on the margins of smuggled newspapers, scraps of paper provided by a friendly trusty, and perhaps even toilet paper--the stuff of legend. The epistle soon appeared in publications all over the country. King and his staff refined it after his release and published a book that that centered on it in 1964.
Really aiming at a national--perhaps worldwide--audience, king addressed the letter to the eight leading white clergy. They had urged him to delay his march partly because, in a recent election, Bull Connor had lost status with the naming of a new mayor, Albert Boutwell. The preachers argued that the new regime should be given a chance to improve civil rights. However, King claimed Blacks had waited hundreds of years for justice and could not be expected to wait forever. Furthermore, while Boutwell was more genteel than Connor, he was a dedicated segregationist. Thus there was little prospect of fruitful negotiation.
King accused the white clergy of inaction--a major obstacle to change. He said they had hidden behind their stain-glassed windows with little understanding of the plight of Black southerners who faced job discrimination, poor education, constant humiliation under Jim Crow laws and customs, and even lynching.
The Clergymen were portrayed by king as a monolithic group, but really they were a varied lot. Two older men, in particular, seemed trapped in traditional southern ways of thinking. They eventually came to see the injustice of Jim Crow and sought to increase help and opportunities for Blacks. However, they had a paternalistic view that Negroes were inferior, child-like, and in need of special care. These pastors adhered firmly to the "separate but equal" doctrine.
In contrast, two younger ministers in the group took a more progressive stand. Rev. Earl Stallings of Birmingham's First Baptist Church and Rev. Edmund Ramage of the First Presbyterian Church welcomed blacks to their worship services. Stallings was pictured on a New York Times front page greeting black visitors at his front door after Easter Sunday service of April 14, 1963. These ministers remained in their pulpits despite death threats and slashing of their tires.
What lessons can one learn from the activities of these brave but unappreciated pastors? At least three seem clear in Bass's analysis:
First, do positive things, rather than just talk, to counteract the negativity of attacks. The eight had issued a rather eloquent statement on Jan. 18, 1963 Calling for school integration in the face of recently elected Gov. George Wallace's call for Alabamans to resist implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education de-segregation ruling. And they distributed another statement on Sept. 16, 1963 condemning the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, apparently by the KKK, which killed four young girls. They realized any effort to rebut king verbally would be futile in light of his great eloquence, credibility, and publicity machine.
Second, take the high ground in a symbolic way. Stallings did this, even gaining positive mention in King's letter, as he welcomed Blacks into his church on Easter Sunday. And several clergy led their congregations in helping to rebuild the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
Third, cultivate a trusting relationship with all factions in the client organization. Ramage and Stallings, in particular, did this so as to make it hard for even staunch segregationists to challenge their leadership.
Certainly many condemned the eight pastors in the ensuing years. these gentlemen resented king's charges against them, but most saw some truth in what he had to say. Some eventually became his supporters. One, Catholic Bishop Joseph Durick, delivered a moving eulogy to king after his 1968 assassination.
Some of the eight did not remain long in their pulpits very long. However, most slogged on at considerable risk to their professional careers and property--and even to their own and their families' personal safety. Doing the "right thing" in the face of opposition within an organization one serves is not always easy for a clergy person or a public relations practitioner. One can dust off his. or her resume and resign in the face of such pressure. However, he or she can then have little impact on the organization served.
As for Birmingham, it has endured lasting image problems despite considerable urban renewal. in 1979, it even elected a progressive Black mayor. Bass Credits the white pastors and king with contributing to these good and bad outcomes.
Reviewed by Hugh M. Culbertson, professor emeritus of journalism, Ohio University, culberts@ohio.edu.
Culbertson, Hugh M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Culbertson, Hugh M. "Blessed are the Peace Makers." Public Relations Quarterly, Fall 2007, p. 3+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA190067485&it=r&asid=6337a765c5996d9088e5a3b08252a46b. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A190067485
Bass, S. Jonathan. Blessed are the peacemakers; Martin Luther King, Jr., eight white religious leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
Mary T. Gerrity
36.4 (July 2002): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Kliatt
http://hometown.aol.com/kliatt/
Louisiana State Univ. 344p. notes. bibliog. index. c2001. 0-8071-2800-7 $17.95. SA
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" marked an important moment in the Civil Rights Movement. While the letter has become part of history, the circumstances surrounding the writing and the effects of the letter on those to whom it was addressed are not as well known. Bass, an assistant professor at Birmingham's Samford University, documents the story behind the demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963 that led to Dr. King's arrest. While in jail King began to compose a response to the eight white clergy who had issued "An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense" in January 1963 and a "Good Friday Statement" on April 12, 1963, urging restraint, avoidance of violence, and a more gradual approach to desegregation in the city. While the letter appeared to be addressed specifically to the eight religious leaders, Bass demonstrates that the letter had a much wider audience. Begun as notes written while King was jailed, the letter grew and expanded to become a rallying cry and crystallization of the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement.
Bass also introduces the eight religious leaders, six Protestant clergymen, one Catholic bishop, and one Jewish rabbi, who reflect a wide range of beliefs and a deep concern for the disturbances engulfing Birmingham. Their lives would never be the same after the letter. For better or worse, they either grew and changed or found themselves swept away as the gradual approach to desegregation gave way to more active integration. While in their hearts they may have believed in the equality of all people, black and white, the tide of history and the impact of the impassioned Dr. King and his astute followers meant that these eight white clergymen would remain symbols of Southern intransigence. Bass tries to set the record straight and provide "a balanced and generally objective study" of the complex circumstances that make up the scenario of "Letter From Birmingham Jail," its author, and the recipients who struggled with moral and legal issues during a pivotal moment in America's history. Recommended for libraries and for upper-level U.S. history classes. Mary T. Gerrity, Camp Springs, MD
Gerrity, Mary T.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gerrity, Mary T. "Bass, S. Jonathan. Blessed are the peacemakers; Martin Luther King, Jr., eight white religious leaders, and the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail.'." Kliatt, July 2002, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA111165710&it=r&asid=d175641d5b5eba203f56db505d7726b1. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A111165710
Blessed are the Peacemakers
Katherine Mellen Charron
8.2 (Summer 2002): p110.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 University of North Carolina Press
http://www.southerncultures.org/content/masthead/
Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" By S. Jonathan Bass Louisiana State University Press, 2001 322 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $17.95
One can hardly blame Martin Luther King Jr. for neglecting to mail his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to the eight white clergymen to whom it was addressed. That year, 1963, was a busy one for the civil rights leader, especially after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) Birmingham campaign captured the nation's attention and garnered an unprecedented level of support for the Civil Rights movement. Most can remember that 1963 began in Alabama with Governor George Wallace's famous inaugural declaration "segregation now ... segregation tomorrow ... segregation forever. "Most can also recall what a tumultuous year 1963 became in Birmingham: two factions vying for control of City Hall amidst increased civil rights pressure in the spring, Wallace's calling in the National Guard to prevent the integration of the city's public schools, and four African American girls killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in the fall. It seems odd, given that the story of Birmingham--and King's prison epistle in particular--is so central to our understanding of the Civil Rights movement that we forget to wonder what became of these white clergymen and their ministries in its wake. S. Jonathan Bass insists that "history should remember them--not as misguided opponents of Martin Luther King, but as individuals with diverse ideas on the volatile segregation issue who struggled with social change the way all people do."
Recovering the stories of these eight white religious leaders, Blessed Are the Peacemakers skillfully weaves individual biographies into the religious and political history of the city, the state, and the region. What these men shared in 1963 was a commitment to gradual social transformation that would preserve the peace in a world increasingly rocked by violent racial turmoil. Concern for "law and order and common sense" led them to condemn as equally harmful the defiance of staunch segregationists and the direct action tactics of civil rights agitators. Bass argues that the two oldest, Nolan Harmon and Charles Carpenter, could not escape the racially paternalistic mindset of their generation. Unable to imagine a world without Jim Crow, they tried to serve as voices of moderation but failed to take substantive action. Four younger clergymen, Milton Grafman, Joseph A. Durick, George Murray, and Paul Hardin Jr., remained more receptive to change and translated their commitment to achieving racial progress into bolder stands for racial justice. Bass's portrait of Roman Catholic Bishop Durick's coming of age as a minister--choosing "Jesus over his love for jazz" and traveling from one rural hamlet to another in an ailing station wagon to proselytize--recaptures a lost era in southern religious culture and is among the most engaging. Two other ministers, Edward V. Ramage and Earl Stallings, attempted to embrace more progressive approaches to social change. Lacking institutional support and confronting pressure from segregationists within their congregations, they were forced to abandon their ministries in Alabama. Bass's sympathetic reevaluation of these clergymen caught standing on a rapidly shrinking middle ground offers readers a more holistic view of conditions that silenced even the most well-meaning whites.
The greatest strength of Blessed Are the Peacemakers is that it illuminates the complete history of King's iconic prison epistle. Bass unequivocally demonstrates that the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was first and foremost a press release. King addressed it to the eight white clergymen, but he envisioned them as rhetorical foils in his and SCLC's attempt to orchestrate a morality play on the national stage. Underscoring the role of the national media in constructing civil rights narratives in the 1960s--reducing the struggle to good guys versus bad guys--Bass's chronicle should make us question the myths of the Civil Rights movement that linger today. Offsetting King-centered views of the movement, Bass astutely concludes, "Inevitably it was the citizens of the Magic City, both black and white, and not Martin Luther King and the SCLC, that brought about the real transformation of the city." At the same time, though, focusing on the clergy reaffirms a narrow view of leadership. Notably absent are earlier attempts at interracial organizing among churchwomen and the influence of these attempts on later generations. Equally significant is the fact that events of 1963 proved the ministers' gradualist approach unsound; rapid change could be accomplished with state support. In May the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Albert Boutwell, a "moderate" segregationist compared to his opponent police chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, victorious in the mayoral election. By the end of july, the city council had repealed all segregation ordinances and downtown merchants were serving African Americans at lunch counters.
Particularly problematic is Bass's failure to ask how eight thousand black voters, who formed the margin of victory in the contested election, had been able to register to vote in this city known as the "Johannesburg of the South." While these eight clergymen needed to be pulled from the shadows of history, there are more stories of Birmingham yet to be told.
Reviewed by Katherine Mellen Charron, coeditor with David Cecelski of Recollections of My Slavery Days by William Henry Singleton, published by the North Carolina Division of Archives and History in 1999.
Charron, Katherine Mellen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Charron, Katherine Mellen. "Blessed are the Peacemakers." Southern Cultures, vol. 8, no. 2, 2002, p. 110+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA86743290&it=r&asid=606f32e564657799b6dcaf04edc8584e. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A86743290
Blessed Are the Peacemakers
John H. Barhill
(Winter-Spring 2001): p316.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Baptist History and Heritage Society
http://www.baptisthistory.org/
By S. Jonathan Bass. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. 322 pages.
Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail is one of the most significant documents of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It brought new life, publicity, and money to the struggling Southern Christian Leadership Council, reaffirmed Birmingham on the map as a capital city of bigotry, and secured King as the leader of the civil rights movement. It also created a great deal of grief for the eight individuals to whom King addressed the letter. This book is in part a collective biography of those eight moderate ministers, in part a study of the letter itself.
King and the SCLC were running short of cash, floundering without a clear target. They needed a success to revitalize the movement, and Birmingham was a natural target. Birmingham was still under the influence of the Bull Conners, the Klan, and White Citizens Council. King thought that nonviolence begetting violence with good media coverage would give his movement a symbol, an impetus to continue.
Moderates of various stripes, the ministers opposed extremism by both sides. King equated moderation with racism and bigotry; those who were not with him were against him. History has followed King's lead, in effect dismissing them with the description: a moderate is a moderate is a moderate.
In truth, the ministers are individuals. They have names--Nolan Harmon, Charles Carpenter, George Murray, Paul Hardin, Milton Grafman, Joseph Durick, Ed Ramage, Earl Stallings. The are Catholic, Jew, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist. They differ in education, age, philosophy, openness to change. The letter and subsequent publicity affected them as individuals of differing denominations and temperaments. Some of these men became activists; some did not. Some could not or would not change. Some survived and rose through their hierarchies; some merely survived.
Bass destroys the myth of King sitting alone and hammering out the document in one extended sitting; the actuality entailed smuggling out of King's notes, forming of fragments into a coherent whole, and multiple rewrites. Actual authorship is cloudy, as with most ghostwritten political documents. The role of the ghost at a minimum involved placing the ideas into a sequence that flowed, correcting misquotes, and making the whole pleasing and readable. One of the appendices tracks the continuing changes in the letter over its publication history.
This book is fascinating on several levels. First, it revives the faded memory of eight honorable men--all but one of whom had been pressured out of Birmingham by 1971. It also puts the almost mythical letter into a context of King's pragmatism and the relative lack of success before and after this episode. It defends the moderate way, and reminds us that nearly forty years after the events of 1963 that Birmingham has not yet attained the dream of King--or those of Harmon, Carpenter, Murray, Hardin, Grafman, Durick, Ramage, and Stallings.--Reviewed by John H. Barnhill, Analyst and Historian, Tinker AFB, Oklahoma.
Barhill, John H.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Barhill, John H. "Blessed Are the Peacemakers." Baptist History and Heritage, 2001, p. 316+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA94160946&it=r&asid=dff61ac3451b1ad5aa1ce52751177aec. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A94160946
Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
86.1 (Winter 2001): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Inc.
http://asalh100.org
Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail." By S. Jonathan Bass. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. 322, $39.95)
This book explores the complex race relations of the South during the 1950s and 1960s through a critical analysis of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Not just a critique of the "Letter" or of the circumstances behind its production and dissemination, Blessed Are the Peacemakers provides biographies of the eight clergymen chided in the "Letter." Also presented are these ministers' reactions to the letter and the legacy of King and the Civil Rights Movement. In the end, Blessed Are the Peacemakers is an attempt to restore the good name of those ministers vilified by King, ministers who agreed with his goals, but not his methods.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail'." The Journal of Negro History, vol. 86, no. 1, 2001, p. 86. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA97723507&it=r&asid=94afafc9a550634a614f48b7698028dc. Accessed 6 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A97723507
The Civil Rights Stories We Need to Remember
By TIMOTHY B. TYSONMAY 19, 2017
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Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban; photograph of Caliph Washington courtesy of Christine Washington
HE CALLS ME BY LIGHTNING
The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
By S. Jonathan Bass
Illustrated. 413 pp. Liveright Publishing. $26.95.
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.
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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.
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He Calls Me by Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
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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.
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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.
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Martin Luther King during the Montgomery bus boycott.
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Gene Herrick/Associated Press
“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.
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.
Timothy B. Tyson is the author of “Blood Done Sign My Name” and, most recently, “The Blood of Emmett Till.”
Web Exclusive – May 16, 2017
He Calls Me By Lightning
Wrongfully convicted in Jim Crow South
BookPage review by Carla Jean Whitley
Caliph Washington was minding his own business. But life took a nasty turn when the black Army veteran was pulled over one evening in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1957.
Officer James "Cowboy" Clark struggled with Washington, and in the process, Clark's gun went off. The bullet ricocheted off the vehicle and pierced Clark's stomach. Although innocent, as a black man in the Deep South, Washington was left with one option: Run.
In He Calls Me By Lightning, history professor S. Jonathan Bass uncovers Washington's search for justice. Officers arrested Washington in Mississippi and returned him to Bessemer, where he would serve decades for a crime he didn't commit. And despite then-Alabama governor George Wallace's famous stance in favor of segregation, Wallace proved something of a saving grace for Washington. Because the governor was staunchly against the death penalty, Washington was able to avoid the electric chair.
“Caliph Washington’s life has come to symbolize the violence, corruption, and racism that dominated not only in this city but also in the larger South,” Bass writes in the book's introduction. Through Washington’s story, Bass draws parallels between Bessemer and the South as a whole. Bass' research is evident—the book's bibliography lists hundreds of sources, including dozens of interviews, court cases, books and more. Even so, He Calls Me By Lightning reads more like a novel. It's a compelling story of a man's search for justice in the midst of America's civil rights movement. Bass is also the author of Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' and with He Calls Me By Lightning, he shows again that truth can be just as compelling as fiction.