Murder on Shades Mountain
The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham’s black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death.
In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell’s youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson’s unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this passionate account of Jim Crow era injustice, educator and activist Morrison (The Grace of Coming Home) exposes how courtrooms "could function like lynch mobs when the defendant was black." Birmingham, Ala., during the Depression was riven by racial, political, and economic tensions. An afternoon excursion in 1931 by three young white women resulted in the deaths by gunshot of two of them: Augusta Williams and Jennie Wood. The sole survivor, Augusta's 18-year-old sister, Nell, was put under intense pressure to identify the murderer, who she claimed was a black man. Weeks later, Nell pointed at a passerby on the street, Willie Peterson, and claimed that he was the guilty party. Awaiting trial, Peterson was shot in jail by Nell and Augusta's brother, Dent, but survived and attracted the assistance of the International Labor Defense, the NAACP, and eminent black legal scholar Charles Hamilton Houston. Despite this high-powered help, Peterson was sentenced to death, while Dent Williams, pleading temporary insanity, walked free. Alabama governor Benjamin Miller subsequently expressed "grave doubts" regarding Peterson's guilt and in 1934 commuted Peterson's sentence to life imprisonment. Peterson died of chronic tuberculosis in Kilby Prison in 1940, aged 46. Morrison, who is white, shares this painful story with clarity and compassion, emphasizing how much has changed since the 1930s, how much white people need to "critically interrogate" the past, and how much "remains to be done" in the fight for justice. Photos.
