Murder on Shades Mountain; the Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham.

• Author: Roper, John H., Sr.

Melanie S. Morrison. Murder on Shades Mountain; the Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018. x+ 443 pages. Cloth, $26.95.

Some crimes against people stand out and some scream out. Such has been the case with lynching, the killing of African Americans without a trial. It is the scourge of southern history, peaking at the coming of World War I, but never really ending altogether. As Melanie S. Morrison reminds us forcefully, some lynchings happen with the trappings of "justice"--judge, jury, lawyers in courtroom--but the result is still a lynching, an execution of an African American for being African American. Such "legal lynchings" are as problematic as Klan violence since the evidence does not matter to a jury that has come bound in determination to convict.

The Rev. Dr. Melanie S. Morrison is academically certified to undertake this difficult study, as she earned an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and a Ph.D. from the University of Groningen. She is certified by interest and experience because of her decades of work, especially in Michigan, in race relations with emphasis on racial justice issues in law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons. Yet the political is here truly personal, for she first learned of this case of northern Alabama injustice from her father, a reformist minister who raised her in Michigan after leaving his native Birmingham in protest. The basic outline of the events covered in this book (minus some extremely troubling details that he withheld) she first learned at her father's knee in his study in East Lansing.

Now she brings her own life of academic, political, and spiritual engagement to the densely tangled story of Willie Peterson, a disabled coal miner falsely accused of sexual assault on three white women, and the murder of two white women at a once-popular picnic site, Shades Mountain, which overlooked Birmingham's coal and iron works in the 1920s and early years of the Depression. The case, although largely lost to historians outside Black Birmingham, would be interesting anyway, but it coincides with two other racial justice cases: The Scottsboro Boys, nine young men (some not even teenagers at time of arrest) who had hopped freight cars in company of some white women who subsequently claimed rape; and Angelo Herndon, a Communist Party labor organizer in Birmingham (originally accused of the Shades Mountain rape...