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Audience score 9731 Votes / USA / cast Jamie Foxx / / Year 2019 / Bryan Stevenson. Full movie just mercy video. Full movie just mercy movie. I ain't crying, my eyes just sweating. Lol, Great story. Full movie just mercy youtube. Watch just mercy full movie. 23, 254 people follow this Facebook is showing information to help you better understand the purpose of a Page. See actions taken by the people who manage and post content. Page created - July 3, 2018 Every generation has its hero. Meet ours. # JustMercy, based on a true story, arrives in select theaters December 25, everywhere January 10. It looks like you may be having problems playing this video. If so, please try restarting your browser. Close It looks like you may be having problems playing this video. Close Screenplayed We sat down with Michael B. Jordan and Bryan Stevenson to breakdown the screenplay of their latest film, Just Mercy Recommended by 470 people An excellent movie - Very powerful and thought provoking!! Excellent movie. Very well done and well acted. Thoroughly enjoyed this true story!!! Tragic how this man’s life was almost destroyed over lies. G... reat performances! See More Just Mercy Just Mercy Just Mercy.

Full movie just mercy one. 1:04 is that grace helbig. Full movie just mercy song. Return to Me meets The Sixth Sense. Ugg. Car wait to watch this. Full movie just mercy online. Full movie just mercy day. Watch just mercy 2019 full movie free online. I SWEAR WHEN THEY WENT IN THE KITCHEN I THOUGHT HIS MOTHER WAS WHITE. Full Movie Just merci de cliquer ici. Jamie Foxx needs his roses while hes on earth Hes a musician Actor Comedian Etc. Bryan Stevenson, an attorney whose exceptional work is dramatized in “Just Mercy, ” does not take the easy way out in his professional life, and this film tribute to him and what he’s accomplished also chooses a challenging path. As the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson has dedicated the past 30 years to, among other things, providing legal services to death row inmates and has saved more than 125 unjustly sentenced people from execution in the process. As directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, “Just Mercy” focuses on Stevenson’s legal beginnings, on the first seemingly impossible case he took on. But though it features Michael B. Jordan as the man himself, “Just Mercy” is not simply about bringing a hero to life. (Those looking for a sense of who Stevenson is and the entirety of his career should check out the fine documentary “ True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality. ”) Rather, the film is at its most convincing when doing something more difficult: allowing us, emotionally, to feel the extent of the crisis Stevenson has made his life’s work. As co-written by Cretton and Andrew Lanham based on Stevenson’s memoir, “Just Mercy” calmly presents a world where entrenched racism, suffocating intimidation and an all but closed legal system stack the deck, to a terrifying extent, against impoverished defendants of color. It is not for nothing that one of Stevenson’s most quoted remarks is that “the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice. ” A powerful asset in making these points is the film’s impressive group of supporting players (Carmen Cuba was the casting director for the film, as she was for “Queen & Slim”). Especially effective is the group of actors (Jamie Foxx, Tim Blake Nelson, Rob Morgan, Darrell Britt-Gibson, J. Alphonse Nicholson and O’Shea Jackson, among others) who portray individuals whose lives have been mangled beyond recognition by being trapped in the machine. Introduced first is Walter “Johnny D. ” McMillian, a pulpwood worker strongly played by Foxx (who already earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for his work), initially almost unrecognizable behind a thick mustache. Almost as soon as we meet McMillian in 1987, we watch as he’s arrested in Alabama’s Monroe County by Sheriff Tom Tate (Michael Harding) on charges of murdering an 18-year-old white woman in Monroeville, which happens to be the hometown of Harper Lee, who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird. ” Though there is a brief prologue of Stevenson as a student, he’s introduced more fully as a recent Harvard Law graduate who gives his family pause when he turns down big jobs to go to Montgomery, Ala., and “fight for people who need help the most” — death row inmates. Though he has the assistance of local activist Eva Ansley (Brie Larson, who starred in Cretton’s previous “Short Term 12” and “The Glass Castle”), Stevenson doesn’t initially understand what he’s up against with the local power structure. A visit to Holman prison and its death row, where he endures a humiliating strip search, and a stonewalling conversation he has with the seemingly affable district attorney, Tommy Champan (a spot-on Rafe Spall), begin a process of education for both Stevenson and the audience. Though “Just Mercy” spends time with several of the death row inmates Stevenson has represented, most of its focus is on McMillian, and the film truly comes alive when the two men meet. Foxx, throwing himself into the character, explosively expresses a total lack of confidence in, and near contempt for, this young attorney. “What you going to do different? ” he all but sneers after listing the failures of the lawyers who represented him in the past. “All they going to do is eat you alive and spit you out. ” McMillian, as it turns out, is not the first person to underestimate Stevenson’s grit, ferocious perseverance and passion for justice. Not one for grandstanding, he simply refuses to be discouraged or even consider backing down. Stevenson eventually realizes that all roads in the McMillian case lead to Ralph Myers, a white career criminal whose questionable testimony was valued more by the jury than the numerous African American alibi witnesses the defense produced. Myers is played with compelling eccentricity by Tim Blake Nelson, who recently starred for the Coen brothers as the very different Buster Scruggs. Myers’ shifty, twitchy, damaged personality holds us completely, and his interactions with Stevenson provide some of the film’s high points. Another strength of “Just Mercy” is its refusal to tiptoe around what it took to make McMillian the first man ever freed from Alabama’s death row — a long, tortuous and difficult process despite compelling evidence of his innocence. The film portrays the ferocious resistance of some people to the possibility that this man had nothing to do with the crime. And that’s when “Just Mercy” is at its best. 'Just Mercy' Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, including racial epithets Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes Playing: Opens Dec. 25 at AMC Century City, Arclight Hollywood.

Full movie just mercy center. Great movie. I saw it. Just mercy is film wort spending your time on it,it shows though subject to potrey with big meaning and political comments in it,even if i didnt agree with all of them and how some people were presented in same light the good ones and the bad ones like that is all the same,michael b jordan shows that he is one of best younger actors working today,and he steals every scene he was in,also surprising for me was tim blake nelson who give really good performance with little screentime he was given,but as good michael and tim were,jaime and brie felt completly out of place for me,expecely brie whos im not a big fan of,still this is good film that potreys tough subject in a good way.

Indians like Tea much more than FANTA🤣. I love that Jamie Foxx lives with his fam. Full Movie Just mercy corps. Average rating 4. 64 · 84, 986 ratings 12, 271 reviews | Start your review of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God's work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story. Re-read. This time via audio. Bryan Stevenson is in the Netflix documentary the 13th. I just watched it. I highly recommend it! I'm late to the party so there is not much for me to say about this book that has not already been said. What I will say is that This is a Very Important Book! If you have not read it you must!!! It should be required reading for high school. I had no idea the injustice that occurred in this country when it came to death row. I live in a state in which the death penalty.. UPDATE.... I just stepped out of the theater seeing this film!!! It’s absolutely extraordinary… Incredible… I can’t recommend it highly enough. I hope it wins best picture of the year… Best actors… Best everything!!!!! Bring Kleenex!!! HONESTLY.... was DEEPLY POWERFUL!!!! “We must reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent". "Capital murder requires an intent to kill, and there was a persuasive.. I often think that my grandparents and parents lived in interesting times. They saw so many things come about in their day. Theirs were exciting times. Women won the right to vote, slaves were freed, and medical advancements were plenty. It was the time of The Industrial Revolution, electricity, the telephone, planes, trains, and automobiles so to speak. I tend to downplay the important breakthroughs of my life and times, Television, Computers, a second industrial revolution of Technology,.. 4 stars! What a powerful and inspiring book! Please note, if this was a review of the author, Bryan Stevenson's, career and life story, my rating would be 5+ stars. Words cannot adequately describe how I feel about this selfless man who has spent his career fighting for justice for those who need it most. My rating of 4 stars is simply my review of this book (which is obviously what this site is about). My impression of and respect for Bryan Stevenson as an individual is extremely high and would.. Well, I suspect it'll drag you kicking and screaming from your happy place, but I defy you to read Bryan Stevenson's remarkable Just Mercy and not come away affected in some way. If you are at all interested in racial and/or sociopolitical injustice, specifically as it applies to our country's (and more specifically, my adoptive home state, Alabama's) seriously flawed justice and penal systems, this is the book for you. Absolutely haunting, heartbreaking, and unforgettable. “Mercy is just when it is rooted in hopefulness and freely given. ” Let me be honest. I would never have picked this book to read on my own. But it was my church book club selection. This is a powerful, scary book. A young black lawyer takes on death penalty appeal cases in Alabama. And he does this because Alabama didn’t provide public defenders for those appeal cases. The book delves into all the aspects of the legal system. It also speaks poignantly on the effects of the larger community when.. With all the recent protests across the nation, sparked by the high-profile deaths of several unarmed black men, this is an incredibly timely read. This book is an account of the author, Bryan Stevenson, and his life calling. Stevenson first began helping death row prisoners, mostly black, who had had no legal defense of any kind. He discovered there were thousands who were completely innocent. This led him to start an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) which is still going.. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the U. S. justice system (or curious about why some people don’t feel they receive equal treatment under the law). In Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson presents what could be dry statistics or empty outrages as stories about real people. However, these stories aren’t just about people, but the towns and cities where horrible crimes were committed (sparking cries for justice) and the flawed mechanisms we have for.. We never read anything in a vacuum. Every book is filtered through the lens of experience, history and daily life. It may have been a coincidence that I read Just Mercy only days after a horrific mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, but it didn't feel like chance. Having such fresh evidence of racism and violence in the South made the events discussed in this book all the more real. Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer in Alabama who works to defend the poor and the.. There is nothing I can write to do justice to this exceptional book. Really, the only thing to say is "Read it! ". But here are a few thoughts: Just Mercy is both horrifying and awe inspiring. I listened to the audio of Just Mercy as read by the author, Bryan Stevenson. I listened to it in 40 minute daily increments as I walked to work or for exercise. Each time I had to turn the audio off, I found it hard to disengage from everything Stevenson has to say about his work as the founder of the.. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption "I…believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth… I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice… Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to.. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson is a 2014 Spiegel & Grau publication. This book came to my attention from a couple of Goodreads friends. Their amazing reviews convinced me this book was one I should, and needed, to read. “We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope of healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity” This man. Bryan Stevenson. Are there.. The Force of Forked Lightning Author and civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson has some hard bark on him: for dozens of years now, traveling into the backwater towns of Alabama (and other places in the South) to defend and save the lives of inmates, many of whom were railroaded onto death row. He centers his soul-sparking memoir on the especially egregious case of Walter McMillian in Monroe County, AL, interspersed with brief sketches of examples nationwide proving particular types of injustices in.. Just Mercy was heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. I felt a wide range of emotions while reading it, including sadness, anger, and frustration. I knew our system is broken but I wasn't aware to what extent. It was infuriating to read how far behind the times some states are, most notably, Alabama. Before reading this book, I was fairly confident in my views re: the death penalty, and punishments by imprisonment in general. This book changed my views on some things. Bryan Stevenson is a.. Excellent! Especially for readers who care about social justice, inequality in the justice system or abolishing the death penalty. It is already abstractly known that minorities, poor people, mentally disabled and un-parented children are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system and Bryan Stevenson gives us an up-close and personal look at many of these people. Judges, police, prosecutors, jailers, politicians, etc. can be very obtuse and uncaring about them and are given.. This book will make your blood boil. While I would have preferred some more nuance in this work (the author cherry picks the most outrageous examples of injustice and the most compelling inmates to argue his cause, understandably so, the majority of us don't possess the amount of empathy Bryan has for people, even the most despicable ones), what Stevenson has done throughout his career to make our world a little bit less awful and a little bit more just, is no less than heroic. His work is hard.. Harrowing, but brilliantly done. "Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment. " I discovered this book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, on display in my local public library and there was something about the title which implored me to pick it up. I had never heard the name Bryan Stevenson before picking up this book and I wasn't aware of the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice he had started to defend the most vulnerable and desperate in our society. Now, Bryan Stevenson is someone.. An absolute must-read book for anyone interested in the integrity of the justice system in the U. This book will make you cry, seethe, and grab everyone you know by their lapels and say to them, "Do you know this is happenening?!?! How can this be?!?!?! " The author is an attorney and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. The book highlights several cases of people wrongly imprisoned, and sentenced to death, for crimes they clearly did not commit. In other cases, while crimes were committed.. “… the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is, Do we deserve to kill? ” Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption chronicles the founding, growth, and work of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). EJI is “a private, nonprofit that provides legal representation to indigent defendants and prisoners who have been denied fair and just treatment in the legal system. We litigate on behalf of.. Content Warning: This is a dark review of a very dark subject. Reader discretion is advised. Joe Sullivan was thirteen years old when he was arrested. Mentally disabled, neglected and abused, the product of a chaotic home, Joe could barely read at a first grade level and grew up mostly on the streets. On May 4, 1989, with two older boys, he broke into an empty house in Pensacola, Florida. Later, the elderly owner of the house was brutally raped. The woman never saw the man who raped her. When the.. “Why do we want to kill all the broken people? ”-Bryan Stevenson “I don’t do what I do because I have to, because I’ve been trained to. I do what I do because I’m broken too. You cannot defend condemned people without being broken. "-Bryan Stevenson Eye-opening, heart-wrenching nonfiction account that tore me apart. The above quotes sum it up. There's nothing else to say. We are all broken people. This is a great read to pair with the fictional book The Enchanted. This may need to be a reread... 5 For the book and for the author in recognition of his incredible work on behalf of those wrongly convicted to death or life in prison caught up in a system of blind justice and no hope. Read by the author, this was compelling from start to finish and deserving of all the recognition and awards. I had no idea, really. All emotions possible will hit the reader; consciousness will be raised. The film version has an expected U. release in January 2020 but read it first... Overall, the lessons to be learned in this book are shattering. Prisons in the United States are an apparatus for stigmatizing and exiling those who we were once told would be rehabilitated. Then there are the innocent ones who have been tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. Bryan Stevenson writes of his transformation from fear to courage and commitment as a young lawyer to come to their defense. He writes of the legacy of racism and other constructs of power and privilege that continue.. There is definitely something amiss with my view of crime. I read crime mysteries and police procedurals for pleasure, but reading about crime from the other side—innocence and guilt or suspects and law or the possibility that the criminal justice system can be wrong—makes me anxious and fretful. I don’t like crime. It seems like weakness. What I have come to see is that crime can occur on either side of a prosecution or conviction: the accused can be guilty of weakness or legal counsel can be.. This is a must read book for anyone interested in and/or concerned about the American system of justice. I always intended to write a full review of this book but instead have decided to provide a link to a review written by a Goodreads friend. I hope you will read this.... This is a book which deserves to be read at a time when issues of justice are on every thinking person's mind. Justice must be served "justly" or our system simply will not work. Our system.. When I first encountered Bryan Stevenson, I was in the middle of tearing pages out of Smithsonian Magazine. Before any reading material made it to my students at the state juvenile correctional facility, I first had to remove any questionable content. Smithsonian was generally safe, but I was quickly drawn into a story profiling Stevenson and Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society. After finishing the story myself, I made sure it found its way to as many of my students as possible. I.. This is just an awesome story of a lawyer who made it his life’s work to fight for the underdog and do all he can to get them justice. He started a non-profit legal office in Alabama to help people in need of serious legal help like those facing execution, the wrongly convicted, teens sentenced to die in prison and others. He spends long hours working, searching for funding, visiting prisoners, and working on cases. After you get so far in the book, you can see why it’s won several awards, and..

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Read an Excerpt Chapter One Mockingbird Players The temporary receptionist was an elegant African American woman wearing a dark, expensive business suit—a well-dressed exception to the usual crowd at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC) in Atlanta, where I had returned after graduation to work full time. On her first day, I’d rambled over to her in my regular uniform of jeans and sneakers and offered to answer any questions she might have to help her get acclimated. She looked at me coolly and waved me away after reminding me that she was, in fact, an experienced legal secretary. The next morning, when I arrived at work in another jeans and sneakers ensemble, she seemed startled, as if some strange vagrant had made a wrong turn into the office. She took a beat to compose herself, then summoned me over to confide that she was leaving in a week to work at a “real law office. ” I wished her luck. An hour later, she called my office to tell me that “Robert E. Lee” was on the phone. I smiled, pleased that I’d misjudged her; she clearly had a sense of humor. “That’s really funny. ” “I’m not joking. That’s what he said, ” she said, sounding bored, not playful. “Line two. ” I picked up the line. “Hello, this is Bryan Stevenson. May I help you? ” “Bryan, this is Robert E. Lee Key. Why in the hell would you want to represent someone like Walter McMillian? Do you know he’s reputed to be one of the biggest drug dealers in all of South Alabama? I got your notice entering an appearance, but you don’t want anything to do with this case. ” “Sir? ” “This is Judge Key, and you don’t want to have anything to do with this McMillian case. No one really understands how depraved this situation truly is, including me, but I know it’s ugly. These men might even be Dixie Mafia. ” The lecturing tone and bewildering phrases from a judge I’d never met left me completely confused. “Dixie Mafia”? I’d met Walter McMillian two weeks earlier, after spending a day on death row to begin work on five capital cases. I hadn’t reviewed the trial transcript yet, but I did remember that the judge’s last name was Key. No one had told me the Robert E. Lee part. I struggled for an image of “Dixie Mafia” that would fit Walter McMillian. “ ‘Dixie Mafia’? ” “Yes, and there’s no telling what else. Now, son, I’m just not going to appoint some out-of-state lawyer who’s not a member of the Alabama bar to take on one of these death penalty cases, so you just go ahead and withdraw. ” “I’m a member of the Alabama bar. ” I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, but I had been admitted to the Alabama bar a year earlier after working on some cases in Alabama concerning jail and prison conditions. “Well, I’m now sitting in Mobile. I’m not up in Monroe­ville anymore. If we have a hearing on your motion, you’re going to have to come all the way from Atlanta to Mobile. I’m not going to accommodate you no kind of way. ” “I understand, sir. I can come to Mobile, if necessary. ” “Well, I’m also not going to appoint you because I don’t think he’s indigent. He’s reported to have money buried all over Monroe County. ” “Judge, I’m not seeking appointment. I’ve told Mr. McMillian that we would—” The dial tone interrupted my first affirmative statement of the phone call. I spent several minutes thinking we’d been accidentally disconnected before finally realizing that a judge had just hung up on me. I was in my late twenties and about to start my fourth year at the SPDC when I met Walter McMillian. His case was one of the flood of cases I’d found myself frantically working on after learning of a growing crisis in Alabama. The state had nearly a hundred people on death row as well as the fastest-growing condemned population in the country, but it also had no public defender system, which meant that large numbers of death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind. My friend Eva Ansley ran the Alabama Prison Project, which tracked cases and matched lawyers with the condemned men. In 1988, we discovered an opportunity to get federal funding to create a legal center that could represent people on death row. The plan was to use that funding to start a new nonprofit. We hoped to open it in Tuscaloosa and begin working on cases in the next year. I’d already worked on lots of death penalty cases in several Southern states, sometimes winning a stay of execution just minutes before an electrocution was scheduled. But I didn’t think I was ready to take on the responsibilities of running a nonprofit law office. I planned to help get the organization off the ground, find a director, and then return to Atlanta. When I’d visited death row a few weeks before that call from Robert E. Lee Key, I met with five desperate condemned men: Willie Tabb, Vernon Madison, Jesse Morrison, Harry Nicks, and Walter McMillian. It was an exhausting, emotionally taxing day, and the cases and clients had merged together in my mind on the long drive back to Atlanta. But I remembered Walter. He was at least fifteen years older than me, not particularly well educated, and he hailed from a small rural community. The memorable thing about him was how insistent he was that he’d been wrongly convicted. “Mr. Bryan, I know it may not matter to you, but it’s important to me that you know that I’m innocent and didn’t do what they said I did, not no kinda way, ” he told me in the meeting room. His voice was level but laced with emotion. I nodded to him. I had learned to accept what clients tell me until the facts suggest something else. “Sure, of course I understand. When I review the record I’ll have a better sense of what evidence they have, and we can talk about it. ” “But... look, I’m sure I’m not the first person on death row to tell you that they’re innocent, but I really need you to believe me. My life has been ruined! This lie they put on me is more than I can bear, and if I don’t get help from someone who believes me—” His lip began to quiver, and he clenched his fists to stop himself from crying. I sat quietly while he forced himself back into composure. “I’m sorry, I know you’ll do everything you can to help me, ” he said, his voice quieter. My instinct was to comfort him; his pain seemed so sincere. But there wasn’t much I could do, and after several hours on the row talking to so many people, I could muster only enough energy to reassure him that I would look at everything carefully. I had several transcripts piled up in my small Atlanta office ready to move to Tuscaloosa once the office opened. With Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s peculiar comments still running through my head, I went through the mound of records until I found the transcripts from Walter McMillian’s trial. There were only four volumes of trial proceedings, which meant that the trial had been short. The judge’s dramatic warnings now made Mr. McMillian’s emotional claim of innocence too intriguing to put off any longer. I started reading. Even though he had lived in Monroe County his whole life, Walter McMillian had never heard of Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird. Monroe­ville, Alabama, celebrated its native daughter Lee shamelessly after her award-winning book became a national bestseller in the 1960s. She returned to Monroe County but secluded herself and was rarely seen in public. Her reclusiveness proved no barrier to the county’s continued efforts to market her literary classic—or to market itself by using the book’s celebrity. Production of the film adaptation brought Gregory Peck to town for the infamous courtroom scenes; his performance won him an Academy Award. Local leaders later turned the old courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum. A group of locals formed “The Mockingbird Players of Monroe­ville” to pre­sent a stage version of the story. The production was so popular that national and international tours were organized to provide an authentic presentation of the fictional story to audiences everywhere. Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root. The story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer in the 1930s fascinated millions of readers, despite its uncomfortable exploration of false accusations of rape involving a white woman. Lee’s endearing characters, Atticus Finch and his precocious daughter Scout, captivated readers while confronting them with some of the realities of race and justice in the South. A generation of future lawyers grew up hoping to become the courageous Atticus, who at one point arms himself to protect the defenseless black suspect from an angry mob of white men looking to lynch him. Today, dozens of legal organizations hand out awards in the fictional lawyer’s name to celebrate the model of advocacy described in Lee’s novel. What is often overlooked is that the black man falsely accused in the story was not successfully defended by Atticus. Tom Robinson, the wrongly accused black defendant, is found guilty. Later he dies when, full of despair, he makes a desperate attempt to escape from prison. He is shot seventeen times in the back by his captors, dying ingloriously but not unlawfully. Walter McMillian, like Tom Robinson, grew up in one of several poor black settlements outside of Monroe­ville, where he worked the fields with his family before he was old enough to attend school. The children of sharecroppers in southern Alabama were introduced to “plowin’, plantin’, and pickin’ ” as soon as they were old enough to be useful in the fields. Educational opportunities for black children in the 1950s were limited, but Walter’s mother got him to the dilapidated “colored school” for a couple of years when he was young. By the time Walter was eight or nine, he became too valuable for picking cotton to justify the remote advantages of going to school. By the age of eleven, Walter could run a plow as well as any of his older siblings. Times were changing—for better and for worse. Monroe County had been developed by plantation owners in the nineteenth century for the production of cotton. Situated in the coastal plain of southwest Alabama, the fertile, rich black soil of the area attracted white settlers from the Carolinas who amassed very successful plantations and a huge slave population. For decades after the Civil War, the large African American population toiled in the fields of the “Black Belt” as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, dependent on white landowners for survival. In the 1940s, thousands of African Americans left the region as part of the Great Migration and headed mostly to the Midwest and West Coast for jobs. Those who remained continued to work the land, but the out-migration of African Americans combined with other factors to make traditional agriculture less sustainable as the economic base of the region. By the 1950s, small cotton farming was becoming increasingly less profitable, even with the low-wage labor provided by black sharecroppers and tenants. The State of Alabama agreed to help white landowners in the region transition to timber farming and forest products by providing extraordinary tax incentives for pulp and paper mills. Thirteen of the state’s sixteen pulp and paper mills were opened during this period. Across the Black Belt, more and more acres were converted to growing pine trees for paper mills and industrial uses. African Americans, largely excluded from this new industry, found themselves confronting new economic challenges even as they won basic civil rights. The brutal era of sharecropping and Jim Crow was ending, but what followed was persistent unemployment and worsening poverty. The region’s counties remained some of the poorest in America. Walter was smart enough to see the trend. He started his own pulpwood business that evolved with the timber industry in the 1970s. He astutely—and bravely—borrowed money to buy his own power saw, tractor, and pulpwood truck. By the 1980s, he had developed a solid business that didn’t generate a lot of extra money but afforded him a gratifying degree of independence. If he had worked at the mill or the factory or had had some other unskilled job—the kind that most poor black people in South Alabama worked—it would invariably mean working for white business owners and dealing with all the racial stress that that implied in Alabama in the 1970s and 1980s. Walter couldn’t escape the reality of racism, but having his own business in a growing sector of the economy gave him a latitude that many African Americans did not enjoy. That independence won Walter some measure of respect and admiration, but it also cultivated contempt and suspicion, especially outside of Monroe­ville’s black community. Walter’s freedom was, for some of the white people in town, well beyond what African Americans with limited education were able to achieve through legitimate means. Still, he was pleasant, respectful, generous, and accommodating, which made him well liked by the people with whom he did business, whether black or white. Walter was not without his flaws. He had long been known as a ladies’ man. Even though he had married young and had three children with his wife, Minnie, it was well known that he was romantically involved with other women. “Tree work” is notoriously demanding and dangerous. With few ordinary comforts in his life, the attention of women was something Walter did not easily resist. There was something about his rough exterior—his bushy long hair and uneven beard—combined with his generous and charming nature that attracted the attention of some women. Walter grew up understanding how forbidden it was for a black man to be intimate with a white woman, but by the 1980s he had allowed himself to imagine that such matters might be changing. Perhaps if he hadn’t been successful enough to live off his own business he would have more consistently kept in mind those racial lines that could never be crossed. As it was, Walter didn’t initially think much of the flirtations of Karen Kelly, a young white woman he’d met at the Waffle House where he ate breakfast. She was attractive, but he didn’t take her too seriously. When her flirtations became more explicit, Walter hesitated, and then persuaded himself that no one would ever know. After a few weeks, it became clear that his relationship with Karen was trouble. At twenty-five, Karen was eighteen years younger than Walter, and she was married. As word got around that the two were “friends, ” she seemed to take a titillating pride in her intimacy with Walter. When her husband found out, things quickly turned ugly. Karen and her husband, Joe, had long been unhappy and were already planning to divorce, but her scandalous involvement with a black man outraged Karen’s husband and his entire family. He initiated legal proceedings to gain custody of their children and became intent on publicly disgracing his wife by exposing her infidelity and revealing her relationship with a black man. For his part, Walter had always stayed clear of the courts and far away from the law. Years earlier, he had been drawn into a bar fight that resulted in a misdemeanor conviction and a night in jail. It was the first and only time he had ever been in trouble. From that point on, he had no exposure to the criminal justice system. When Walter received a subpoena from Karen Kelly’s husband to testify at a hearing where the Kellys would be fighting over their children’s custody, he knew it was going to cause him serious problems. Unable to consult with his wife, Minnie, who had a better head for these kinds of crises, he nervously went to the courthouse. The lawyer for Kelly’s husband called Walter to the stand. Walter had decided to acknowledge being a “friend” of Karen. Her lawyer objected to the crude questions posed to Walter by the husband’s attorney about the nature of his friendship, sparing him from providing any details, but when he left the courtroom the anger and animosity toward him were palpable. Walter wanted to forget about the whole ordeal, but word spread quickly, and his reputation shifted. No longer the hard-working pulpwood man, known to white people almost exclusively for what he could do with a saw in the pine trees, Walter now represented something more worrisome. Fears of interracial sex and marriage have deep roots in the United States. The confluence of race and sex was a powerful force in dismantling Reconstruction after the Civil War, sustaining Jim Crow laws for a century and fueling divisive racial politics throughout the twentieth century. In the aftermath of slavery, the creation of a system of racial hierarchy and segregation was largely designed to prevent intimate relationships like Walter and Karen’s—relationships that were, in fact, legally prohibited by “anti-miscegenation statutes” (the word miscegenation came into use in the 1860s, when supporters of slavery coined the term to promote the fear of interracial sex and marriage and the race mixing that would result if slavery were abolished). For over a century, law enforcement officials in many Southern communities absolutely saw it as part of their duty to investigate and punish black men who had been intimate with white women. Although the federal government had promised racial equality for freed former slaves during the short period of Reconstruction, the return of white supremacy and racial subordination came quickly after federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s. Voting rights were taken away from African Americans, and a series of racially restrictive laws enforced the racial hierarchy. “Racial integrity” laws were part of a plan to replicate slavery’s racial hierarchy and reestablish the subordination of African Americans. Having criminalized interracial sex and marriage, states throughout the South would use the laws to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Forbidding sex between white women and black men became an intense preoccupation throughout the South. In the 1880s, a few years before lynching became the standard response to interracial romance and a century before Walter and Karen Kelly began their affair, Tony Pace, an African American man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, fell in love in Alabama. They were arrested and convicted, and both were sentenced to two years in prison for violating Alabama’s racial integrity laws. John Tompkins, a lawyer and part of a small minority of white professionals who considered the racial integrity laws to be unconstitutional, agreed to represent Tony and Mary to appeal their convictions. The Alabama Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1882. With rhetoric that would be quoted frequently over the next several decades, Alabama’s highest court affirmed the convictions, using language that dripped with contempt for the idea of interracial romance: The evil tendency of the crime [of adultery or fornication] is greater when committed between persons of the two races.... Its result may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.

Reporter Lil Liyah
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