He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty - Softcover

Bass, S Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 163149452X ISBN 13: 9781631494529

Publisher: Liveright, 2018

Synopsis

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection
A Southern Independent Booksellers Association “Spring Pick”

This harrowing portrait of the Jim Crow South “proves how much we do not yet know about our history” (New York Times Book Review).

Caliph Washington didn’t pull the trigger but, as Officer James "Cowboy" Clark lay dying, he had no choice but to turn on his heel and run. The year was 1957; Cowboy Clark was white, Caliph Washington was black, and this was the Jim Crow South.

Widely lauded for its searing “insight into a history of America that can no longer be left unknown” (Washington Post), He Calls Me by Lightning is an “absorbing chronicle” (Ira Katznelson) of the forgotten life of Caliph Washington that becomes an historic portrait of racial injustice in the civil rights era. Washington, a black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, was wrongfully convicted of killing a white Alabama policeman in 1957 and sentenced to death. Through “meticulous research and vivid prose” (Patrick Phillips), S. Jonathan Bass reveals Washington’s Kafkaesque legal odyssey: he came within minutes of the electric chair nearly a dozen times and had his conviction overturned three times before finally being released in 1972. Devastating and essential, He Calls Me by Lightning demands that we take into account the thousands of lives cast away by the systemic racism of a “social order apparently unchanged even today” (David Levering Lewis). 25 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

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.

Review

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 (New York Times Book Review)

In sharper focus, thanks to Bass’s painstaking research, is a picture of how Jim Crow legal systems operated at the local and state levels. . . . There is much in He Calls Me By Lightning that we needed to know. There is much, almost too much, that is simply nice to know. But we are left, at the last page, with insight into a history of America that can no longer be left unknown. — Colbert I. King (Washington Post)

This absorbing chronicle of deep injustice reveals how the Jim Crow South protected racial humiliation with distorted law and organized terror. Written with insider knowledge and analytical power, the book engages our senses to experience repression and challenges our intellect to appreciate the courage of resistance. — Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself

He Calls Me by Lightning is riveting, heartbreaking, and vitally important. Through meticulous research and vivid prose, Bass brings the raucous world of Bessemer, Alabama, to life as it was in the Jim Crow era, and recovers the epic story of Caliph Washington’s struggle for freedom. This odyssey through a profoundly unjust legal system has a great deal to teach us all about the present. — Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America

The stamina needed to read S. Jonathan Bass’s instructive book about justice systematically deferred in Bessemer, Alabama, is a measure of the reader’s determination to find a scintilla of humanity in a Jim Crow social order apparently unchanged even today — David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography

On July 12, 1957, a white policeman, Cowboy Clark, was killed. It was never certain whose gunshot did it...Thus began a saga of fourteen years of at once a Dickensian legal nightmare and a clear-eyed indictment of criminal law in Alabama under Jim Crow. In Jonathan Bass’s gripping telling, the bleak houses were a series of grim prisons in which [Caliph] Washington awaited his execution...He Calls Me by Lightning tells of a case, happily in the past, that speaks loudly to injustices that still plague our criminal justice system. — William S. McFeely, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Proximity to Death

Edition details

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 163149452X
• ISBN 13: 9781631494529
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 432