Monday, October 02, 2017

Murder at Broad River Bridge: A True Story of Murder and the Ku Klux Klan, by Bill Shipp

Murder at Broad River Bridge, by Bill Shipp (1983; reprinted 2017 by UGA Press), is powerful journalism, reportage, and historical recovery. Most people living in Athens, Georgia, today don’t recall the murder of Lemuel Penn in 1963 by members of the Ku Klux Klan headquartered in Athens on Prince Avenue. Today Athens is a progressive town full of people with progressive attitudes. Athens almost always appears on election maps as a blue patch in a red state. It is important to remember Lemuel Penn’s murder. It was one of many murders and attacks committed by the Klan in the early years of the civil rights movement. Yet Penn was not a participant in the civil rights movement. He was an educational administrator in Washington, DC. He was murdered as he was returning home from a three-week stint of service in the Army reserves. Penn and two fellow reservists drove up from Fort Benning to Atlanta, where they stopped to refuel. Then they headed to Athens, where they asked a police officer for directions, and headed out of town towards Colvert, Georgia, which they thought would be a direct route to their destination but which instead was an empty  two-lane state road. Several miles outside of Colbert at a bridge over the Broad River, a car pulled up beside the one carrying the reservists. Two shotgun blasts penetrated the windows. Penn was killed instantly. The car nearly ran off the road until the surviving occupants regained control and pulled over. A passerby saw there was trouble, but instead of stopping to help he drove back to Colbert and informed the local policeman on duty that there were problems at the Broad River Bridge.
In the investigation that ensued, the FBI, GBI, and local police determined that local Klansmen had committed the murder. Ultimately, the two individuals who wielded the shotguns and fired the shots were identified and arrested, along with several accomplices. In the trial that followed the state made a convincing case but the jury voted to acquit. In a federal civil rights trial several months later, the two primary perpetrators were found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison.
Shipp is particularly concerned in this book with the willingness in 1963 of Athens citizens to tolerate the Klan’s presence, with their unwillingness (with some exceptions) to speak out publically about the murder and about the Klan.

Shipp covers all the primary details of these events. A writer and editor at the Atlanta Constitution, he followed the investigation of Penn’s murder and the trial closely. He's done a service in writing this book. It's interesting to consider this book in the context of the ongoing controversy about Civil War historical markers and whether they should be removed. Historical markers may commemorate, but they do not explain and reveal history. It's far more important that books like Shipp’s are read and discussed than it is that we worry over the presence or absence of historical monuments to Civil War generals. Few of us in the contemporary South would choose to return to the era of the Civil War, which included slavery and the abuse of the rights of human beings. There is nothing about this period in Southern history that is honorable or laudatory. I see no reason to commemorate it. I stand with those who want to move the historical monuments, most of which were erected in support of white supremacy in the deep South rather than as monuments to Civil War figures. I'd be happy with relegating those monuments to museums, or to the back lots of cemeteries where Confederate soldiers are buried. What's most important is that this country find a way to move forward and to heal the still festering wounds of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, decades of suppression of the rights of African-Americans, the Civil Rights movement, and the conflicts of the present day. Books like Murder at Broad River Bridge make possible the understanding of historical events that are far more important to remember than the Civil War, which took place over 150 years ago. Everyone should read this book: to remember how things were in 1963 in the deep South, in Georgia, in Athens. We have come a long way since 1983. But not far enough.

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