He Calls Me By Lightning

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