Alabama sodomy prohibition

The Alabama sodomy prohibition criminalized nonprocreative sex. In the case of Walter McMillian, it mattered not as the basis of a proven sexual offense but as a charge officials used to arrest him while building a capital-murder case. Its deployment joined the policing of intimate conduct to racial hostility and helped turn suspicion into official action.

Scope and racial context

The book distinguishes the prohibition on nonprocreative sex from anti-miscegenation statutes, which specifically barred interracial sex and marriage. Those statutes belonged to a longer Southern effort to preserve racial hierarchy: after Reconstruction, restrictions on intimacy helped sustain Jim Crow, and law enforcement in many communities treated investigation and punishment of Black men involved with white women as part of its duty. The prohibition at issue was not identified as an anti-miscegenation statute, but its use against McMillian unfolded amid this history and the intense scrutiny of his relationship with Karen Kelly.

That relationship had already altered how some white residents viewed McMillian. When he was subpoenaed to testify in a custody hearing involving the Kellys, he acknowledged being Karen’s friend but was spared further questioning about their relationship after her lawyer objected. Anger followed him from the courthouse, and his public image shifted: he was no longer seen only as a hardworking pulpwood worker, but as a figure associated with a feared interracial intimacy. The book presents that change in reputation as part of the setting in which the sexual charge could be made to seem inflammatory and useful.

Use in McMillian’s arrest

After months without solving Ronda Morrison’s murder, Tom Tate, lead investigator Simon Benson, and district attorney’s investigator Larry Ikner decided to arrest McMillian primarily on Ralph Myers’s allegation. They had not yet done much investigation into McMillian and wanted to hold him on a pretext while they built their case. Myers claimed to fear him; when an officer suggested that McMillian might have sexually assaulted him, Myers recognized the suggestion’s usefulness and agreed that it was true. Officials then planned to charge McMillian under the prohibition on nonprocreative sex.

On June 7, 1987, Tate led more than a dozen officers to a back-country road McMillian used on his way home from work. They stopped his truck at gunpoint and surrounded him. When Tate said he was under arrest for sodomy, McMillian did not understand the term. After Tate explained it crudely, McMillian laughed in disbelief. Tate responded with racial slurs and threats of lynching. The charge thus entered the arrest not as a neutral description of conduct established by investigation, but as a pretext delivered in a scene of overt racial intimidation.

From sexual accusation to murder evidence

The sodomy arrest also served an investigative purpose unrelated to proving a sexual offense: it let officers bring McMillian’s truck to the jail so Bill Hooks, a jailhouse informant, could see it. Hooks, who was being held on burglary charges, was promised release and reward money if he could connect the truck to the Morrison murder. He then identified it as the vehicle he claimed to have seen near the cleaners. His identification supplied the second witness prosecutors needed to charge McMillian with capital murder.

The book therefore traces a concrete chain of consequences: a sexual accusation provided a pretext for arrest; the arrest enabled investigators to expose McMillian’s truck to a promised informant; and the resulting identification helped advance the murder prosecution. The sodomy charge functioned as a gateway into the separate criminal case, while the racialized suspicion surrounding McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly helped make that gateway politically potent.