Lynching and racial terror

Lynching and racial terror were not isolated acts of mob violence but a system for enforcing white supremacy through killing, threat, and the fear that any encounter across racial lines could provoke lethal punishment. In Just Mercy, this history reaches from the collapse of Reconstruction into the present-day criminal legal system: it shapes the danger surrounding Walter McMillian, informs Sheriff Tate’s threats, and helps explain the racial history of capital punishment.

Historical Foundations

After slavery, the promise of racial equality during Reconstruction gave way to renewed white supremacy and racial subordination. Once federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, African Americans lost voting rights, and racially restrictive laws rebuilt a hierarchy that subordinated Black people. The laws reached into intimate life as well as civic life. Across the South, statutes criminalizing interracial sex and marriage were used to enforce racial boundaries and, alongside racial-integrity laws, to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Preventing relationships between white women and Black men became an especially intense preoccupation.

The legal order and mob violence reinforced one another. The book describes lynchings as acts of terror whose power exceeded the number of people killed: they warned Black communities that an encounter, social misstep, unintended slight, look, or comment could invite a gruesome response. In Monroe County alone, nearly a dozen people had been lynched since the county’s incorporation; neighboring counties had seen dozens more. The threat therefore governed everyday conduct even when no lynching was taking place.

Interracial Relationships as a Target

The history of interracial relationships made Walter McMillian’s affair with Karen Kelly dangerous in a way that ordinary gossip or disapproval could not explain. Walter did not know the legal history, but he understood the risks from the stories he had heard growing up. When he was twelve, the body of Russell Charley, a Black man from Monroe County known to Walter’s family, was found hanging from a tree in Vredenburgh. The lynching was believed to have been prompted by an interracial romance. Walter remembered the terror that spread through the Black community when Charley’s bullet-ridden body was discovered.

Decades later, Walter’s own relationship with a married white woman became a subject of countywide talk. He had been known to white residents primarily as a hardworking pulpwood man, valued for his skill with a saw. The affair changed how they regarded him: he now represented a more troubling breach of the racial order. When Karen Kelly’s husband subpoenaed Walter to testify in a custody hearing, Walter nervously acknowledged that he was Karen’s friend. Her lawyer objected to the husband’s crude questions about the relationship, but Walter left the courthouse amid palpable anger and animosity. News spread, and the relationship’s public exposure intensified the danger he already feared.

The older legal history had precedents. In the 1880s, Tony Pace and Mary Cox, a Black man and a white woman who had fallen in love in Alabama, were arrested and sentenced to two years in prison under the state’s racial-integrity laws. Their lawyer, John Tompkins, appealed. In 1882, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed their convictions, using racist claims about interracial intimacy and racial mixing to describe the state’s interest in preserving its social order. The case shows how the law could make racial terror’s boundaries official: intimacy across the color line was not merely stigmatized but criminalized.

Threats, Killing, and Official Response

On June 7, 1987, Sheriff Tate and more than a dozen officers stopped Walter’s truck on a back-country road as he returned from work. Tate told Walter that he was being arrested for sodomy; when Walter did not understand the term, the sheriff explained it crudely. Walter laughed incredulously, and Tate responded with racial slurs and threats of lynching. The threats named the purpose plainly: to prevent Black men from associating with white women. Tate invoked the recent lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, turning a recent murder into a threat directed at Walter.

Donald was walking home from a store after a mistrial in the prosecution of a Black man accused of shooting a white police officer. Some white residents blamed the mistrial on the presence of Black jurors. After a group of Ku Klux Klan members burned a cross on the courthouse lawn, they searched for someone to victimize, severely beat Donald, and hanged him from a tree. His body was found hours later. The sequence linked resentment of Black participation in a jury to organized racial violence against a young man who had not taken part in the trial.

Local police initially ignored evidence that Donald’s death was a hate crime and suggested that he might have been involved in drug dealing, an explanation his mother denied. The lack of local interest prompted Black residents and civil rights activists to press the United States Department of Justice to intervene. Three white men were arrested two years later, and details of the lynching became public. The delayed investigation illustrates another dimension of racial terror: the violence was accompanied by institutional indifference that could obscure its racist character and deny victims’ families a serious response.

From Racial Terror to the Criminal Legal System

The book traces connections between racial terror and institutions that did not take the form of a mob. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-Black counties. As Black residents began exercising voting rights, legislators aligned counties to preserve white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. In criminal trials, officials also used jury-selection practices to keep juries white. Although the Supreme Court had long prohibited excluding Black people from jury service on racial grounds, voting-roll-based jury pools, discretionary strikes, and other tactics continued to limit their participation. The 1986 Batson v. Kentucky decision made racially discriminatory peremptory strikes more directly challengeable, but, as the book notes, it also forced prosecutors to find more creative ways to exclude Black jurors.

During Walter’s trial, that history took a visible form at the courtroom door. The entrance had been altered with a large metal detector and a German shepherd held by a police officer. The courtroom, previously filled with Walter’s supporters, was now mostly occupied by older white people supporting the Morrison family and the prosecution; Walter’s family and supporters outside had been kept from entering. The scene does not make courtroom exclusion identical to lynching. It shows how the book places racial power in multiple settings, from the threat of extrajudicial killing to the control of who may witness a trial and take part in legal institutions.

The book also locates capital punishment within this history. Bryan Stevenson argues that the reign of terror following the collapse of Reconstruction shaped the lives of people of color until World War II, and that lynching helped create the modern death penalty. In this account, the adoption of speedy executions partly redirected the violent energies of lynching while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price. The claim identifies a historical relationship between mob violence and state punishment, not an assertion that every later criminal proceeding was itself a lynching.

Memory and Continuing Consequences

Racial terror persists in the book not only through public records and legal rules but through family and community memory. Walter had heard relatives discuss lynchings as a child, and the killing of Russell Charley remained an immediate warning in his adult life. That memory helps explain why Tate’s threat terrified Walter even as the sheriff’s accusation confused him: the threat drew on a violence Walter already knew could be real.

The book’s historical account also contests the idea that terrorism in the United States began with the September 11 attacks. After speeches, older people of color sometimes told Stevenson that they had grown up with terror from police, the Klan, and white people more broadly, including bombings, lynchings, and other racial violence. Their recollections challenge a national story that treats domestic terrorism as new while leaving the long history of racial terror at the margins. By placing these memories beside the history of slavery, Reconstruction, jury exclusion, and capital punishment, the book presents racial terror as both a specific history of threatened and actual violence and a force whose effects continue in how Black people encounter law, public authority, and punishment.