Monroe County, Alabama, is both the local setting of Walter McMillian’s prosecution and a measure of the racial structures surrounding it. Although the county was 40 percent Black, Black residents’ belief in McMillian’s innocence did not prevent a prosecution built around contested testimony, or ensure that his family and supporters would be treated equally in court. The county’s courthouse and, later, a church near Monroeville mark two contrasting scenes: exclusion during the case and collective remembrance after his death.

Setting and racial power

Monroe County lay within South Alabama, where racial hierarchy shaped civic life long after Reconstruction. The return of white supremacy in the 1870s brought the loss of voting rights for African Americans and racially restrictive laws; throughout the South, fear of relationships between Black men and white women became a particular preoccupation of law enforcement. The history surrounding the county is therefore not only a backdrop to individual cases: it helps explain why racial identity could influence how suspicion and authority were exercised.

The distribution of political power reinforced that context. In 1987, every elected district attorney in Alabama was white, including in a state with sixteen majority-Black counties. Legislators had aligned counties to preserve white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. In Monroe County, where Black residents formed a substantial share of the population, the demographic reality did not translate into equal influence over prosecution or the courts.

The courthouse and jury selection

The county’s racial imbalance was especially visible in the jury box. In Deep South states, jury rolls had historically been drawn from voting rolls that excluded African Americans; after voting rights expanded, clerks and judges could still use other methods to keep jury lists predominantly white. Requirements that prospective jurors be considered intelligent and upright were among the criteria used to exclude Black people and women. Later rulings required more representative jury pools, but did not guarantee that summoned Black residents would actually serve.

Peremptory strikes remained a powerful means of removing Black prospective jurors. The Supreme Court of the United States had condemned racially discriminatory use of those strikes decades earlier, but its standard proved so difficult to meet that challenges failed for years while the practice continued. The 1986 decision in Batson v. Kentucky made prosecutorial strikes more directly challengeable, offering defendants new grounds to object while also pressuring prosecutors to find other ways to exclude Black jurors. In a county that was 40 percent Black, McMillian still had reason to fear that his capital case could be heard by an all-white jury.

That concern accompanied a prosecution that many Black residents already doubted. Tom Tate and Ted Pearson had both heard residents say they believed McMillian was innocent. Pearson nevertheless thought he could win a conviction despite doubts in the Black community and the suspect testimony of Ralph Myers and Bill Hooks. He was also conscious of criticism that his office had failed to solve the murder of Ronda Morrison quickly, and wanted to leave office with a victory. The case thus joined local political pressures to the broader question of whose doubts and testimony carried weight.

Unequal access to the courtroom

The courthouse itself made racial division visible during McMillian’s proceedings. After his supporters had filled the benches the previous day, Bryan Stevenson arrived to find the courtroom altered: a metal detector stood inside the door, a police officer restrained an enormous German shepherd, and older white people occupied much of the seating in support of the Morrison family and the prosecution. McMillian’s family and supporters had been told they could not enter, although the State’s supporters had been admitted.

Stevenson challenged the exclusion with the prosecutors and raised it with the judge. The episode turned access to the courtroom into part of the case’s larger conflict: the formal setting of justice appeared open to one side’s supporters and closed to the other’s. The contrast between the groups in the room did not prove the case, but it made the unequal distribution of power concrete for those who had come to witness it.

Memory and aftermath

The county’s history of racial terror also shaped how its suffering was remembered. Stevenson connected the legacy of slavery to the terror that followed Reconstruction, including lynching and racial violence, and described the pain borne in the oppressed spaces of Monroe County. In his account, that history was not safely past; it continued to inform how residents understood justice and the violence exercised against Black communities.

After McMillian died, his funeral was held on a rainy Saturday morning at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church near Monroeville. The pulpit was the same one from which Stevenson had spoken to the congregation more than twenty years earlier about casting and catching stones. Scores packed the church, with dozens more outside; the gathering brought poor, rural Black mourners together around a life marked by unjustified pain and torment.

A large screen beside the casket displayed photographs, almost all taken on the day McMillian was released from prison. Several showed him standing beside Stevenson, both appearing happy. The images set the visible joy of release against the years that had passed and the suffering that preceded it. In this way, Monroe County is more than the place where a wrongful prosecution unfolded: it is also the place where the community gathered to mourn McMillian and where his release remained present in the images chosen to remember him.