Sam Crook’s trust in and support for Walter McMillian

Sam Crook’s relationship with Walter McMillian combined a history of paid work with conspicuous support for a man facing a racially charged prosecution. Crook was one of the occasional white people who contacted Bryan Stevenson in support of Walter; he insisted on meeting Stevenson, offered help against the local forces backing the case, and later appeared in court with a group of supporters. Walter, for his part, described Crook as an unusual but dependable former employer.

A former employer speaks out

After Stevenson visited Walter’s family, calls about the case increased. Most came from poor Black people offering encouragement, but Crook was among the occasional white supporters who called. He had employed Walter, and their connection was not merely a public alignment with the defense: Walter remembered having done substantial work for him and regarded him as someone who had treated him well.

Crook introduced himself to Stevenson in deliberately theatrical terms, identifying himself as a rebel and as part of the 117th division of the Confederate Army. He said his people had been Confederate heroes and that he had inherited their land, title, and pride. The declaration placed his family identity within the history of the white South, but Crook did not use that inheritance to defend the prosecution or the racial order it represented. He said he loved the county while recognizing that what had happened to Walter was wrong. The force of his intervention lay in that contrast: a man who invoked Confederate ancestry was willing to oppose an injustice against a Black man in his own community.

An offer of backup

Crook did more than express sympathy. He told Stevenson that the defense would need backup from someone who knew the people it was going up against, and promised to help. His offer was grounded in local familiarity: he presented himself as a person able to support the challenge to Walter’s prosecution from within a community whose customs and power relations he knew.

Crook also asked Stevenson whether he thought his phone was being tapped. The question conveys the atmosphere of suspicion surrounding the case, but the account does not establish that surveillance was taking place. Its significance here is relational: Crook spoke not only as a sympathetic former employer but as someone alert to the risks Stevenson might face while opposing influential local actors. Stevenson could offer little more than thanks, while Crook’s pledge gave the defense a supporter who understood the county from a different position than the mostly poor Black callers who had also rallied to Walter.

Walter’s measure of Crook

When Stevenson later asked Walter about Crook, Walter answered that he had done a lot of work for him, that Crook had been good to him, and that he was a very interesting man. Walter’s word choice was characteristically restrained. In their conversations, he used “interesting” for people he found odd, and he tended to chuckle rather than speak harshly about them. The description therefore registers both Crook’s eccentricity and Walter’s reluctance to condemn people outright; it does not negate Walter’s trust in him.

The working relationship also reveals a form of mutual regard that crossed the boundary between employer and worker. Crook’s support was grounded in having known Walter through his labor, while Walter’s account of Crook began with that shared history rather than with Crook’s bold political self-presentation. Walter’s confidence in him appears in the plain statement that Crook had been good to him, not in an elaborate declaration of friendship.

Support made visible

At a courthouse hearing, Stevenson saw Crook and his posse among a packed audience that had come to support Walter. The room included Walter’s relatives, people who had attended the fish fry on the day of the crime, people interviewed during the investigation, and people who knew him from work. Crook’s presence made his earlier promise tangible: he had not confined his backing to a private telephone call but stood with Walter’s supporters in court.

That crowd mattered in a case where Walter’s defense confronted the racial composition and operation of local legal institutions. Crook’s support did not erase those inequalities or establish that he could change the outcome. It did, however, complicate the prosecution’s social landscape: among the people publicly standing behind Walter was a white former employer who claimed Confederate inheritance and local pride, yet called the case unjust and offered the defense backup. The relationship is presented through that unresolved tension—local belonging on one side, loyalty to Walter and opposition to his treatment on the other.