A review by chewdigestbooks
Murder at Broad River Bridge: The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan by Bill Shipp
4.0
This is a reprint of the 1981 book of the same name, FYI. It gives a brief account of the 1964 murder of Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn near Athens, Georgia and the court cases that followed.
It turns my stomach that Penn was only in Georgia to do his reserve service at Fort Benning. He was serving his bloody country and was murdered because the perps "thought" his D.C. license plate meant that he was one of President Johnson's Feds, there to cause trouble.
Let me say that again, he was killed because his license plate showed he wasn't local and the color of his skin while returning home from his responsibilities of serving his, our, and his murder's country.
There isn't a ton of deep diving into the information like there might be in a book published today, but that is part of its strength. It's brevity still covers all of the bases, including what happened to the men charged in the years after and leading up to their death. However, it didn't get me as fired up as many more current books tend to do. It didn't and won't haunt me like [b:The Blood of Emmett Till|30753852|The Blood of Emmett Till|Timothy B. Tyson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474198979s/30753852.jpg|51302259] continues to do, even though I read it way back in January.
Still, when you think about the period it was originally written, 1981, it's message was huge, unique, and very needed. All of the current books owe Bill Shipp a bit for being one of the first authors to stand up and say, this isn't right and you need to learn why.
It turns my stomach that Penn was only in Georgia to do his reserve service at Fort Benning. He was serving his bloody country and was murdered because the perps "thought" his D.C. license plate meant that he was one of President Johnson's Feds, there to cause trouble.
Let me say that again, he was killed because his license plate showed he wasn't local and the color of his skin while returning home from his responsibilities of serving his, our, and his murder's country.
There isn't a ton of deep diving into the information like there might be in a book published today, but that is part of its strength. It's brevity still covers all of the bases, including what happened to the men charged in the years after and leading up to their death. However, it didn't get me as fired up as many more current books tend to do. It didn't and won't haunt me like [b:The Blood of Emmett Till|30753852|The Blood of Emmett Till|Timothy B. Tyson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474198979s/30753852.jpg|51302259] continues to do, even though I read it way back in January.
Still, when you think about the period it was originally written, 1981, it's message was huge, unique, and very needed. All of the current books owe Bill Shipp a bit for being one of the first authors to stand up and say, this isn't right and you need to learn why.