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    Murder at Broad River Bridge: The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan
    Murder at Broad River Bridge: The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan
    Murder at Broad River Bridge: The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Murder at Broad River Bridge: The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan

    By Bill Shipp and Renee C. Romano

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    About this ebook

    First published in 1981, Murder at the Broad River Bridge recounts the stunning details of the murder of Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan on a back-country Georgia road in 1964, nine days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Longtime Atlanta Constitution reporter Bill Shipp gives us, with shattering power, the true story of how a good, innocent, "uninvolved" man was killed during the Civil Rights turbulence of the mid-1960s. Penn was a decorated veteran of World War II, a United States Army Reserve officer, and an African American, killed by racist, white vigilantes as he was driving home to Washington, D.C. from Fort Benning, Georgia.

    Shipp recounts the details of the blind and lawless force that took Penn’s life and the sorry mask of protective patriotism it hid behind. To read Murder at Broad River Bridge is to know with deep shock that it could be dated today, tonight, tomorrow. It is a vastly moving documentary drama.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2017
    ISBN9780820351629
    Murder at Broad River Bridge: The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan
    Author

    Bill Shipp

    BILL SHIPP was an award-winning author, reporter, editor, and columnist who has covered southern politics and government for more than five decades. He was also a member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and the Atlanta Press Club Hall of Fame.

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      Book preview

      Murder at Broad River Bridge - Bill Shipp

      PROLOGUE Protectors of Our Children

      THE KU KLUX KLAN started as a social club of Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, just after the Civil War. Less than a year later, the organization was restructured at a meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, along the lines of white supremacy. It became The Invisible Empire of the South.

      Within two years, the robed and hooded Klansmen were riding the backroads of the South, whipping and killing in acts of terrorism aimed at restoring white supremacy. They served on juries, too, unrecognized, and they posted placards threatening blacks and whites alike, bullying any whose ways did not suit the Klan.

      The number of kidnappings and murders increased to such an alarming extent that new federal laws were passed, and the grand wizard of the Klan himself ordered the organization disbanded in 1869. Local groups paid little attention to that call, continuing to operate with vigilante disregard for any law but their own. They still operate that way.

      In June of 1979, a neatly dressed, articulate young man spoke to a crowd in Euless, Texas. His name was David Duke, age twenty-eight, of Metairie, Louisiana. This college-educated young man looked and acted much like an up-and-coming Southern politician. He was, in fact, one of the new leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, which experienced new vitality as the decade of the 1970s ended and the decade of the 1980s began.

      The general Hollywood-New York axis doesn’t oppose us because of our robes but primarily because of our beliefs, Duke told the crowd in Euless.

      Duke and the current crop of wizards, dragons, and cyclopses like to tell their audiences that Klan violence is a myth perpetuated by the hostile federal government and militant black leaders. They contend nightriding and lynchings went out of style fifty years ago.

      On the day Duke spoke in Texas, Klansmen forced the public swimming pools to close in Selma, Alabama. Mayor Joe Smitherman said he was ordering the pools closed to avoid violence after robed Klansmen appeared at one pool, saying they were there "to protect the

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