With thousands of U.S. soldiers dying in Vietnam, a group of young Catholics in New York embarked on a secret mission to bring the war machine to its knees.

By Stephen Wood

Paul was the favorite of Betty Good’s ten children. His next-eldest brother, Jim, still remembers his christening in 1947 as a momentous occasion, given that Paul was his maternal grandparents’ fiftieth grandchild. Consider yourself advised, right off the bat, that this is a story about Catholics.

Jim described his brother as “a young man that just loved life.” By his teenage years, Paul was such a notorious pool shark that he had to travel farther and farther from his family’s Western Pennsylvania home in search of marks. “You didn’t wanna play pool against Paul Good,” Jim said. “That was out of the question.”

Shortly after Paul graduated from high school, he was called up to serve in the Army and sent to Vietnam. When Betty put him on the plane, she was proud of what he was doing and convinced that it was right. But just a few weeks later, on June 19, 1967, she awoke with a premonition that something terrible had happened to Paul.

It took a few days, but when the men from the Army arrived outside her house, she knew why they were there. She knew what they were going to say even as she waited for her husband to come and receive the news with her. Paul Good was killed in action outside Saigon on June 19, a few months shy of his twentieth birthday.

Like many people his age, Jim already had serious problems with U.S. foreign policy. Now it had claimed the life of his younger brother. “At that point,” he said, “I just wanted to make the government feel like they’re not as secure as they think they are.” Eventually, he and some friends hatched a plan to do just that—one as outrageous as it was outrageously simple.

Jim is in his eighties now, and he can’t say for certain how many government offices he broke into following his brother’s death. But it all began in Buffalo, New York.

America watched as men in suits picked blue capsules out of a glass container, like some perverse game show, to determine the order in which the most recent crop of draft-eligible boys would be called into service.

Jim started out on a path of righteousness—a spiritual one, that is. He entered seminary at 14 and spent eight years training to be a Catholic priest. It wasn’t spreading the faith that excited him so much as the opportunity to travel; he wanted to be a missionary. But shortly before he was to be ordained and sent overseas, Jim was, in his words, “politely asked to leave” due to his chronic inability to obey orders.

Instead he became something of a secular missionary, traveling to the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer. He arrived less than a year after President Lyndon Johnson sent tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the island nation to prop up a strongman friendly to his administration. Most locals gave Jim a chilly reception. “When I got out there, it was like, ‘Hey, hi! My name is Jaime Bueno, Jim Good, and I’m here to help!’ And they said, ‘Screw you.’ ” Jim quickly realized that the troops were there to protect American landowners, not Dominicans, and that the local Catholic clergy “lived very well” while their flocks toiled on plantations. When he began to speak out against the injustice around him, according to Jim, he fell out of favor with the Peace Corps bureaucracy. He ended up leaving his post three months early.

Now known as Jaime Bueno to his friends—James was the most popular name for boys born in the United States every single year between 1940 and 1952, so a distinctive nickname was vital—Jim moved to New York City and fell in with the growing antiwar community. He eventually moved to Buffalo, where he met a number of like-minded people, many of whom had also grown up Catholic.

“I always wanted to be a saint,” said Jeremiah Horrigan, a Buffalonian from a family of ten children, whose father, Jack, was a beloved sportswriter turned executive for the Buffalo Bills. Studious, morally upright, and the son of a local bigwig, Jeremiah was a natural fit at Canisius High School, an elite boys’ school he described as “a training ground for the eventual leaders in Buffalo—at least, the Catholic leaders.”

Mike Hickey, the eldest of ten from a South Buffalo family, attended Canisius on a scholarship. As a kid, Mike always took the Church seriously, but his “scrupulous conscience” alerted him to some major contradictions between doctrine and practice. While studying the catechism in grade school, he was surprised that the illustration accompanying the Fifth Commandment in his book was a photograph of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy: “It seems pretty straightforward, you know, as a commandment: Thou shalt not kill.”

Ken Mudie referred to the neighborhood where he and Mike grew up as “an Irish-Catholic ghetto.” Ken and his brother stood out. “We had two strikes against us,” he said. “My parents were divorced and we weren’t Irish.” His early life was chaotic, with his mother working multiple jobs and a variety of “transient” relatives cycling through his home. But he had a great time, and he got good grades, which earned him a ticket to Canisius.

Maureen “Meaux” Considine grew up in a suburb of Buffalo, one of “only” five kids. Her parents were “devout,” she said, “but there were things about the Catholic Church that they questioned a little bit.” Had the Church allowed it, her mom would have been a priest. The Considines were the rare suburban white couple who purposefully sent their daughter into the city proper for high school, to Mount St. Joseph Academy. Being in an urban environment exposed Meaux to the effects of racial segregation and grinding poverty. It also put her in proximity to Canisius boys, including Mike, Ken, and Jeremiah.

After the four of them graduated high school, in 1968, they headed to college. Ken and Mike enrolled at Le Moyne College in Syracuse. A Jesuit school, Le Moyne until recently had employed Father Daniel Berrigan, a radical antiwar priest. The Catholics there dressed and talked more like hippies than like the Mass-goers Ken had grown up with, and they weren’t above getting their hands dirty when the spirit moved them.

Le Moyne was where Mike first got picked up by the cops, for leafleting on behalf of farmworkers. He’d been a literal and figurative Boy Scout before college. “ I was always a good boy and never disobeyed any rules,” he said. “But it just seemed like the right thing to do. So we did it.” He and Ken also protested racist hiring practices at a construction site, and they began to recognize the connections between racism in the United States and what was happening in Vietnam. In the early years of U.S. military involvement in the conflict, Black Americans were drafted and killed in disproportionately high numbers.

Ken’s upbringing wasn’t political, beyond his family’s general affinity for John F. Kennedy because he was Catholic. His father was a World War II veteran who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and Ken was raised not to question what America did overseas. Jocular and self-effacing, he continued to defend the Vietnam War in conversations with friends and fellow students, until one day, he said, “I just couldn’t argue why we were there.”

Ken, Mike, and Jeremiah all attended Woodstock, the generation-defining music festival in upstate New York, and their accounts of this period are laced with references to countercultural music. One song that’s stuck with Ken is “Sky Pilot,” a catchy but haunting piece of psychedelia released in 1968 by Eric Burdon and the Animals (of “House of the Rising Sun” fame). Over seven and a half minutes, it tells the story of a military priest blessing troops as they head into battle, listening to the firefight, then watching the men return, wounded and traumatized. Burdon’s tone is one of pity mixed with disdain. It’s a song about a man who keeps his head down and stays quiet, allowing great evil to unfold around him.

Meaux was studying at St. Mary’s College, just across the street from Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, when in 1969 the U.S. Selective Service began to draft young men by date of birth via a televised lottery. America watched as men in suits picked blue capsules out of a glass container, like some perverse game show, to determine the order in which the most recent crop of draft-eligible boys would be called into service. “It was a terrible night,” Meaux said. “Lots of drunk people. They were drunk because they were happy or because they were sad. There were people who were hysterically crying because their number was really low.”

Ken got lucky—his draft number was high. So high that he quit Le Moyne after two years, giving up the possibility of a student deferment, and started working full-time. “There’d have to be a ground invasion in Iowa before I would ever be drafted,” he said. Mike stayed in school, but his deferment weighed on him as he watched more and more young men get called up.

Jeremiah credits the alternative of a “death sentence” in Vietnam with his decision to go to college. At Fordham University in the Bronx, another Jesuit school, he discovered a scene similar to the one at Le Moyne: Professors assigned books with titles like The Nonviolent Cross. One of those professors was John Peter Grady, a sociologist who appears to have used his teaching position primarily to foment nonviolent resistance to U.S. foreign policy. Gregarious, canny, and hard-drinking, Grady took every opportunity to convert casual war opponents into crusaders against the war machine. And it was an open secret on campus that Grady had been involved in some of the recent high-profile raids on Selective Service offices, better known as the draft boards.

They sent their destroyed cards to the Selective Service, but weren’t arrested. “ I did get a call from the FBI asking me, ‘Did you knowingly and without duress do that?’ ” Chuck recalled, laughing. “And I said, ‘Yeah, you could cast it that way.’ ”

In 1966, determined that neither he nor any of his eleven younger brothers should be drafted, 19-year-old Barry Bondhus emptied a bucket of excrement into the drawer containing his file at a Minneapolis-area draft board. Thankfully, for the sake of public health, this exact method of protest didn’t catch on, but Barry had exposed just how easy it was to destroy the documentation required to draft young men into military service.

In October 1967, four individuals, including Father Philip Berrigan, brother of Daniel, entered a draft board in Baltimore, poured blood—a mixture of animal and their own—over a quantity of files, and were arrested. The following spring, a group now known as the Catonsville Nine, among them both Berrigan brothers, removed files from a suburban Maryland draft board in broad daylight, destroyed them with homemade napalm in the parking lot, and were arrested. “Our apologies, dear friends, for the fracture of good order. For the burning of papers, instead of children,” the Catonsville Nine said in their official statement, which Daniel Berrigan read to reporters over the pyre.

What separated these raids from nearly all other antiwar actions was, to put it bluntly, their potential to be effective. In a world without computers, the physical documents containing the personal information of draft-eligible men might have been the only materials linking them to the Selective Service. “ I often thought, what about the women who worked in those offices?” Jim Good said. “Did they see those files as death certificates?” He and other peace activists came to view the contents of draft boards’ filing cabinets as no different from bombs or bullets: They were just tools that helped the government kill. Crucially, destroying files could be accomplished without any violence, unless you counted the destruction of property, which raiders did not. They believed that some property simply didn’t have a right to exist. 

No central structure existed to plan the raids, but a diffuse network of participants, consisting primarily of working-class Catholics, adopted the moniker of the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives. The Berrigan brothers were the most visible members, and they were often assumed to be the movement’s leaders—J. Edgar Hoover even branded Phil a terrorist during a Senate hearing. But neither was personally involved in more than a handful of raids. By 1971, the brothers were in prison for the Maryland actions; Phil went quietly, but Dan led the FBI on a weeks-long chase, during which he occasionally surfaced to deliver guerrilla sermons. Many of their fellow organizers evaded detection, and soon more young people were joining their ranks.

Chuck Darst was one of them. Chuck was a bookish, articulate Catholic kid from Knoxville, Tennessee, whose parents were so apolitical that neither knew how the other voted. He intended to join the ROTC when he enrolled at Notre Dame, then maybe serve in the Air Force. But before long, Chuck was studying just-war theory, reading Gandhi, and plumbing the depths of his own psyche to the tunes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. He also fell in love with Meaux over at St. Mary’s.

In the summer of 1968, Chuck was selling books in rural Alabama when his older brother, David, was arrested along with the rest of the Catonsville Nine. Back at school, Chuck tore up his draft card beside other young men during a Mass celebrated before the campus mural known as Touchdown Jesus. They sent their destroyed cards to the Selective Service but weren’t arrested. “ I did get a call from the FBI asking me, ‘Did you knowingly and without duress do that?’ ” Chuck recalled, laughing. “And I said, ‘Yeah, you could cast it that way.’ ”

Then his brother died suddenly. A writer and member of the De La Salle Christian Brothers, a community of laymen who take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, David taught religion at a Catholic high school in Nebraska. He’d been convicted for the Catonsville action, but had yet to start his prison sentence, when he was killed in a car accident at age 27.

Chuck took a semester off to focus on compiling a book of his brother’s writings. Maybe some part of him already knew that he wasn’t going back to college. “It just seemed like I was inexorably being drawn to do something more than I had done at Notre Dame,” Chuck said. “The mantle of draft resistance and resistance to the Vietnam War kind of seemed to come to me.”

Meaux also found her studies increasingly meaningless as the fabric of society seemed to fray around her. Buffalo became a favorite port of call for Chuck as he hitchhiked back and forth from South Bend to talk to East Coast publishers about his brother’s book, and when she finally dropped out of St. Mary’s, Meaux ended up back in her hometown, living with Chuck and working for an antiwar congressional candidate.

Chuck’s and Meaux’s fates were sealed when they joined Mike Hickey in a drive across the state to see an off-Broadway play Daniel Berrigan had written about Catonsville. The production incorporated footage of Chuck’s late brother that Chuck had never seen before, and it helped him and his friends come to a monumental decision. “As Meaux and Mike and I made our way back to Buffalo, we were saying, ‘We’ve gotta do an action,’ ” Chuck recalled.

In the summer of 1971, Mike called Ken Mudie and asked if he wanted to attend a meeting about raiding a draft board. Ken agreed to go, in his telling because he happened to have time on his hands. Once they were gathered, the participants introduced themselves with some words about what had brought them there. Everyone shared a story of personal growth and discovery—except Ken.

“I’m Ken Mudie,” he said. “My favorite band is the Kinks, and my favorite color is green.”

He now wonders if he should’ve said something a little less flippant, but his humor had a function. “I think the point I was trying to make was, I’m just new to this, folks,” he said. 

Other newcomers to righteous lawbreaking were there that day: Mike, Meaux, and Chuck, as well as Jeremiah Horrigan. But the two Jims—Jim Martin and Jim Good—were civil-disobedience veterans. That June, they’d gone to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Selective Service to carry out a citizen’s arrest of its director, Curtis Tarr. They’d arranged a meeting, invited reporters to join them, and, once in Tarr’s office, announced that they were charging him with war crimes. They asked him to sign an affidavit admitting his guilt. He declined. Martin moved to place handcuffs on him, but Tarr was six feet seven inches tall and a World War II veteran. He brushed Martin aside with enough force to knock him on his ass. The next morning, papers across the country ran a photo of Tarr towering like a victorious boxer over a falling Martin. To the side, Jim Good is holding handcuffs and perhaps starting to wonder if there might be a more effective way to mess with the war machine.

Martin’s girlfriend, Ann Masters, was also at the meeting in Buffalo, along with Barb and Mike Dougherty, a married couple with a newborn baby. The Doughertys were a bit older than the rest of the crew, but they were moved by the spirit of the age, and their guidance was crucial to their younger comrades. “They were the rocks that we built around,” Jeremiah said. Ken described Mike Dougherty as a natural leader and Barb as an “earth mother” who shocked his delicate sensibilities by squirting breast milk across the room at unsuspecting targets. (The Doughertys are now deceased, as is Jim Martin. Ann Masters declined an interview for this story.)

By all available evidence, no member of the Buffalo cell had ever raided a draft board before; among them, however, they had several points of contact with the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives and a clear sense of what they wanted to accomplish. Their mark was so obvious, it almost went without saying: The Old Post Office stuck out like a Gothic Revival thumb over downtown Buffalo. The six-story gray square with a glass-covered atrium in the middle—Jim Good described it as both a “stone fortress” and a “square doughnut”—housed all manner of federal offices, including two draft boards. It also contained a branch of U.S. Army Intelligence, which was of great interest to the antiwar crowd. Buffalo was often the last stop on the path to Canada for young men fleeing the draft, just as it had been for people escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. The local peace community believed that Army Intelligence was trying to track down draft dodgers, and raiding their office seemed like a good way of finding out.

After their first meeting, the Buffalo group went through what some in their circle called a “period of discernment,” a Catholic term that refers to a time of serious contemplation, often undertaken before entering seminary. In this case, it meant weighing the ethics and consequences of breaking into a suite of government offices. Nobody in the group could pinpoint the moment when they decided that they were in; each came to the conclusion over a period of weeks. “It seemed pretty natural,” Mike Hickey recalled. “I was 20, so my left prefrontal cortex was not fully developed. But it was, I would say, a moral decision at that point.” Jim Good said that he came to see planning the raid as “more of a challenge than a risk. It almost became a game. Except it was a serious game.”

As with any break-in, the key to raiding a draft board was casing. The Buffalo crew spent countless hours staring at the Old Post Office, noting mundane details like foot and car traffic at various times of day; the patterns of nearby police patrols; and which lights were left on at night, and how late. They typically cased in twos, for safety and to stave off boredom. Mixed-gender pairings had the option to sit in parked cars. That way if cops took an interest, they could simply pretend they were there to make out.

Jim Good and Jeremiah Horrigan went into the Old Post Office during the day to determine, among other things, if there were any armed guards. Nobody was willing to risk the possibility of guns going off. Luckily, according to Jeremiah, “it was not a difficult building to infiltrate.” There was no camera or alarm system—no security infrastructure beyond the locks on the doors and a single watchman on duty around the clock. Over the course of several summer weeks, the crew did not observe any employees staying late or working weekends.

A simple-enough plan began to form: The raiders would enter the building during a busy workday, and each would quietly make their way to a staircase that led to the top floor. There they would hide in an unused attic until the dead of night, when they’d sneak downstairs. Five members of the group would hit the draft board offices, while Jim Good and Mike Hickey would enter the Army Intelligence office two floors below. They’d all escape in a van waiting outside, disguised to look like a Postal Service vehicle, with Ken at the wheel. Unlike the Berrigan brothers, they weren’t interested in public arrests—they wanted to get away.

Planning took place primarily at the West Street apartment of Cathy McCue, a local college student who was subletting her spare room to Meaux and Chuck. Cathy came from a socially conscious family residing in the New York City suburbs, but was too busy at the time to engage seriously with the plot being hatched in her living room. She claimed that she only learned after the fact just how many meetings had taken place in her apartment while she was at school, at work, or asleep.

Meaux’s “key role” was to get into the rooms where the draft files were kept. “When we cased the building, we saw what kind of locks were in the doors, and then we went out and bought a bunch of those locks, put them in a two-by-four, and just started practicing,” she said. Meaux “fiddled and fiddled and fiddled” with crochet hooks, knitting needles, and fondue forks until she was certain she could efficiently pick the locks that stood between the raiders and the files.

At some point, the group realized that there would be too many files in the offices for them to carry away. They’d have to destroy some of them on-site. “Just ripping them wouldn’t be enough,” Jeremiah explained, because the government could piece the documents back together. “And fire was out of the question.” Destroying papers was one thing, but the group wasn’t ready to risk burning down the Old Post Office. When raiders elsewhere had encountered this problem, they’d soaked draft documents in a substance that made them impossible to read. The activists in Buffalo decided to buy Rit Dye, typically used to color fabric, and a tub they could dump the files in.

Along with her fondue forks and knitting needles, Meaux concealed an uninflated kiddie pool inside her clothes when she entered the Old Post Office on August 20. Mike Hickey was alongside her, in a Goodwill suit several sizes too big, with bottles of dye taped to his body. He also carried two items he wanted with him in the event that he went to jail: a toothbrush and a picture of his girlfriend, Lucy.

Chuck was confident it wouldn’t come to that. He thought their chances of getting away were good. The night before the raid, he drafted a statement on behalf of the group, taking credit for what they were about to do. “Okay,” it began, “the war goes on.” The statement referenced the Gospels and Albert Camus (“I wish I could love my country and still love justice”). It called the war “a violence of extraordinary arrogance and cruelty.”

“In you, good neighbor,” one passage read, “we wish to inspire neither alarm nor disgust by this, our night’s work. We move here against vandals and terrorists especially those of official badge or office in our country.”

The statement was signed: The Buffalo.

Jim Good took a break from the action to put his grubby stockinged feet on an Army officer’s desk, pick up the phone, and call a friend to brag about where he was.

The raiders made it inside the building undetected. “I think my comrades could tell I was a fucking nervous wreck,” Mike said. Jeremiah was excited. “I knew kids that were bound for Vietnam,” he said. “If I was able to make the machine, as I thought of it, stop—or at least throw some sand into the machine—that was the best feeling in the world.” They signed a guest book (Mike checked in as “K. Marx”) and then, one by one, made their way to the top floor.

What followed was more than twenty-four hours of nervous silence in the baking mid-August heat; the friends had decided to wait until Saturday night to emerge from the stuffy, filthy attic. They tiptoed out onto the roof to smoke and pee. Chuck meditated and wrote.

When Friday night fell, Jeremiah went downstairs to surveil the building’s lone watchman and came back having discovered a wrinkle. Devoid of people, the building’s atrium was like an echo chamber. The swishing of Jeremiah’s bell-bottom jeans had carried, and he was worried that the noises made by the group would alert the watchman. Father Jim Mang, a local priest, was scheduled to pull up outside and lean on his horn, providing a distraction as they broke into the offices. Still, out of an abundance of caution, everyone agreed to strip down to their underwear.

When the appointed hour came on Saturday night, the seven scantily clad friends descended the building’s stairs, split up, and took their places. Outside, the priest hit the horn, and the raiders got to work picking locks and pulling files from cabinets. Some documents went into mail sacks; others were destined for the kiddie pool. Jim Good took a break from the action to put his grubby stockinged feet on an Army officer’s desk, pick up the phone, and call a friend to brag about where he was.

Chuck’s job was to monitor the watchman, and before long his ears perked up: The elevator shaft in the atrium was active. Someone was coming.

Chuck alerted his friends, but it was too late. When the elevator doors opened, it wasn’t the watchman but two unknown men who stepped out, guns drawn. They were wearing flip-flops and tank tops.

“There they are!” one of the men shouted. They weren’t surprised to see the raiders—they were there to apprehend them. In that instant, Jim Good knew there must have been a snitch.

“FBI!” the agents yelled. 

Jim Good had planned for the worst. While casing the building, he’d taken the bold step of loosening the screws on the lock of a revolving door that offered an alternative exit. Now, from where he stood, with the agents advancing, he saw that he and his friends could scramble over a wrought-iron cage protecting a stairwell, drop down to the main floor of the building, and flee through that door. Jim made his move, and Mike clambered over the cage after him. As Jim began removing the screws from the lock, Mike expedited things: He rammed right through the door.

The FBI had the other five raiders cornered upstairs. Jeremiah started whistling the “Colonel Bogey March.” “You know, how could they shoot someone who was whistling?” he said. He was arrested along with Meaux, Chuck, Anne, and Jim Martin.

When he pulled up in the getaway van, Ken thought he’d stumbled across some crime scene—flashing lights in the middle of downtown—before realizing it was his crime scene. He kept driving, navigating calmly around the traffic circle outside the Old Post Office and heading right back the way he came, wondering what the hell had happened.

As they tasted fresh air, Jim and Mike were wondering the same. “The only thing that took the terror away was the adrenaline of escaping,” Mike recalled. He would have run the entire five miles home to South Buffalo if Jim hadn’t persuaded him to stop and take cover in a parking garage. They were still smeared with grime from the attic and stripped to their underwear; going any farther on foot would attract attention. When they spotted a group of young people hanging out in a nearby alley, they made their way over. The kids burst out laughing when they saw the pair.

“Is the man after you?” one of them asked.

“Yeah,” Jim replied. “Frankly, quite a few of them.”

The kids said they’d give the two raiders a ride in exchange for Jim’s Bulova watch. “You can have it!” Mike said immediately, even though it wasn’t his to give. Jim took off the watch and handed it over.

Soon they were in the backseat of the car, on their way to a safe house where they could shower and put on some clothes. It was around then that Mike remembered the two items he’d left behind in the pocket of his pants, which were still up in the attic of the Old Post Office: his toothbrush and the picture of Lucy. As the sun rose, he hunkered down at his parents’ and devised escape routes for when the FBI came to take him away.

By coincidence, the Buffalo action took place the same night as a raid on a federal building in Camden, New Jersey. One of the people involved in that operation was Bob Good, Jim’s brother. As they were gearing up in Camden, Bob wondered aloud whether the Buffalo raid, which Jim had told him was in the works, might be happening the same night. A minute or so later, another member of the Camden crew, Bob Hardy, excused himself to call his wife.

In fact, Hardy was calling the FBI; he’d been an informant for months. His handlers alerted their colleagues at the FBI’s Buffalo office, the staff of which were enjoying an end-of-summer picnic—hence the casual attire of the agents who busted the Buffalo raiders.

The feds interrogated the five arrested friends. Chuck refused to give so much as his name. As the mustached 21-year-old repeatedly cited his Miranda Rights, one of the FBI agents across from him gave the other a knowing look and said he was stepping out to get some coffee. The remaining agent grabbed Chuck and bundled him over to an open window. “If you don’t tell me your goddamn name right now, you’re going out that window,” Chuck recalled the agent saying. “I’m just gonna tell him you jumped.” Even with his head and torso thrust through the window frame, Chuck didn’t take the threat seriously. So instead of freaking out, he just stared at the agent until he finally relented and hauled Chuck back inside.

Monday morning’s Buffalo Courier-Express carried a photograph of a smiling Chuck, clad in a T-shirt and handcuffs, being led out of the Old Post Office by an FBI agent. In the photo, Ann Masters and another agent walk behind them, and next to Chuck is a suspect identified as “Joseph Hill”—Jeremiah Horrigan had refused to cooperate with the authorities, giving them the name of a deceased Swedish-American folk singer and labor activist in lieu of his own.

When the papers figured out Jeremiah’s identity, they contacted Jack Horrigan for comment. Jack refused to condemn the raid and described his son as “a warm, loving human being.” Being a Bills executive, Jeremiah explained, was “like being the Holy Ghost in Buffalo,” where everyone knew everyone and everyone loved the football team. Even Buffalonians who couldn’t relate to antiwar activists could probably relate to Jack Horrigan.

Next to the article on the Buffalo operation was the headline “20 Nabbed in Camden Draft Raid,” along with a photo of one of the people arrested: John Peter Grady, the Fordham professor. Eventually, eight more people would be arrested for the Camden action. All told, Bob Hardy’s snitching led to the arrest of more than two dozen people in two states.

For the next several weeks, it seemed like the FBI was everywhere. Cathy McCue was on the other side of the state the night of the raid, but as soon as she arrived back in Buffalo, her landlord met her outside and informed her that the feds had been there. Agents also visited professors in her department at the University of Buffalo and questioned the owner of a restaurant where she’d worked. “My whole life was picked apart,” Cathy said.

G-men tried to interview Meaux’s family, but her father kicked the agents out of his house after they suggested that Meaux was too dangerous to be in contact with her siblings. Meaux was out on bail by then; local activists had pooled funds, and priests had appealed to the consciences of well-to-do parishioners until there was enough money to free all five raiders. Ken’s family got a visit, too, even though he hadn’t been arrested. Ken thought he could detect a hint of pride in the way his grandmother talked about his friends “popping off”—her misstating of the colloquialism “ripping off”—a federal agency.

When the FBI showed up at Mike’s house, he hid in the bathroom. His mom told the agents that he wasn’t home, but then, feeling like a coward, Mike revealed himself. He assumed that the agents knew he’d been in the Old Post Office because his girlfriend’s picture was in the pants he’d left behind, but it quickly became clear they didn’t have anything on him. They just thought he might know something.

Along with Jim, Ken, and the Doughertys, Mike’s thoughts soon turned to revenge. In Washington, Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell called a press conference to proclaim the end of the East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives. “That pissed us off,” Mike said. “That’s why we decided, well, we’re gonna keep doing it.”

“I really thought that I would get stigmata because I was so holy,” Sally said. “As a little kid, third, fourth grade, I would look at my hands and go, ‘It’s not there yet, Mom!’ She’d just say, ‘Keep prayin’!’ ”

The five activists arrested in Buffalo never seriously considered a guilty plea. “We talked to one attorney who thought we ought to plead insanity,” Chuck said. Then, in “a real stroke of luck,” they got in touch with attorney Vinny Doyle. He and his partner, Joe Birmingham, agreed to an unorthodox approach. The Buffalo raiders, along with their counterparts in Camden, wanted to represent themselves at trial, put questions directly to witnesses, and make themselves as sympathetic as possible in the eyes of the jury. Doyle, Birmingham, and other legal minds in the antiwar movement would act as a backstop, advising them and handling some of the courtroom technicalities, but it would be the defendants’ show. Doyle “just wanted to help us say what we needed to say,” Chuck said.

The home of University of Buffalo professor Ed Powell became a node for the defense campaign, a place to gather and strategize. A disenchanted former FBI agent and his wife also offered their sizable suburban home as a base of operations; Meaux, Chuck, and some other activists eventually moved in. Before the trial, the activists decided to conduct an extended speaking tour across Buffalo, taking every opportunity to explain their opposition to the war to the people of western New York, in the hope of raising public consciousness and softening up the jury pool. They also compiled a list of potential witnesses that included prominent academics and war veterans, people whose testimony could be argued—fairly—to have nothing to do with the facts of the case. The Buffalo hoped to deliver a history lesson and tell a morality tale. They might not escape jail, but they would go down doing their part to change people’s minds about Vietnam.

While the defendants prepared for trial, Jim, Mike, and Ken cased draft offices throughout New York as possible targets for new raids. They decided to hit three on the same night, in Niagara, right on the U.S.–Canada border; in Batavia, halfway to Rochester; and in Geneseo, a college town south of Rochester. These offices were much smaller than the Old Post Office and seemingly had no night watchmen. The crew knew where to break in and how. But with their co-conspirators awaiting trial, they needed new recruits.  

One of them was Sally Hamlin. Another Buffalo native, Sally was a self-professed religious nerd. “I was enamored, fascinated by all the weird stories of the saints and  martyrs,” she said. When she was seven or eight, Sally still swears, she heard the voice of God calling her to be a priest, a notion her parents dismissed. “I really thought that I would get stigmata because I was so holy,” she said. “As a little kid, third, fourth grade, I would look at my hands and go, ‘It’s not there yet, Mom!’ She’d just say, ‘Keep prayin’!’ ”

The liberalizing reforms that swept Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council—Masses in languages other than Latin, nuns allowed to wear shorter habits—buoyed Sally’s spirits, and by her late teen years she’d embraced the gospel of the Catholic left. “It spoke to me,” she said, “as a person who thought that Jesus had it going on, in the nonviolent, Jesus Christ Superstar kind of way.” She opposed the war on principle and was devastated when it touched her directly. Sally and her best friend, Joanie, both had older brothers. When the boys got drafted, Sally said, “we shaved their hair in our kitchen and drank a lot of beer and sent them off to war.”

Sally got a shock when she picked up the paper on the morning of August 22, 1971, and learned that several of her friends were in federal custody for trying to raid the Old Post Office. She immediately got involved in the volunteer defense committee that had sprung up to aid the defendants. Soon she soon found herself attending weekend retreats where people were laying the groundwork for future raids, and she fell in with the new cell planning to hit three draft boards in one night.

Sally’s widower father couldn’t afford to send her to college. “ I had no money, I had no education,” Sally said, “but I had a body.” She figured she should use it.

Ken called Mike Dougherty to let him know, in code, that the raids had been a success. “Game went well last night!” he said. “I got up three times and had three hits, hit the ball outta the park.”

Sally was working as a nanny, and she made sure to give her employers, the Carlsons, a heads-up prior to burglarizing the Batavia draft board. “I’m gonna get involved with some things that may show up in the newspaper,” she told them. The Carlsons were cool. They didn’t ask questions.

On the afternoon of October 28, 1971, Sally dropped off the Carlson kids at home and hitchhiked to Batavia. She walked right through the door of the draft board building, nonchalantly ascended a flight of stairs, and slid into a broom closet to wait until nightfall. The office was on the town’s main drag, but Batavia didn’t have much in the way of nightlife. Once the coast was clear, Sally let two other activists in through the front door.

The raiders rifled through cabinets, stuffed draft files into sacks, then hauled the sacks downstairs and loaded them into a waiting car driven by another new accomplice named Paul. He and Sally set off for a cabin in the Finger Lakes that was the rendezvous point for everyone involved in the raids that night “We were feeling pretty good that we’d gotten away with it,” Sally said, until she and Paul were about a dozen miles from their destination. “All of a sudden we see flashing lights in the car behind us.”

Paul and Sally pulled over and instinctively sidled up to one another, to pretend they were a couple out for a romantic drive. But that wouldn’t explain the bulging sacks in the back of their car. The policeman approached Paul’s window to ask for his license, and Paul said they were on their way to his family’s cabin for the weekend. The officer told Paul that his taillight was out—that was the reason for the stop. Then he shined his flashlight on the sacks. In a moment of inspiration, Paul told him that they were full of Halloween costumes for the kids at a local Catholic orphanage.

Miraculously, the cop didn’t search the bags, but he offered to follow Paul and Sally to the cabin to make sure they arrived safely. After all, a broken taillight could be a hazard. Thinking it would be suspicious to refuse, Paul and Sally agreed. They set off again, still in possession of several bags of purloined federal property, leading a cop directly to the rendezvous point.

The Niagara break-in was more complicated from the start. Betsy Feltham, a student at Niagara University, was a new raider—she’d been reading Thoreau and Gandhi in school and connected with an “alternative, sort of underground” Catholic community. She couldn’t recall who had asked her to help knock over the Niagara draft board, but she remembered consenting immediately. “It would never occur to me not to,” she said.

The office was adjacent to an outpost of the Social Security Administration, and Betsy cased the building under the pretext that she was doing a school report on the agency. “I set my hair, put on a miniskirt, shaved my legs, and went to interview people,” she said. “That was not the way I normally looked, for sure.” The two government bureaus shared a bathroom, so it was easy enough for Betsy to excuse herself and scope out the target without raising suspicion. Nevertheless, she was so nervous she had to put on her research act “two or three times” to gather the information she needed, which must have made a couple of local Social Security administrators feel very interesting.

The plan in Niagara was for two people to hide in a closet and let Betsy and Mike Hickey into the draft board late at night. But as he waited at a safe house, Mike was alarmed to receive an early phone call from his comrades inside the office. They had emerged from hiding to find the doors to the building locked from the outside. To let the other raiders in, they’d have to improvise.

From there, Mike said, the operation proceeded “kinda like from a Three Stooges movie.” While casing, the raiders had noticed an exterior door that should have led into the Social Security office, but Betsy saw no sign of it from the inside. The activists realized it had been drywalled over. Now they figured that if they got the door to open from the outside, they could cut through the drywall, enter the Social Security office, and access the draft board via the shared bathroom.

To carry out the new plan, they would need to bypass a construction fence, which meant Mike and Betsy had to scramble up a ladder and onto the office’s roof. They’d made it about twenty yards across the flat rooftop, by Mike’s estimation, when he glanced at the window of an adjacent house. His blood ran cold. “There was a face looking at me out the window, and I completely fucking freaked out,” he said. “Then I slowly looked again and it was a jack-o’-lantern.”

Once they were off the roof, Mike set about carving through the sealed door with a drill and a handsaw. Within minutes they were inside, where their co-conspirators had already begun bagging up files. There were too many to fit in the getaway car, so they dumped the extras in the building’s sinks and turned the faucets on. Betsy still feels bad about leaving the water running.

Finally able to fulfill his destiny as a getaway driver, Ken Mudie picked up the group and drove Betsy back to her dorm. It was a Wednesday night, and she had a midterm to study for. Ken and Mike then got on the highway, heading for the rendezvous point. They were a few exits away from the cabin when, for reasons he still doesn’t understand, the hood of Ken’s Ford Fairlane flew up, obstructing his view. For what felt like forever, but was probably just a few seconds, Ken was driving an accomplice and several thousand stolen government files down the New York State Thruway functionally blind.

Mike stuck his head out the window and guided Ken to the median, then tied down the hood using his belt and some rope. The friends started up the Fairlane again and took the first exit. They’d use surface roads to get to the cabin.

Jim Good was part of the crew that hit the Geneseo office, but the specifics of that raid had blurred together with others in his memory. What’s certain is that, like their comrades in Batavia and Niagara, the Geneseo crew left behind a note, which Jim had written, addressed to Nixon, Hoover, and Mitchell. One of Jim’s accomplices that night was a guy named Harry, whom some of the other raiders had accused of being a government informant. Jim and Harry were waiting at the lake cabin with their batch of stolen files when Sally and Paul came driving up with a police officer tailing them. Harry burst out laughing and climbed a tree. “And you thought I was an informant?” he cried down at Jim.

To their relief, after seeing them to the cabin, the cop bade Sally and Paul good night and left. As the squad car disappeared into the night, most of the group breathed a sigh of relief, but Jim couldn’t relax. For all he knew, the cop might be back any minute with the FBI in tow. Jim decided it would be unwise for everyone to remain, and he told his accomplices to split. When Ken and Mike arrived, fresh off their ordeal with the car hood, Jim took the files they’d confiscated and asked them to leave, too.

Back home, Ken called Mike Dougherty to let him know, in code, that the raids had been a success. “Game went well last night!” he said. “I got up three times and had three hits, hit the ball outta the park.” Ken hung up to find his grandmother at the threshold to the kitchen, having heard every word.

“Did you do another pop-off last night?” she asked.

He told her the truth. She smiled and said, “Well, good for you.” Ken never heard another word about it. “She hated Nixon,” he said, chuckling at the memory.

Jim and Sally still had one more job to do before they could rest. From the cabin, they drove to a nearby shopping center, found a pay phone, and rang up the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Without giving his name, Jim read a copy of the letter left behind after each of the raids, then stayed on the line to answer the reporter’s questions. While he spoke, Sally kept watch.

The first sign of trouble was an unmarked car carrying men in trench coats. They looked like FBI agents, and they were circling the lot. Then a police car arrived. Jim might have chatted with the Democrat and Chronicle all day if Sally hadn’t dragged him from the phone booth and forced him to get back on the road. The unmarked car followed them.

Sally assumed that someone at the paper had tipped off the FBI, and that Jim’s conversation with the reporter gave the feds time to trace the call. Now, as men she was sure were law enforcement tailed them on the highway, Sally realized she was carrying an address book that contained contact information for a number of people in the antiwar movement. She tore out the pages one by one, swallowing some and tossing others out the window.

Soon Sally was fed up with the chase. “Let’s just stop and ask them who they are and what they’re doing,” she told Jim. They pulled into a small town and got out of the car. The men tailing them did the same. Jim, who had a camera on him, took photos of the men, who refused to answer the activists’ questions and told them they’d “better leave.” So Sally and Jim started driving again—only for police cars to appear in their mirrors. They were pulled over and arrested.

Yet, after all that, they were only charged with loitering in the small town where they’d briefly stopped. If Sally’s theory about why they’d been followed was right, the authorities had come incredibly close, but in the end they couldn’t link her or Jim to the break-ins. The pair got out on bail, and the loitering charges were eventually dropped. According to Sally, she and Jim returned to the cabin to deal with the stolen draft files. They mailed as many as they could to the young men named in them.

On October 28, the front page of the Buffalo Evening News read, “Three WNY Draft Offices Ransacked.” The accompanying article quoted the raiders’ letter: “You did not break [our] back, as you claimed”—a reference to Hoover and Mitchell’s gloating press conference. FBI special agent Karl Brouse told the paper that the investigation into the newest raids would “be a full-time job.”

As the trial of the five members of the Buffalo neared, the government kept pressure on peace activists and their families, hoping to smoke out other raiders. It was these tactics that finally brought Ken Mudie’s mother around to his political point of view. FBI agents showed up at her house and, in an effort to get her to talk about Ken’s activities, informed her that they had observed him driving over one hundred miles per hour, in gross violation of traffic law. When his mother confronted him, Ken laughed. The vehicle in question was a Ford Pinto. “That car would disintegrate at a hundred,” Ken said. “It’s like driving a roller skate with a door!” His mother, with whom he’d had some “knock-down-drag-outs” about his antiwar stance, was shocked that government agents would come to her house and lie to her. “They lie all the time,” he said.

Betsy Felthem believed that the FBI identified her as a suspect because she’d used the name of a girl who lived down the hall from her when she signed in to the Niagara Social Security office to case the draft board. But they didn’t arrest her for the break-in. That happened when she failed to comply with a subpoena from a grand jury. When federal marshals came for Betsy, Sally sat down in front of their car, earning her a night in jail.

Betsy was compelled to testify before the grand jury, and she sensed that the authorities thought she was a soft target. “If I were going to pick who might crack, who might talk,” she said, “I would’ve picked me.” But she stonewalled, giving the grand jury nothing, and the government let her go after a few hours.

The authorities had failed to turn up evidence they could use to prosecute even a single person for the triple raid. It was a clear victory for the antiwar movement. Still, in Buffalo, the feds had five defendants dead to rights.

Chuck and Meaux even decided to get married in the middle of the trial. “We had friends who could come for a wedding and friends who could come for a trial, but not for both,” Meaux said.

There were two federal judges in line to hear the case against the five Buffalo defendants, and one of them was a known right-winger likely to throw the book at them. The other was John Thomas Curtin, a World War II veteran, former U.S. attorney, and Great Society liberal, appointed by President Johnson on the personal recommendation of Robert F. Kennedy. Perhaps most important, Curtin was a Catholic from Buffalo. When they ended up on Curtin’s docket, the Buffalo activists lucked out—he literally knew where they were coming from.  

Nevertheless, the odds weren’t in their favor. The prosecution had an open-and-shut case, not least because the defendants readily admitted what they’d done. If they had any chance of winning and avoiding jail time, they’d need to convince the jury that their actions had been justified. “We have souls,” Meaux said at one point, “and that is what brought us here.”

On the first morning of the trial, in April 1972, the defendants immediately risked Curtin’s goodwill by refusing to stand when he entered the courtroom. As Jeremiah Horrigan explained, “We wanted everybody to be equally treated.” Curtin could have held them in contempt right there. Instead, when the defendants returned from the day’s lunch break, they found that he’d had their seats removed, forcing them to stand. The chairs were eventually returned, and it was agreed that all participants in the trial would stand for each other as they entered.

Prosecutor James W. Grable’s case was simple: These kids had broken the law. He trotted out cops, FBI agents, and draft board officials to testify to the crimes and the damage done. The defendants then played attorney and cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses. “The agents all have that Nixonian rigidity of body and walk, bereft of laughter, grace, kindness,” professor Ed Powell wrote in his notes from the gallery. “These agents of the Government, the state, Grable, the cops, the FBI people will never know the freedom of expressed conviction; never have freedom really to express that conviction, therefore will never have a conviction, an honest belief, valued as a truth in itself.”

When Grable asked a witness whether the Buffalo had left a statement behind, to which the answer was a simple “yes,” defense attorney Vinny Doyle had the presence of mind to ask if Grable might read the statement. Grable did. How far into the statement did Grable realize his error? Somewhere around “repression of dissent and resistance here at home goes on,” perhaps? When he finished reading, the defendants joined the jam-packed gallery in a round of applause. In his notebook, Powell wrote, “The Judge permitted maximum leeway in discussion of the war.”

Outside the courtroom, the defendants and their allies kept the faith at a local church. “We did a lot of singing, we did a lot of great meals,” Sally said. “We did a lot of having fun together and telling stories and just staying up late and talking about our lives and what in the world was happening.” Chuck and Meaux even decided to get married in the middle of the trial. “We had friends who could come for a wedding and friends who could come for a trial, but not for both,” Meaux said. “It was unusual. It was a great party, though.” Bob Good, himself preparing to go on trial in Camden, made their wedding cake.

Eventually, it came time for the defense to make its case. Curtin had determined that the war was germane to the proceedings, which allowed the Buffalo to call witnesses with no direct connection to the break-in: a Vietnamese refugee, a veteran who had witnessed U.S. troops using prisoners for target practice, experts in the psychological effects of conflict on soldiers and civilians. Grable declined to question these witnesses. Not so with the defendants: The Buffalo were free to speak at length about their justifications for the raid, but each of them was also subject to cross-examination, which meant five chances for Grable to interrogate them about the two extra pairs of pants and shoes left behind in the attic of the Old Post Office.

Each defendant took the stand in turn and was questioned by one of their friends. Ann Masters went first. As part of her testimony, she screened a ten-minute film about Vietnam, which Grable refused to watch. She then put a question to the courtroom: “Can we say we did not know?” One by one the defendants made a moral case for what they’d done. “If a house is on fire and you break down the door to rouse the people inside and get ’em up,” Chuck said, “sure, you broke a door down, but is that breaking and entering in that case? That was the analogy that we used.”

According to Ken Mudie, it was Jim Good’s idea to “do the Spartacus thing.” Already hiding a number of secrets, Ken wasn’t eager to draw attention to himself, but he agreed with Jim that something had to be done, and that Spartacus was a cool movie. On April 25, the day Ann testified, Ken, Jim, and Mike Hickey entered the courtroom prepared to take one more risk.

On cross-examination, Grable got Ann to confirm most of the basic facts of the burglary, but when he asked her point-blank who else had been with them in the attic, she hesitated. Into the breach stepped Jim, Ken, and Mike.

“I was there!”

“I was with them!”

“The shoes are mine!”

None of them could remember who said what. Probably Jim was the first to stand up. “What was really neat about the Spartacus thing was that we told the truth,” Ken said. It was exhilarating, and maybe a bit of a balm to the Catholic conscience, to make such a confession.

Then a remarkable thing happened: Other people stood up. “I hadn’t even seen the movie. I didn’t know what the hell they were doing,” said Cathy McCue, who was in the gallery. But sometimes courage is contagious. “Jim Good was sitting next to me, and he stood up, and I thought, Oh God, I better stand up, too.”

One after the other, people in the gallery rose to take responsibility for the Buffalo’s crimes. Then they did it again, and again, as Grable put the same query about the unidentified accomplices to successive defendants. “The third time the question was asked, before the prosecutor got the question completely out of his mouth, the whole courtroom stood up as one body,” Chuck said. “I thought, I’ll never see a moment more dramatic and life-affirming than that, you know?”

Jeremiah, who had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant, wondered if he could still be a good father from a federal penitentiary.

When both sides had rested, Curtin was clear in his instructions to the jury: If you think they did it, you must vote guilty. The facts alone should inform their decision. Only he could take their motivations into account, and that would happen if sentences were issued.

It took seven hours for the jurors to return with a verdict. The Buffalo were convicted of conspiracy to destroy government property and intent to commit third-degree burglary. They were acquitted on the charge of removing files from Army Intelligence, as the government could not prove who exactly had gone in to that office. All five defendants faced the possibility of at least six years behind bars.  

For the three weeks between the verdict and sentencing, the activists could only hope that Curtin would be merciful. “ I went to the hearing with maybe six or eight of my favorite books under my arms, thinking I was gonna be going to prison for a year or two,” Chuck said. Jeremiah, who had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant, wondered if he could still be a good father from a federal penitentiary.

The courtroom was overflowing on Friday, May 19. Curtin began the proceedings with a lecture about the importance of acting within the law. “Concerning the action that you took, it was fortunate no one was injured,” he said to the convicted five. He advised them to get involved in electoral campaigns instead of illegal activities. He chastised them for unilaterally deciding that some property shouldn’t exist, pointing out that the same logic could be deployed to defend torching abortion clinics.

“And then,” Chuck said, “he turned a corner.”

Curtin told them he wished more people had their courage. He complimented them on how they had conducted themselves in court and said that he admired their commitment to peace. “I don’t speak for myself here,” he said. “I speak for all of the people in the community.” Curtin sentenced them each to a year in prison—then suspended the sentences. The Buffalo were free.

“The room just erupted,” Jeremiah recalled. “And we walked away.” The crowd applauded Curtin as he exited his courtroom. Once they were outside, people started singing “Here Comes the Sun.” For the first time in months, Jeremiah imagined a future outside of prison. “There was a whole new page,” he said. “I had to do something with my life.”

In the wake of the trial, Curtin publicly criticized the Vietnam War. At a commencement ceremony less than a month after letting the Buffalo go free, he implored a graduating class, “We must end the war in Vietnam before it ends us. This war has turned all our best ideals to dust.” The following summer, Curtin took a class on civil disobedience taught by Father Jim Mang, the priest who’d blared his horn outside the Old Post Office during the raid. Five years later, Curtin tried one of the most significant cases in Buffalo history, issuing a ruling that at long last desegregated the city’s public schools.

The raiders, meanwhile, took his words to heart and resolved to pursue their goals through legal means. For the most part.           

After the trial, Chuck and Meaux moved to a tiny town in Washington State. They divorced within a few years. Meaux worked as a nurse, remarried, had kids, got divorced again, and came out as lesbian. Before Curtin’s passing in 2017, Meaux visited the judge three times. She also took his advice. “No more actions,” she said. “I wasn’t gonna show up in the courtroom again.” She channeled her politics into an international youth-exchange program, where she’s worked for the better part of the past three decades. “I think everyone should be thinking about peace,” she said. “Everyone.”

Like Meaux, “one raid was enough” for Chuck. He opened a bookstore, remarried, and had kids. But he never had regrets about Buffalo. “I’m more proud of those two felonies than I would be of a degree from Notre Dame,” he said.

Jim Martin made his living as a geologist and a farmer; he passed away in 2024. Ann Masters became a fleet maintenance supervisor for the New York City Department of Sanitation. Jeremiah Horrigan drove a cab, worked at the Buffalo Zoo, and eventually settled into a career as a journalist. He and his girlfriend, Patty, got married and named their son, born less than a year after the trial, after John Peter Grady. Jeremiah and Patty now live in the Hudson Valley.

Ken Mudie had a successful career in the insurance business, retired to Cape Cod, and is now the town moderator, a nonpartisan elected official who oversees democratic decision-making, in Yarmouth Port. He claims to have abided by the law since the early 1970s, notwithstanding a few traffic offenses perhaps, but says the draft raids changed him for the better. “What it did is embedded in my mind that passiveness is not a good offense,” he said.

Mike Hickey became a chiropractor, married, and had a daughter. In 2024, he ran into Lucy, the girlfriend whose photograph he’d left behind at the scene of the crime in August 1971. Only then, more than fifty years after the fact, did Mike learn that the FBI had indeed found her photo, identified Lucy, and questioned her and her father. Lucy dumped Mike as a result, but she didn’t give him up to the authorities.

“ I did not avoid the draft,” Mike told me. “I ran head-first into the draft. I attacked my draft board.” Now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mike continues to participate in antiwar protests, including recent actions against arms shipments to Israel.

Around the time of the Buffalo trial, Sally Hamlin and Betsy Feltham moved to a Catholic Worker house in Niagara Falls. Feeding, clothing, and housing the poor were their top priorities, but within weeks of the five raiders being set free by Judge Curtin, Sally said, “a few of us drove to Chicago.” Jim Good went, too. The crew decided to hit draft boards in Evanston and Cicero.

The raids went off without a hitch, except that a getaway driver had backed out at the last minute. The replacement driver allowed Jim to use her typewriter to draft the statement of responsibility, which her paranoid boss discovered when he went through her trash and found the discarded typewriter tape. After successfully avoiding arrest for the Batavia raid, Sally served ninety days in jail for the Evanston action. Her arrest and conviction put her at odds with her family. “ My dad said, ‘You were a thorn in my side.’ He told me he didn’t wanna see me anymore,” she said. But it didn’t last: “In the end, he told me, ‘You kids were right.’ ”

Sally stayed in countercultural circles for several years before moving with her husband to Vancouver, British Columbia, and becoming a nurse and a mother. When the last of her kids was out of the house, the girl who heard God’s voice in grade school quit her job, sold everything she owned, and used the money to pay for seminary. She became a Unitarian Universalist minister at the age of 51 and has served several congregations in western New York.

In addition to being a chief organizer of multiple raids in western New York and the Chicago area, Jim Good pulled off at least one more draft board action, which ended with a sack of files floating down the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. “It wasn’t like we were gonna close the war down just by destroying a few draft records,” Jim said, but it felt important “to let the government know that there are people who are seriously opposed to this war and are willing to take the risk to demonstrate that.” Jim eventually became a carpenter and now lives on the Big Island of Hawaii with his husband. (His brother Bob and the rest of the Camden raiders also went free following a sensational 1973 trial.)

Today there’s no comprehensive list of all the draft board actions that took place across the country, but there were at least several dozen, and possibly more than one hundred. They took place in Providence, Rhode Island; Pasadena, California; and many places in between. Their impact is hard to quantify, but it’s possible that hundreds of thousands of files were liberated or destroyed. Even disrupted raids like the Old Post Office break-in hamstrung individual draft boards and drew public attention to the antiwar cause.

When the draft ended in early 1973, it was a victory for the peace movement, but it also provided political cover for Nixon and Henry Kissinger to intensify bombing in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. Some people believe that the antiwar movement died with the draft; the American public could more easily tune out what the government was doing overseas, particularly as new technologies allowed the U.S. to wage war with fewer boots on the ground. Meanwhile, the proliferation of surveillance technologies made resistance actions like the draft board raids much harder to pull off.

Still, if there’s one thing the Buffalo activists know, it’s that peace is a lifelong cause. You have to keep fighting for it, however you can.

After retiring from draft board raids, Jim Good helped some friends open a drop-in center for peace organizing in an abandoned storefront in downtown Buffalo. Over the next five decades, he mellowed a bit, but his commitment to civil disobedience remained ironclad. “People should be willing to call out our government, our military, our businesses, when they’re out of line,” Jim said. “And they are, most of the time.”

More from The Atavist Magazine

The Buffalo Raiders

Master and Commander

“That’s Somebody’s Son”

© 2026 The Atavist Magazine. Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic.
Privacy Policy • Opt-out preferences • Privacy Notice for California Users

The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins

---

The people of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember the longtime sheriff as a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask.

By Alexandra Marvar

Author’s Note: The American sheriff is an office as old as the colonies. In England, the sheriff—the reeve of the shire—was appointed by the king to maintain law and order, collect taxes for the crown, and raise the posse comitatus. After the Revolutionary War, this British import became an elected position. But 250 years on, some U.S. sheriffs seem to still want to answer to a king—and in the absence of a king, to hold absolute power. The following story was first published in 2018, in a too-short-lived magazine called Topic. At the time, I thought of my work as righting a whitewashed historical record, sharing an underrepresented perspective, filling out the context around a supposedly heroic “legend in his own time” in the Deep South. We were not quite one year into Donald Trump’s first presidential term, and constitutional sheriffs—ironically, the term for sheriffs who believe they have more authority than the Constitution when it comes to choosing whether or not to enforce federal laws—were emerging as some of his most vocal supporters. Now a year into Trump’s second term, this claque of sheriffs are ever more boldly superseding federal law on issues like immigration, voting rights, and election procedures. Revisiting this story now, I understand Lummie Jenkins differently. I’d originally considered my piece to be a history, revealing the dark truth about a man who tamped down the civil rights movement in his county while maintaining a public reputation of charm and humor. Now I also see it as a case study on the making of the constitutional sheriff and how that figure’s particular brand of power has persevered through wave after wave of democratic reform.

—Alexandra Marvar

Talk to anyone over the age of 70 in Camden, Alabama, and they can tell you a story about Lummie Jenkins, the sheriff of Wilcox County from 1939 to 1971. According to newspapers across the Deep South, Percy Columbus Jenkins—also known as Sheriff Lummie, Mr. Lummie, or just Lummie—was “a superb raconteur,” a “master psychologist,” and a “modern-day hero.” It was common lore that, unlike other sheriffs in the region, Lummie didn’t need to carry a gun, and he didn’t go prowling for suspects. Instead, he kicked back in his chair at his chinaberry-wood desk, packed his pipe with Prince Albert tobacco, and summoned the guilty parties to the Wilcox County Courthouse in downtown Camden simply by word of mouth. Out of fear or respect, the legend goes, suspects came in of their own accord.

Introducing The Atavist’s Revived series.

The length of Lummie’s tenure as Wilcox County’s chief law enforcer—eight consecutive terms—broke records in Alabama. And because much of it took place before the dawn of Miranda rights, which were enshrined in law by a Supreme Court ruling in 1966, there are countless stories, some surely truer than others, about the sheriff’s knack for coercing a confession from anyone. Newspapers reported claims that he employed sorcery, mind reading, and dreaded doses of “Truth Medicine”—sips from a glass bottle of Listerine he kept in his office that sported the disclaimer “Will paralyze if you lie.” Lummie had powers, people said, that exceeded those of ordinary lawmen.

You could say that law enforcement was in his blood. His father, P. C. Jenkins Sr., was sheriff of Wilcox County from 1911 to 1914. Lummie was just 12 when he snuck out of school to watch his dad preside over a public execution by hanging in Camden’s town square. “There were so many people,” he later recalled. “It looked just like a show day.”

Wilcox County sits in Alabama’s Black Belt, so named for its rich, dark soil and concentration of Black residents. It’s a place where the legacy of slavery runs deep; immediately before the Civil War, few counties across the South had more enslaved people. The sheriff’s domain comprises the city of Camden, four small towns, and a tangle of hilly two-lane highways and red-dirt roads that weave through the overgrowth of fallen cotton empires and felled pine woods. In 1960, there were some 18,000 residents in Wilcox County, 78 percent of whom were Black. Today, the population is fewer than 10,000 and more than 70 percent of residents are Black. Then as now, Wilcox hovered near the top of the list of the nation’s poorest counties.

In 2008, Lummie’s granddaughter, Delynn Jenkins Halloran, celebrated her grandfather’s gilded reputation by self-publishing a compendium of lightly edited newspaper articles and collected praise titled Lummie Jenkins: The Unarmed Sheriff of Wilcox County. The contributors to her crowdsourced book included white family members, white journalists, white congressmen, white governors, and white sheriffs of nearby Alabama counties—as well as the white wives of many of these men. An additional source on Lummie’s legacy, from autobiographical cassette tapes he recorded in his final years, was the man himself.

On the cover of the 168-page paperback is a color photograph of the sheriff. He wears a jaunty grimace and a white cowboy hat to match the white vest buttoned over his brick-red shirt. One of his cherished pistol-themed tie clips glistens at the center of his chest. Taken for the Birmingham News in 1968, and appearing above the caption “Wilcox County’s gunless sheriff always gets his man,” the photo shows Lummie leaning against a sheriff’s cruiser before the antebellum columns of the Wilcox County Courthouse, squinting through the fat lenses of his glasses.

I visited the site of this photograph in the fall of 2018. The courthouse looked exactly the same as it does in the Birmingham News photo; even the Jim Crow–era drinking fountain still protruded, unmarked, from a patch of grass on the street corner. I’d been to the area a couple of months earlier to meet a legendary group of quilt-making artisans in a nearby community called Gee’s Bend.¹ Lummie Jenkins had been dead for forty years, but in Gee’s Bend I kept hearing mention of the late sheriff and his granddaughter’s book.

1. During the Great Depression and into the mid-twentieth century, women in Gee’s Bend stitched quilts from every available fabric—cotton scraps, old blue jeans, feed sacks—to keep their families warm. In the 1960s, civil rights organizers helped the women set up a mail-order business. In the 1990s, a pioneering art collector named Bill Arnett came to the community, purchased quilts in large numbers, and surfaced them to arts critics, collectors, and curators. Today its quilts are on U.S. postage stamps and in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide.

I was hard-pressed to find a cup of coffee in Camden—Hardee’s had run out—but I did come across copies of The Unarmed Sheriff on two occasions. It was on a shelf at the Wilcox County Library, upstairs from Lummie’s former office in the courthouse, where a researcher helped me locate news clippings about him. (“Mr. Lummie!” she remembered warmly, and told me that he had once given her family a puppy.) The book was also available for $16.95 at the Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, a nonprofit gallery and shop packed with gifts, paintings, and crafts, located about five hundred feet from the courthouse door.

Outside Wilcox County, copies of The Unarmed Sheriff were harder to come by. There was a used copy available on Amazon, where the book had two reviews.² One gave it five stars: “Awesome book. Very very good read.” The other was a one-star review: “Wait a minute wasn’t this the ‘infamous’ Sheriff who beat the Black woman McDuffie to death with a rubber hose? … So thankful my father got me and my Mom out of Alabama as soon as I was born.”

2. Today I can only find a copy on eBay, for $84.

“Wait a minute wasn’t this the ‘infamous’ Sheriff who beat the Black woman McDuffie to death with a rubber hose?”

Gee’s Bend is an unincorporated town, tucked so deep into one of the Alabama River’s oxbow arcs that it feels (and functions) like an island. The families there can trace their roots and last names directly back to slavery. In the generations that followed the Civil War, white landowners left; Black residents stayed. The town’s geography makes it thirty-eight miles from Camden by car via the nearest bridge, or about six miles on the local ferry—an hour and a half drive or a fifteen-minute boat ride.

In 1949, during Lummie’s tenure, the government decided to change the town’s name, which was taken from plantation owner Joseph Gee. Authorities rechristened it Boykin, after a segregationist senator. Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, residents filed a request to rename their home again, this time to King. Nearly sixty years on it’s still Boykin, but most everyone calls it Gee’s Bend.

On an afternoon in October 2018, I boarded the ferry in Camden. I rode across a wide, flat reservoir to the muddy shore of the Bend. The Welcome Center served a free hot lunch to seniors on weekdays, and when I arrived a few women—all quilt makers—were picking over the carrot-and-raisin salad or skipping directly to the Moon Pies.

Lummie’s reign as sheriff ended almost a half-century ago, but several of the women remembered him well. At first the stories I got—as a white stranger asking questions in a community where outsiders are few and memories are long—felt reserved. But as the women cautiously gauged my response, their physical reactions said more than their words. When I asked Lola Pettway, then 77, if she remembered Lummie Jenkins, she recoiled, like I’d spooked her. She could remember Mr. Lummie standing at the edge of a field, watching her and her family pick cotton; something about that image sent chills through her body. Nancy Pettway, then 83, told me about how, just before she was married, Mr. Lummie made the trip over to the Bend, arrested her fiancé, and threw him in jail after hearing that he’d killed a dog that attacked him.

I left the Welcome Center and drove a few miles down dirt lanes and through rolling fields to a farm on John Gragg Road. A silver Cadillac was parked askew near some hay bales in a field of cows. Barking dogs eagerly surrounded my car. I was there to see none other than John Gragg, 88, the son of a well-known preacher and landowner in the Bend. Gragg came to the door with his walking stick and invited me into the living room of his one-story 1930s farmhouse.

“Lummie Jenkins?” Gragg said. He sat back in his recliner, his walking stick resting on his knee. “He was the boss man.” He chuckled to himself. The music from an old black-and-white western flared up from his television set. I asked him if it was true that Lummie didn’t carry a gun. “Didn’t carry a gun?” Gragg sounded amused. “He carried a gun and a nightstick.”

Virtually everything I’d read—all the profiles, op-eds, obituaries, and tributes—pegged the sheriff’s mystique to the idea that he was unarmed. But Gragg remembered a different Lummie. He also remembered the sheriff’s cronies. “He had his snitches,” Gragg said, “and they would tell him what he want to know.”

As I kept talking to people in the Bend, I heard more about this other Lummie Jenkins. The one who, if he was in a mood and caught a Gee’s Bend resident on the wrong side of the river after Camden’s eight o’clock curfew, would make them swim home, even in winter. Fear was essential to keeping white power intact, and as the civil rights movement whipped up revolutionary energy across the Black Belt, Lummie’s and his colleagues’ efforts intensified. People told me that, in 1962, as voting rights organizers started to arrive in Wilcox County, the leadership shut down the Gee’s Bend ferry, turning a short passage into an all but unmanageable journey—you needed a car, gas money, and time. This effectively cut Bend residents off from local services, including the voting registration office. Lummie reportedly made a comment about the decision that’s the stuff of legend: “We didn’t close the ferry because they were Black. We closed it because they forgot they were Black.” (The ferry would remain out of commission for forty-four years. In 2006, it was reopened with fanfare and hat-in-hand apologies.)

Gee’s Bend residents also remembered King’s visits in 1965, and the march on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, some forty miles north. They remembered walking as children and teenagers for days in the rain with King and John Lewis. They remembered gathering by the hundreds at the Camden courthouse for another demonstration, being blockaded by Lummie and Mayor F. R. Albritton, being immersed in tear gas and pummeled with smoke bombs, getting arrested, kneeling in the street, refusing to leave. They remembered the songs they sang. Some people also remembered what happened to David Colston, what happened to Della McDuffie.

Some people would have preferred not to remember that time at all.

Lummie Jenkins may have been a nonpareil in Wilcox County, but he was not an anomaly in the Jim Crow South, where sheriffs were considered more powerful than the American president. He held office during the rise of “peace officer” organizations—groups of law enforcement officials, organized state by state, who shared similar conservative ideas about the Constitution and other matters. Lummie was a loyal member of the Alabama Peace Officers Association and something of a celebrity among its ranks, serving as vice president and then president between 1959 and 1963. As one admirer wrote in a 1975 edition of the Alabama Peace Officers Journal, “Lummie is not only respected and loved by his people in Wilcox County; he is the only officer I have ever seen walk into a meeting of law enforcement officers and get a standing ovation.”

Members of peace officer organizations embraced a concept called interposition: They believed that it was a sheriff’s job to insert himself between state or federal authorities and his constituents to prevent the enforcement of laws he didn’t agree with. In 1958, the Supreme Court held that this doctrine had no legal basis, but peace officer groups continued to foster and amplify sheriffs’ dissent against legislation they didn’t like. This would last decades. In 1994, a pair of sheriffs filed a suit against the federal government over a new law that compelled police to run background checks on people who bought handguns. The sheriffs won—it was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled, for the feds to make local police enforce the policy. Then, in 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, dozens of sheriffs united again, this time against gun-control regulations proposed (but never passed) during the Obama administration.

American sheriffs are still spreading the doctrine of interposition. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), which was established in 2011, is now a nationwide organization of right-wing law enforcement officers who share an interpretation of the Constitution that gives sheriffs the “authority to check and balance all levels of government within the jurisdiction of the County.” Among its most famous members is Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2017 for racially profiling Latinos in order to turn them over to immigration authorities.

There’s always been just one way for most sheriffs to maintain their power: They have to keep getting elected to office. For most of Lummie’s career, that wasn’t a problem. Then came the civil rights movement.

In January 1965, registration of eligible Black voters across the South was upwards of 40 percent, but in Wilcox County it was zero percent. Meanwhile, white registration was 113 percent—some deceased residents were still on the rolls.

One day in 1963, a dozen or so men dressed in their Sunday best climbed into pickup trucks and caravanned from the Bend to Camden. They intended to register to vote, a right guaranteed them by the Fifteenth Amendment, which by then had been on the books nearly a century. They knew that they were breaking ground and risking everything. They’d all heard the infamous story about an elderly Black minister who, years prior, tried to register in Wilcox County, only to be shot and killed. The incident wasn’t documented, but true or not it had an impact. One by one, the men filled out an application at the county courthouse. All of them were rejected.³

3. The first documented instance of a Black man attempting to register to vote in the county was the Reverend James Foster Reese, a transplant from Kentucky. He believed racial dynamics in Wilcox County could and should change, so one day in 1958, he went to the courthouse to exercise his right to get his name on the voting roll; he was turned away. He kept trying to register, but the more he persisted, the more consequences he faced, including physical attacks and threats to his family. He eventually moved to Tennessee. He never succeeded at registering to vote in Alabama.

Hundreds of Black residents would follow their lead in the next two years. Every one of them had to overcome the fear of death. They also had to accept that they could lose their jobs, and that they and their families might face intimidation and threats. The Ku Klux Klan and other vigilantes across the South torched churches, set off car bombs, and assaulted or murdered Black neighbors and voting rights organizers in a desperate war to keep the white power structure intact.

As if that weren’t enough, Black would-be voters had to contend with onerous logistics. As of early 1965, the voting registration office in Camden was open for business twice a month. If a Black resident had a way to get there at the right time on the right day, they still had to pass a literacy test. If they did that, state law dictated that they needed two registered voters of good “moral character” to vouch for them before their registration could be validated. In Wilcox County, there were apparently no white voters willing to vouch for their neighbors of color. In January 1965, registration of eligible Black voters across the South was upwards of 40 percent, but in Wilcox County it was zero percent. Meanwhile, white registration was 113 percent—some deceased residents were still on the rolls.

That February, during a civil rights demonstration in Camden, Martin Luther King Jr. himself approached Sheriff Lummie in a crowd outside the courthouse with a request: Would Lummie himself vouch for voters of color? Onlookers would remember that the sheriff was courteous. He explained plainly to King that, well now, being “in politics” as he was, he couldn’t vouch for any individual voters. King asked him if that was indeed the law. “I haven’t read that in the law, but I’ve heard it,” Lummie said. King then asked if he and his colleagues could at least count on Lummie’s protection. The sheriff shrugged: “I only have two deputies.”

The following month, Jim Clark, the sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, made international headlines for the violence he and his officers wrought on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, on what became known as Bloody Sunday—March 7, 1965. Even local news coverage celebrated King’s march and vilified Clark.

The press wasn’t a problem for Wilcox County’s sheriff, at least not locally. Once in a while, a reporter from elsewhere would note the county’s “bad reputation” in the context of civil rights, but what happened there tended to stay there. Hollis Curl, the publisher of the local paper, was an old friend and hunting buddy who would later eulogize Sheriff Lummie warmly.⁴ Curl’s paper didn’t run a word about the marches, smoke bombs, and tear gas in Camden in 1965.

4. Curl described the sheriff as folksy, humble, loyal, larger than life—“a mighty man.” Lummie “loved people” and helped anyone who came to him. He “had the respect of both races,” said Curl, who was sure that “some of his best friends were colored.”

In charming the local media, Lummie was less like Jim Clark than like Laurie Pritchett, police chief of Albany, Georgia. If Clark galvanized the civil rights movement, Pritchett, whom journalist and historian James Reston once called “the smartest of King’s adversaries,” did the opposite. Just like King, Pritchett had studied civil disobedience and the strategies of Mahatma Gandhi, and he set out to diffuse civil rights efforts without producing martyrs. His tactics included keeping racially motivated violence in check, skillfully managing public relations, and cultivating a cordial relationship with King himself. He countered a civil rights push in Albany in November 1961 by ordering his officers to be nonviolent and calling on every Georgia sheriff within a 70-mile radius to give him access to their jails. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested and dispatched to borrowed cells.

Pritchett’s success was of great interest to Alabama authorities. Bull Connor, the notoriously violent public safety commissioner of Birmingham, once offered what Pritchett called “an outrageous sum” for him to take a short break from his police chief duties and come on as an adviser in the Alabama capital. Pritchett reluctantly agreed, only to leave after a short time in disgust. “I didn’t have anything in common with Bull Connor,” he later said.

Like Pritchett, Lummie had less overt ways of imposing fear and keeping the racial hierarchy intact. Once, when civil rights leaders asked for his protection while they ate at a local restaurant, Lummie let the activists know that it wasn’t his job to look out for them. He also asked for their home addresses. He wanted to be able to reach their families, the sheriff said, because the restaurant’s proprietor was “going to kill you for sure.”

“He was the lawless lawman,” said Sheryl Threadgill Matthews, who at 15 became one of the first of two Black students to integrate Wilcox County High School. There was no police protection for students like Matthews, and no punishment for the classmates who verbally and physically abused her. She wasn’t getting much of an education, she said, so her enrollment lasted only a year before she returned to Camden Academy, the Black Presbyterian secondary school where her father, the Reverend Thomas Threadgill, was a chaplain. “Lummie didn’t play by the book,” Matthews told me. “He did whatever he wanted.”

For a time in 1965, Camden Academy offered housing to student volunteers who came in from across the U.S. to help with voter registration efforts. One student Matthews remembers from that time was Maria Gitin, a skinny white 19-year-old on summer break from college in San Francisco. She had seen the attacks of Bloody Sunday on TV and left home to enlist in a ten-week voter registration program in Wilcox County.

“Lummie Jenkins: not my favorite subject!” Gitin emailed in response to my interview request. She described the sheriff in her 2014 memoir of the civil rights movement, This Bright Light of Ours, as a “notoriously cruel,” “bandy-legged,” “homely” man who endorsed and enforced segregation, and lent his full support to the local Ku Klux Klan, “all while shaking hands and patting Black children’s heads.” Gitin recalled a traumatizing night she spent in the Camden jail, listening to a fellow organizer being brutally beaten in a neighboring cell. (“He was always arresting us,” she said of Lummie when we spoke on the phone. “Every few days.”) Upon her release the next morning, she remembered, she had to pass through the sheriff’s office, where Lummie and his deputies heckled her, laughing and passing around a jar of moonshine. “He was far from unarmed,” she said. “He pretty much always had a big shotgun with him.” It had been pointed at her the day before, when he came to round up her group of civil rights organizers at a local church for “conspiracy to boycott.”

That church was Antioch Baptist, a hub for voter registration efforts. King spoke there at least twice. One night that June, a white mob broke into the building and beat two Black teenagers so severely they were hospitalized. Two days later, on July 1, Lummie showed up at Antioch, ordered everyone out, and padlocked the doors shut.

White students in Gitin’s voter registration program were paired with Black locals. Her canvassing partner was a 16-year-old named Robert Powell. Now living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Powell still had family in Wilcox County. He laughed out loud when I asked him on the phone about the “unarmed sheriff.”

“When we was demonstrating, we had songs made up about him,” Powell told me. “I’ll never forget some of those songs.” He recited one: “ ‘Ol’ Lummie, you’ll never be able to jail us all—segregation is bound to fall.’ ” Powell said that Lummie hated the songs. As for the people singing them: “There wasn’t much he could do at the time, with a hundred or two hundred fifty people, but jail them. And the jail wasn’t big enough to hold everybody,” Powell said. “He couldn’t stand it.”

Shelly Dale was arrested in the summer of 1965 during a voting rights demonstration. She was a teenager at the time; she went on to become Wilcox County’s tax assessor. She kept her arrest record in her desk drawer and fished it out to show me. “When you’re young, you’ll do some crazy things, right?” she said.⁵

5. Shelly Dale’s interview wasn’t originally featured in this story, because the audio files of my conversation with her were corrupted. I was later able to salvage them and can now include her perspective.

But getting arrested wasn’t the most memorable occurrence of that summer. “My baby sister got shot right there, right [in] front,” she gestured out the window of her office, at the town square. She recalled the bullet ricocheting off a parked car. It went in one of her sister’s shoulders and out the other. The bullet left “a long scar,” Dale said, and nothing worse. “If it had went that way,” Dale drew a line with her finger from her shoulder toward her heart, “she would have been dead.”

I asked her if, amid everything that happened that summer, she ever met Lummie Jenkins personally. “Please don’t call him Lummie Jenkins, OK?” she asked me gently. “He was such a mighty man. Please call him Mr. Lummie.” She saw him, she said, but never spoke to him. She told me it wasn’t her place to judge what he did back then. “He just had… power,” she said. “And people was afraid of him. Simple as that.”

By the end of the summer of 1965, the number of Black voters registered in Wilcox County had gone from a couple dozen to five hundred and counting. When the national Voting Rights Act became law that August, Alabama’s vouching rule was no more. The following year, federal election supervisors would arrive to see that Black voters were able to cast their ballots in the 1966 election. It wouldn’t be long before Black voters outnumbered white voters in Wilcox County and throughout Alabama.

Still, the past kept dogging the present, and Sheriff Lummie helped it along.

“Please don’t call him Lummie Jenkins, OK? He was such a mighty man. Please call him Mr. Lummie.”

“We had a café on the side of the road, right down there,” John Gragg told me as we sat in his house in Gee’s Bend. He pointed over his shoulder, toward where Route 5 joins the top of the Bend to the west. In his slow, low voice, he said, “They went in there, beat her up, and killed her.”

By the mid-1960s, there were outside eyes on white law enforcement here. But in the years before the civil rights movement, things were different. Stories from that time still circulate in whispers around Gee’s Bend. Della McDuffie’s story is one of them.

On a Saturday just after midnight in April 1953, Lummie Jenkins and other officers entered a Black-owned café, apparently to enforce a law that no music be played on Sundays. The place was bustling, and witnesses later told the Chicago Defender and the Afro-American that the sheriff and his deputies stormed in swinging blackjacks and a rubber hose, firing shots into the ceiling and floor “to scare the n–––s.” It worked. Patrons dove out windows to escape. One person, however, couldn’t run: the café owner’s wife, Della McDuffie. She was 63 and paralyzed, so she used a wheelchair. Several accounts would describe Lummie ordering her to get up and go to bed. When she couldn’t, he beat her with a rubber hose. Within an hour—despite frantic care from her husband, William, and the arrival of a doctor—Della was dead.

William would later recall seeing a trickle of blood running from his wife’s ear down her face. Her death certificate, prepared by the sheriff’s office, listed her cause of death as a “preexisting blood condition.”

Her family fought back. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, then a lawyer and head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into Della’s death, along with injuries sustained by another woman on the scene. According to press coverage from the period, the FBI made preliminary inquiries, but local witnesses, some of whom had already been threatened, refused to testify, and law enforcement was uncooperative. A year later, William McDuffie drowned in unclear circumstances. DOJ investigators wrote back to Marshall that they couldn’t do anything further with the case. Subsequently, the surviving McDuffies reported house fires and death threats made against them. They eventually left Alabama.

On Lummie’s watch, there were other suspicious and often violent deaths of Black residents that the sheriff’s office never found any foul play in connection with. In January 1966, 32-year-old David Colston was killed by a white farmer, J. T. Reaves, near Antioch Baptist Church. Colston had been on his way to a funeral, after which he was going to a rally for the election of Black citizens to local office, when Reaves rear-ended his car. Reaves claimed that Colston got out of his vehicle and confronted him, so he shot him in self-defense. Colston died at the scene.

Following the shooting, Reaves turned himself in to Lummie. As for what happened next, some reports say that, after handing over his gun, Reaves went home. Others claim that he spent a night in jail. Either way, in short order Reaves was free. He was never punished for the crime, which the sheriff’s office recorded was the result of heated tempers during a “traffic incident.”

Witnesses contradicted this account from the start. Colston’s wife, who was in the car with him, said there was no argument between her husband and Reaves. In her telling, Colston went to check his car’s bumper after Reaves hit him and Reaves shot him in the head at close range. It was an assassination.

Colston’s murder seems to have shifted the tone of life in Wilcox County. Black residents recalled their white neighbors becoming emboldened, leaving guns on their car seats and dashboards for all to see. They understood Reaves’s violence to be not just against Colston but against all of them. Colston’s funeral portrait was hung in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference headquarters in Selma—“a literal picture,” Jet magazine reported at the time, “of Alabama Negros’ drive to secure the vote.” ⁶

6. The NAACP called for the investigation of other deaths of Black Wilcox County residents that occurred in 1967—a year Lummie also happened to serve as the county’s coroner. One of the deceased was 31-year-old Rodell Williamson, whose body was found “hung up” with fishing line in the Alabama River. The sheriff’s office declared it an accidental drowning. Lummie was quoted in Jetmagazine as speculating that Williamson “may have been in the river swimming. Or he could have fell in.” Family members who identified Williamson’s body told reporters that his neck was gashed and appeared to be broken, that his head was “smashed,” and that there were bruises on his chest. A number of area residents claimed they’d heard that Williamson had been beaten to death, but Lummie’s deputy said that was “a damn lie—and you can quote me.”

Fewer than two weeks after Colston’s death, a Black grocery store owner named Walter Calhoun put on a suit, drove down to the courthouse, and filed papers to run for sheriff of Wilcox County. Calhoun was evicted from his store two days later, but he didn’t bow to intimidation. His name stayed on the ballot.

Meanwhile, with encouragement from King, Black residents of Wilcox County continued to register to vote. Lummie didn’t seem worried about his electoral prospects. “I’ve always tried to protect people of both races and the people know it,” he told a New York Times reporter. “I believe I’m going to get votes from both sides.”

White federal election supervisors were again appointed to watch over the polls. Ballot counters were white; polling places were white businesses. There was no guarantee that Black citizens’ votes would be counted, that they would feel safe voting for the candidate they wanted, or that they would feel safe voting at all. Whatever happened, whoever was able to vote as they wished, of the 6,198 votes cast in the sheriff’s race, Lummie beat Calhoun by a margin of 722.

It would be four more years before Lummie’s reign finally came to an end. In the 1970 election, at the age of 69, he lost to his opponent by just ninety-three votes. The victor wasn’t a Black man, however. It was F. R. Albritton, the former mayor who’d once joined Lummie in trying to block civil rights protesters from reaching the county courthouse. “The other man catered to the n––– vote,” Lummie lamented to Bob Adelman, a photographer who covered the civil rights movement. “He made speeches to them. He went to their churches. I’ve never done that.”⁷

7. Albritton said he ran for sheriff because his old friend Lummie—who’d had two heart attacks—was planning to retire. Only at the last minute, Albritton claimed, did Lummie decide to stay in the race. According to Albritton, when he won Lummie didn’t speak to him for a month.

The Alabama Peace Officers Association would print that Lummie Jenkins had “retired.” According to a report from a university student teaching in Wilcox County at the time, he went out with a vow to “fill the jails with n–––s” before he left office.

Among the Gee’s Bend voters who cast a ballot for Albritton was John Gragg. “We all voted for Albritton,” he told me. “Albritton got to be the sheriff and forced Lummie Jenkins out.” That was satisfying. “But then Albritton made him a deputy,” Gragg added.

Lummie didn’t leave the law completely, but he no longer had absolute power: a small but significant change that showed Wilcox County might soon be ready for a bigger transformation. And two terms later, in the November 1978 election, a remarkable thing happened. Albritton was beaten by Prince Arnold, a 27-year-old Black schoolteacher from the tiny unincorporated town of Pine Apple. Arnold would go on to serve eight terms, tying Lummie for the title of longest-serving sheriff in the state.

A month after Arnold was elected, but before he took office, 77-year-old Lummie Jenkins died of a heart attack. By then, Sheryl Threadgill Matthews was a social welfare officer at the Alabama Department of Human Resources. “My coworker, a white lady, came up to me at the water fountain,” she remembered. “She said to me, ‘Mr. Lummie said he would die and go to hell before he see a Black man become sheriff. And, well, I guess he sure did.’ ”

According to a report from a university student teaching in Wilcox County at the time, Lummie went out with a vow to “fill the jails with n–––s” before he left office.

In the summer of 1965—the same summer when white residents shot at and tried to run down Maria Gitin, Robert Powell, and other voter registration volunteers in Wilcox County—19-year-old Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, a recent graduate of Wilcox County High School, was still living in Camden. In 2006, as a U.S. senator from Alabama, Jeff Sessions voted along with the rest of Congress to unanimously extend the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Still, he complained that it was outdated and unfair to the history of his state. “I am worried because [the extension] does little to acknowledge the tremendous progress made over the last forty years in Alabama and other covered jurisdictions,” Sessions said at the time. “Today is not 1965, and the situation with respect to voting rights in Alabama and other covered jurisdictions is dramatically different from 1965. I would have expected Congress to recognize this tremendous progress.”

In 2013, Sessions championed a Supreme Court decision restricting federal oversight of voting rules in nine southern states, calling it “good news for the South.” Within two years, Alabama codified a requirement that voters show state-issued identification at the polls, then proceeded to announce that it was closing the offices that issue driver’s licenses in nearly half the state’s sixty-seven counties. All the affected locations were rural, and they included every county where at least 75 percent of the population was Black. Wilcox was among them.

In some ways, Wilcox County is different than it was in Lummie’s time. Many of its current elected officials are Black, including Earnest Evans, the current sheriff, who has held the position since 2010. In a photograph on Evans’s 2018 reelection campaign website, he stands before the Wilcox County Courthouse Annex, which was erected in 1976. It looks a lot like the courthouse Lummie posed in front of in the photo adorning the cover of his granddaughter’s book. Evans’s sheriff’s badge shines on his suit jacket. His gaze is toward the horizon. Underneath the photograph is a reminder: “You will need a Photo I.D. to vote.” Meanwhile, at the county’s main public high school—the one Sessions attended, the one where Sheryl Threadgill Matthews toughed out a year of abuse in the name of desegregation—enrollment has flipped entirely. Due to white flight, not a single enrolled student is white.⁸

8. Today the school is 98 percent Black.

When Robert Powell looks at today’s Wilcox County, he doesn’t see the progress he fought for. “We put our lives on the line to try to create some type of change, as a people, as a race of people,” he told me. “But Camden is still a segregated place to this day.” Despite “all the struggles and sacrifices we made, the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

More from The Atavist Magazine

I’ve Gone to Look for America

American Hindenburg

The Talented Mr. Bruseaux

© 2026 The Atavist Magazine. Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic.
Privacy Policy • Opt-out preferences • Privacy Notice for California Users

I’ve Gone to Look for America

Conversations and revelations about an ailing nation along Interstate 95.

_{Words by Masha Hamilton
Photographs by Cheney Orr}

The Atavist Magazine, No. 167

Masha Hamilton is the author of five novels. She began her career as a journalist, reporting from the Middle East and Russia. She later served as director of communications and public diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and worked in communications for the Rockefeller Foundation.

Cheney Orr is a Pulitzer Prize–nominated photographer. He is a regular contributor to Reuters, and his photographs have also appeared in the New York Times, ProPublica, and the Wall Street Journal. His book War Notes, a collection of portraits and interviews from Ukraine, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Alison Van Houten

Published in September 2025

---

The sky is dark. The highway hums beneath our tires. We’ve covered a lot of miles today, and the night is pressing us off the road, toward a Virginia rest stop where, years ago, a man was murdered in a bathroom. I want to see the door he pushed open, stand where he stood, feel how quickly ordinary moments can turn.

But more than anything right now, I want to stop. Stretch out in the back of Cheney’s car, let the wash of highway noise lull us for a few hours. It’s been another long day of catching strangers mid-journey, asking one personal question and then another.

We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos.

For me this trip is a therapy session with my country. I fear that there is a deep crack in our union, and I’m not sure I belong here anymore. Maybe the road can convince me otherwise. I also want time with a son I once knew so well, back when I looked down at the top of his head, but whom I’m learning all over again now that he’s grown to six-foot-four and seen what he’s seen, weathered what he has.

I’m six weeks past being laid off, in a season of layoffs. Cheney is a little over a year past a breakup that shook him loose from the life he thought he’d have and thrust him into another. It marked the end of a marriage he didn’t tell me about for 11 years, a secret that would recast all the holidays we celebrated, dinners we shared, and trips we took. Now we’re driving the coast of a country that has imprinted us with its violence—me in Afghanistan when a bomb tore open a morning during America’s forever war, him on the banks of the Rio Grande when the river swallowed breath. A nation itself now bruised and battered has scarred us with pain and sorrow.

The long ribbon of road insists that life goes on. The days gather, falling into one another, changing Cheney, changing me.

Beginnings and endings—let’s do both now, up front. No spoilers, just a map to provide a sense of direction amid the uncertainty to come.

Our journey began Memorial Day weekend 2025, at the I-95 on-ramp in Miami Beach, where the northbound and southbound lanes split, carving through a cityscape that’s a chaotic snarl of polished skyline and subtropical thicket. Two peacocks wandered in the brush bordering I-95 North, one of them calling out in loud, catlike screeches that competed with the drone of traffic. Along the southbound side, a small community of chickens foraged beneath an overpass. Feral birds, exhaust fumes, wild color: a surreal overture to the road ahead.

We ended 17 days later near Houlton, Maine, on a deserted bridge overlooking the border with Canada. Rain had just passed—puddles were alive with mosquitoes, and the sun hung low behind gauzy clouds. We took a couple of selfies to mark the moment. The clerk at a shop offering travelers duty-free goods told me that business had all but disappeared. I was the first customer he’d seen in three hours. As if to explain, he walked me to a display of chocolate bars, their wrappers stamped with Donald Trump’s face, stars and stripes curling beneath his grin. “People come in from Canada, and they turn the chocolate around so the face doesn’t show. Sometimes they drop the chocolate on the ground. On the ground!” the clerk said with dismay. “Aren’t we supposed to be grown-ups here?”

In between the peacocks and the chocolate were startling revelations and moments of grace. They came from a Cajun great-grandmother driving an 18-wheeler. A philosophical cop from Georgia. An unhoused community living in cars, inventing rest-stop resilience. Conversations arrived unexpected, unguarded. Some drifted open, while others cracked wide in an instant. There were bursts of candor at vending machines and outside bathrooms—intimacy in the unlikeliest of places, with the murmur of the interstate a constant soundtrack.

I-95 isn’t just asphalt. It was born of two ambitions: one public, one military. In 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, lawmakers envisioned a road connecting the country’s entire eastern edge that could also be a means of moving troops and supplies if the Cold War turned hot. Now, at its busiest, more than 300,000 vehicles crowd the interstate daily, including tens of thousands of commercial trucks, those hulking giants that thunder by, rattling mirrors and nerves.

Families ride I-95 with coolers wedged between the seats of their minivans. Truckers push through the night, carrying oranges and lumber and coffins. Greyhound buses, Teslas, and beat-up sedans weave at high speeds. I-95 is an artery of ambition, movement, and flight. A place where millions of people hurry toward love and loss, carrying their hope, their grief, their ordinary Tuesdays, all at 70 miles per hour.

This story unfolds like our experience of the road: not a straight shot but a series of quick confessions, bitter jokes, whispered memories. Strangers laying themselves bare, then moving on. No two encounters were alike; wherever they went, we followed.

In every conversation, and the silences in between, I listened for the shape of an answer to my question: Are we breaking apart, or is there enough left to bind us?

“When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anyone has all their bases covered. So I focus on the things that bring me joy.”

Dale, at right with his dog, Winnie, in South Carolina

“You’re going to appreciate this trip after she’s gone,” Dale says to Cheney, tipping his head toward me.

It takes a moment to register what he means, that he’s referring to my death so casually, after we’ve known each other 25 minutes.

“I appreciate it already,” Cheney responds with a smile.

Dale, 65, retired four years ago and moved from upstate New York to Lake Placid, Florida. We found him on a weathered bench under a sky collecting dusk at the Santee Welcome Center in South Carolina, midway between the Georgia and North Carolina state lines. Death is on his mind this evening, and not just mine. He’s thinking about the end times.

“I was raised a Fundamental Baptist,” Dale offers. “I call myself a recovering Baptist. But some of those things are hard to overcome.”

Especially now. Floods, plague, conflicts, corruption, the money changers in the temple—“you look around and it looks like all that stuff we studied in Sunday school,” Dale says. “When God has had enough with the sins of humanity…”

He breaks off his thought as his mini Aussiedoodle, Winnie, tugs hard on her leash, tumbling in wild arcs around our legs, ecstatic with the kind of life that doesn’t yet know limits.

Dale stresses that he’s not a prepper. But he has thought about what he might need to survive should the world fall apart, and he’s stockpiled a bit of it. He acknowledges that this is an exercise in futility. “When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anyone has all their bases covered,” he says. “So I focus on the things that bring me joy.”

Living in Florida was a longtime dream for Dale. “Since I was a teenager and made my first trip,” he says. A job, a bad end to a relationship, and a delay in getting his pension kept him anchored in New York longer than he wanted. When finally he was able to move, he purchased a house in foreclosure, sight unseen. “When I walked in, I was tickled,” he says. “The house was about in the condition I’d expected—nothing worse.” At last he felt like he was home. 

“I asked God for one year of peace and quiet to enjoy my retirement in the sunshine. And this month I’m starting year five,” Dale tells me, his voice catching with the knowledge that no one gets forever. “I feel more than blessed.”

But Winnie is disrupting that peace. So Dale is heading to the mapled city of Hornell in upstate New York this summer and saying goodbye to her there. A friend has offered to adopt her. “I think it’s a good idea,” Dale says, to himself as much as to me.

“I love her to pieces,” he adds. “But she’s too much for me. She’s a puppy. She needs more than I can give.”

Doubt flickers across his face, and I suck in my breath, feeling the sharp ache of his hesitation. At a time when he fears that the world might end, Dale is giving up something that brings him comfort as well as complication. Winnie, sweet chaos in motion. 

Dale is already practicing his goodbye. I can see it in his eyes and the way his hand lingers on Winnie’s head. I want to believe I’m not practicing my own goodbyes, but long road trips, with their constant departures, stir up profound feelings about mortality, about letting go.

I have been a news junkie all my life. As a college freshman, I rose early to sneak-read the copy of the New York Times left outside my dorm neighbor’s door, sitting cross-legged on the hallway floor. But as Trump’s second term began, I found that I couldn’t stomach much beyond the headlines.

Still, I knew that avoidance was corrosive. During my five years living and reporting in Moscow, mostly during the Gorbachev era, the Russians I knew had a rule: No discussing politics except very late at night, in cramped, smoky kitchens, after a few rounds of vodka. But that kind of reticence seemed only to deepen communal resignation and embolden political leaders.

So in Trump’s America I wanted to talk, even to people who might disagree with me. At the same time, I was scared—that I’d ask the wrong questions, trigger tripwires I couldn’t see. “It’s not going to be like that out there,” Cheney kept telling me.

I wanted him to be right, to trust him. But he’d kept silences of his own.

I’d learned of his marriage only after it was already coming undone. A friend of his, crashing at my house, let it slip, either unaware or forgetting that Cheney’s mom didn’t know. I called my daughter. “Is Cheney married?” I asked. “Oh, Mom, no,” she said, brushing off the idea. Turns out she didn’t know, either. Later that day, when she pressed him, the truth came out. The woman we’d known as Cheney’s longtime girlfriend was actually his wife.

I have a 48-hour rule: When anger strikes, I try to wait that long before speaking, hoping that time will cool my ego and allow curiosity to surface. This time, 48 hours barely made a dent. Two weeks passed before I could bring it up. By then, Cheney was braced for the discussion.

The whole thing started as more whim than promise, he explained. Even he wasn’t sure that it would hold. Also, I hadn’t yet met her and was far away in Afghanistan, working at the U.S. Embassy during one of the most violent stretches of America’s twenty-year war. “If I’d told you,” he said, “it would only have added to your stress.”

“I’ve been back from Afghanistan for a while,” I said, and he laughed ruefully.

“Eventually, it seemed like too much time had passed,” he replied.

It all stung. Not just the secrecy but the assumption that I couldn’t handle the truth, that my life was too fragile to absorb it. He had decided on his own what was best for me. And not for the last time, probably. If I’m fortunate enough to grow old, there likely will come a day when Cheney and his siblings weigh my choices for me. The only consolation: When they were small, I decided for them. Maybe this is how the cosmic books stay balanced.

By the time I suggested the trip up I-95, Cheney and I had said what needed saying. Still, I longed for the kind of trust built not by declarations but by the quiet choreography of collaborating, sharing meals, spending time side-by-side for days on end. In ordinary acts, I hoped to restitch the thread of connection between mother and son.

The morning we set out, the road’s toll was already visible on Cheney. He’d been living largely out of his car for months, moving constantly in part to avoid the pain of staying still. To meet me, he drove 2,200 miles: from Colorado to Texas and on to an old storage unit in Georgia—he had places for his belongings, but not places he felt he belonged—then finally to Miami. Now small red welts freckled his skin, the work of insects so minuscule they’re called no-see-ums. The bugs had slipped through the netting strung across an open window of Cheney’s 2015 Subaru Outback the night before while he slept.

Cheney was feverish and scratched absently as we drove, his discomfort like a low drag on everything he said. We added many pharmacies to our itinerary, searching unsuccessfully for the perfect anti-itch cream. The bites were insistent, and they seemed to trouble my son beyond the physical irritation.

This is how harm so often arrives, not with sirens but with a whisper. The no-see-ums that bite through the night. The slow burn of heat that turns seasons hostile. The safety net that unravels slowly until there’s nothing left to catch you. A nation, like a body, can be marked before it recognizes the wound.

Mile by mile, I-95 leads us into the hurt.

At a Whataburger counter I meet Bill and Sienna, who have traveled the interstate around a dozen times over the past few months to join protests up and down the East Coast. Bill wears a T-shirt that reads, “Stop Pretending Your Racism Is Patriotism.” He’s spoiling for a fight. “I’m a big guy,” he says. “I love it when people ask me about this shirt when they don’t like it, because it’s a pretty good testament to their character.”

Others are fatalistic, certain that what’s happening is beyond their control. “Doesn’t matter what we think,” shrugs Don, who along with several friends just visited Monticello. “They’re going to do what they do.” That sentiment is echoed by Christy, 64, traveling with her pregnant 41-year-old daughter and her 11-year-old granddaughter. “Where are we headed? To a time when ten people run the country and the rest of us just live with it,” she says.

When I meet Joe, it’s late afternoon in Georgia. The air presses in, damp, alive with gnats. He and his wife are 12 hours into a 20-hour drive, and his face bears every one of those hours and more.

“I’m whooped,” he acknowledges, leaning against the side of his car as if staying upright is too much effort. A cigarette hangs from his fingers. His eyes stay fixed on the women’s restroom, where his wife has gone. This stop is for her. He wants the trip over.

They are headed from Saint Petersburg, Florida, to Newburgh, New York, the town Joe grew up in but doesn’t like. He needs to see his brother, who is in a nursing home. It might be their last visit. “He’s not doing well,” Joe says. He grimaces as if in pain, then wipes the expression away. Grief, it seems, is an extravagance he can’t afford, not with the miles waiting and the day mostly gone.

We change the subject. I ask how he’s feeling about America these days, and he says that the world has gotten meaner since the pandemic. “I don’t like what’s coming for my three grandkids.”

His words mirror my own worries about the flawed inheritance we’re leaving behind, unraveling like an heirloom quilt. “So what are you doing,” I ask, “to help them prepare?”

“Teaching them to shoot.”

He says this without drama or bravado. His voice is grim, resigned.

Joe carries a Glock nearly always. His wife is surprised that he left it at home for this trip. “My permit doesn’t hold in New York,” he explains.

I try to lighten the tone. I ask what he’s optimistic about.

“Reaching my destination,” he says. “Just that.” Then he draws a long breath from his cigarette and exhales, slow and deliberate, like a man letting go of more than smoke.

By the numbers, I-95 is America’s deadliest highway. It claims hundreds of lives every year. The emotional impact of this loss is everywhere. Truckers describe wrecks they’ve passed; motorcyclists recall friends killed on the road.

At a rest stop in Seabrook, New Hampshire, Mary, 59, tells me about a long-ago family trip to Florida. She was a teenager then, one of five siblings. “There was a bad crash,” she says. “My dad, being who he was, pulled over to help.” The man’s leg was nearly severed. Her father held it in place until the ambulance arrived. Her sister cradled the man’s head. “It was in the local papers,” Mary says, then looks off toward the trees.

David, a maintenance worker, describes the evening of February 21, 2024, when a speeding 18-wheeler barreled into the rest stop where he works near Savannah, Georgia, slamming into multiple vehicles and igniting a fire that engulfed several rigs. Two truck drivers were killed. The flames lit the night sky.

There are other legacies of harm etched into the earth beneath the interstate, held by the asphalt. To build I-95, bulldozers carved through cities, leveling blocks, erasing whole neighborhoods. Often Black. Often poor. Families were scattered, churches toppled, maps redrawn in the name of progress. People watched the America they knew vanish beneath pavement.

The interstate reminds me and Cheney that, no matter where you are, this country’s violence is never far away. Not that we need reminding.

April 6, 2013. A suicide bomber struck members of my team in Zabul Province, southern Afghanistan. I was the director of communications and public diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy. I boarded the first helicopter out of Kabul to get to my people.

We’d lost Anne Smedinghoff, who was 25, my daughter’s age at the time. Four other people died, three soldiers and a translator. At least ten more were wounded. One of my staff lay in a coma; another was unable to walk.

Someone handed me Anne’s purse, punctured with shrapnel, her phone still inside. It felt impossibly heavy. I wanted to set it down. I wanted to never let it go.

February 24, 2024. Piedras Negras, Mexico. Cheney watched as a small group of people waded into the Rio Grande, trying to cross to Eagle Pass, Texas. Among them: a young couple, Rossana, 25, and Widman, 26.

Cheney photographed them as they entered the murky river. He watched them retreat from its force, regroup, and try again. On the U.S. shore, a Coast Guard officer shouted warnings through a loudspeaker, but it was too late. Cheney saw the current pull the couple apart. He saw their heads bobbing, their hands reaching. The water took them under.

Rossana’s body washed ashore in Mexico and was quickly returned to her family. Widman drifted toward the U.S. side; his body was not repatriated to Guatemala for four months. Cheney traveled there, to the town of Yepocapa, to stand with Widman’s family as they sealed his casket into a tomb.

These deaths did not happen to us directly. Grief belongs to those who lost their kin, to the friends left with nothing but memories. And yet. America’s violence—its wars, its borders, its history—folds itself into the stories of those who witness it, along with a stark question: What could we, should we, have done differently?

Cheney and I spend a night at a rest stop near Dale City, Virginia. Here, in December 1996 around 3 a.m., a man named Bobby Lee Durham Sr. pulled in driving a white Cadillac. A 51-year-old trucker from Dover, Pennsylvania, he was headed home from South Carolina, where he and his family had been handling things following his father’s death.

Durham helped his disabled sister to the restroom and crossed the breezeway to the men’s room. Two teenagers were waiting inside. They demanded his wallet. He handed it over. “Please don’t hurt me,” he said. They shot him anyway. The triggerman later wrote a crude rap song boasting of the killing: “Three to your head. Bang, bang, bang. He’s dead.”

I photograph the entrance to the restroom, trying to see it as Durham might have. A brick archway. A drinking fountain. A metal door glowing sickly yellow under artificial light. Haunting yet heartbreakingly ordinary. No sign that this would be the end.

The next morning, birdsong rises from the trees, but the rest stop feels uneasy. Most of the picnic tables are chained off, with signs that read, “Out of Service, Do Not Use.” Heavy slabs of concrete that once promised community are now stripped of function. They feel like a sign of our shrinking commons, a warning to the country’s travelers: What we share is now cordoned off. Proceed; do not gather.

Back near the bathroom where Durham died I meet Jobert, 55, a prosecutor visiting from the Philippines. He and his family—his wife, three children, and two aunts—are tracing their own version of the American road trip. They stopped in Texas to visit a friend, then made a pilgrimage to Disney World. Next up, they’re going to the nation’s capital. When he mentions his job, I tell him about the murder.

“Really? A murder?” Jobert grows quiet. “No one deserves that in any jurisdiction in the world,” he said, shifting into legalistic formality. “But I’ve been stopping at many rest areas, and I think they are normally safe. I’ve always looked up to America as a friend, a kind nation, a hopeful nation. I hope this trip will show me that it still is.”

His words linger. He’s looking for reassurance. So am I.

“We’re on the same page. Black, white, we all want the same thing. You want your kids to be taken care of. You don’t want to work until you drop dead.”

Gary, at left, a trucker, in Virginia

And it comes, in fits and starts.

I don’t have a script, but I start asking travelers what it means to be American. At the Ladysmith rest area in Virginia, Gary, a trucker and self‑described progressive from Mississippi, puts it this way: “We’re on the same page. Black, white, we all want the same thing. You want your kids to be taken care of. You don’t want to work until you drop dead.”

At the Biden Welcome Center in Delaware, Bob, 57, a Trump supporter with a dog leash in one hand and his mom’s voice coming through his earbuds, offers a version of the golden rule: “Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.”

Joann, 55, originally from Liberia, tells me about recovering from an illness the doctors couldn’t explain. She woke up one day paralyzed: hands curled, feet twisted, limbs locked. For six months she lived in stillness. She vowed to become a caregiver if she got better. And she did. She’s a nurse now, taking care of all kinds of patients. “What I love about this country,” she tells me, “is its diversity. That’s what makes it powerful.”

Mark, with a graying ponytail, is adamant and assured. “We’re all red, white, and blue in the end. We want a democracy, not a king,” he says. The owner of a chain of spas and salons, he’s parked at a rest stop in Hardeeville, South Carolina. He and his girlfriend, along with their Australian kelpie, Termita, are one month into a slow drift north from Mexico, sometimes taking back roads or exploring bike trails in forgotten places. “I’m seeing fewer political signs than I expected,” Mark says. “Less of that roadside yelling.”

He’s been talking to strangers, too—asking questions, swapping stories. Proximity, he’s found, is a low-tech fix for a high-volume problem. “It’s the fringe radio shows, the influencers selling rage—they make it sound like we’re tearing each other apart,” he says. “But out here, when you actually talk to people? That’s not what I’m seeing.”

Ladd, 26, is a natural storyteller. He’s been a rest-stop supervisor for less than a year, but already he’s seen enough to fill a book. “Some insane things,” he says, grinning, shaking his head at the memories. A woman trying to bathe her Chihuahua in the bathroom sink. A mime who stopped in (“He didn’t have much to say,” Ladd deadpans). A wild boar that sent tattooed truckers into a scared huddle as it tore around the parking lot.

In Ladd’s telling, rest stops like his are more than breaks in a journey. They’re a kind of stage where the absurd and the ordinary collide. He calls them “the great equalizers.” A shiny new Mercedes slides into a parking space alongside a ’91 Corolla. Young and old, rich and broke, weary and restless all shuffle toward the same humming drink machines, the same toilets. For a moment, divisions fall away, and hierarchies flatten out.

Ladd tells me he sees people you might not expect to interact talking and laughing together all the time. “I’ve seen truckers flying the Confederate flag on their vehicles. They hover around the vending machines, and they’ll strike up conversations with Black truckers, or we have Mexican truckers as well that come in,” Ladd says.

Harmony isn’t always a given, he acknowledges. His biggest headache? Two of his employees fall into such bitter theological debates—both are Christians, but from different denominations—that he has to keep them on separate shifts.

Cheney cues up a road-trip playlist he found on Spotify. Johnny Cash belts, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” It feels like we have, too. We keep stopping, keep talking—we meet some 250 people in all. The encounters collect in my mind like a stack of Polaroids, each a flash from the road, beckoning me to return to it later.

“My whole life has been driving,” Mary Ann tells me. She used to operate “forklifts that could lift a truck to the top of a two-story building.” Fifteen years ago, she started driving a rig professionally. Now she calls trucking her “retirement.”

After a year driving solo, she decided she needed a partner, for company and for safety—someone to stand beside her when she pulled into lonely stops in the dark. She started asking around and found Archie, a veteran trucker who had 24 years on the road. “I met her in the parking lot,” Archie says, leaning against the side of their truck. “I said we could give it a try.”

They’ve been partners for 14 years now, sharing an 18-wheeler that’s become their home, trading the driver’s seat back and forth across thousands of long nights. Mary Ann invites me up into the cab, where the seat smells faintly of diesel and sun-warmed vinyl. On her phone, she shows me photos of her five grandchildren and one great-grandchild, all of whom live in her hometown of Sulphur, Louisiana. She only sees them once or twice a year. “But they know I’m out here working,” she says, her voice firm with pride. “I want them to know hard work matters.”

Archie’s load is heavier. The life he chose strained his relationships with his eight children. He says that he doesn’t want them coming to his funeral. “They weren’t there for me when I was alive. Why should they be in death?” His words carry the ghosts of things already buried—the hope of reconciliation, the promise of remembrance.

Mary Ann tells me that she has a problem with drivers who don’t speak English well, and it jars me. Then she talks about sharing dinners with those same drivers over camp stoves, the air alive with spices she can’t name, hands of different colors passing bowls back and forth. Suspicion at the threshold, welcome once the table is set: This is Mary Ann’s America.

For others we meet, America is faith and uncertainty interlaced, inextricable.

Taha, 21, has just finished praying with his brother when we meet him at a Pennsylvania rest stop. He says that personal freedom is what defines being American. “The thing I’m worried about the most,” he adds, “is misinformation.”

Ayesha, 43, a calligrapher and mixed-media artist, is traveling with her husband and three children from Tampa to Washington, D.C., for a flight to Lahore, Pakistan, to visit her parents. She wonders if she should leave the U.S. for good. Her husband believes the country still offers them the best chance for stability. “He is seventy-thirty sure we should stay,” Ayesha says. “I’m fifty-fifty.”

Yuri, 52, a trucker from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, left the former Soviet Union a decade ago to get his daughter a better education. He isn’t certain that the school system lived up to his hopes, but he does feel sure that U.S. democracy will survive. “As long as you have elections every four years, don’t worry,” he says.

At a rest stop in Georgia I meet Jesús, 31. He came from Mexico, his wife from Colombia, and he now works in the restaurant industry. He wants to apply for U.S. citizenship, but he’s also considering returning to Mexico with his wife and eight-month-old daughter.

Jesús chooses his words with care. “We will be with family. It’s OK,” he says. His smile widens when he speaks of his daughter. “She’s an American citizen. She has good opportunities.”

Hope, fragile yet determined, rides in the back seat of his car.

Grief and humor, weariness and wonder—the balance between them propels us forward. In South Carolina, Cheney and I interrupt the motion: We rent kayaks, paddle out into a bay, and are rewarded with dolphins. So many of them, and so close. They swim beneath us like shadows, quick and playful.

We pull up alongside a fisherman tossing fish guts over the side of his boat. The dolphins gather like guests at a dinner party. We drift into their celebration and strike up a conversation with the man. His biggest fear? The rising tide. Not the fact of it, but how few people seem to notice.

“I met her in the parking lot. I said we could give it a try.”

Archie, at right with Mary Ann, his driving partner, in New Jersey

I meet Betsy in Delaware on a sweltering afternoon, the kind where the heat makes the asphalt shimmer. She stands by her Tesla as it charges. With her are two young asylum-seeking brothers from Venezuela. They linger in the shade of a thin tree nearby.

“It’s scary when you can’t let an 18-year-old go play soccer because ICE is all over the neighborhood,” Betsy says, nodding toward the young men. Her voice is as sharp as a snapped twig. “The terror that puts people under—it’s beyond anything I’ve experienced.”

Betsy is an ordained priest and retired psychiatric nurse who once helped run a shelter. She tells me that her late husband, Ralph, would hate today’s America. They took a long road trip through the country in 2010, a few years after Ralph was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Betsy planned the trip with care. She tracked down Ralph’s college roommate, his med-school buddy, distant cousins, friends she’d only heard about, former neighbors who’d moved away. Ten weeks. Ten thousand miles. Each stop a chance to connect. “We stayed with someone we knew every single night,” she says. 

Remembering wasn’t the point really. Presence was. Giving Ralph one last taste of everything that made him who he was before the disease took hold. He loved cold beer and ice cream, and many of their hosts greeted them with one or the other. Sometimes both.

They were still a year or two away from Ralph getting lost one door down from their home of thirty years, but forgetting was already a creeping shadow. When they were listening to an audiobook Ralph loved, he didn’t want the driving to end. He knew that by the next morning the plot would have slipped his mind. Once Betsy drove four hours past their destination just so the story could reach its conclusion.

“He didn’t always know what state we were in,” she tells me. “But he loved every minute.”

My own husband died of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Even as the disease tightened its grip, pieces of him—essential ones—remained. I prefer to remember those parts: his stubborn sense of justice, his friendliness. Also, his joy riding horses near the pyramids, and his laugh in the snow.

Betsy and I exchange contact information. She’s 81 now, and she carries the memory of her journey across the country with Ralph like a lantern. It reminds her that there are many ways to show up, to hold on, to keep going.

Memory has always pulled at me: what we carry forward, what fades, what we revise without meaning to. The things we remember become in some way immortal—but only as long as we keep returning to them. As a child, I tried to memorize moments. Not just milestones but flickers: coyotes calling in the desert, the cool edge of a desk, a friend’s whispered secret. Remember this, I told myself.

As a nation we’re reshaping, and in doing so allowing ourselves to forget—our common stories, our hard-won lessons, our fragile bonds of trust. On I-95, the smallest exchanges start to feel like a way back, landmarks amid the rage and outrage that signal common ground. I’m a child again, willing my mind to map a path I can follow whenever I get lost.

Remember this.

John and Maryanne in Kennebunk, Maine, showing off their Kawasaki bike with a Hannigan sidecar. They traveled I-95 together for their honeymoon 34 years ago. For them the highway is a vow kept.

Mike Valentino, 70, wiry, racing from Key West to Ticonderoga, New York. “To see my lover,” he booms, then adds more softly, “who is ill.”

Another Mike, whose wife died of cancer this year. When she first got sick and told him she was ready to leave Michigan to chase warmth, he said, “Whatever you want.” So they moved to Miami. Now it feels cold there without her.

A woman on her way south, giving her tomato plants fresh air in Virginia. “They cost $9 for three in New York and $20 for two in Florida,” she explains. “So I’m carrying them as passengers.”

A man from Appalachia pointing out a mound of fire ants to his wide-eyed daughter.

A Ukrainian-American woman cradling her pet ferret, lamenting the children she lost custody of.

A young woman in a crop top describing a friendship gone sour.

Remember this.

Here is what I will remember of Michael: Dawn, a Smokey Bear statue, the rest stop glowing under first light. I wander toward a man sitting alone on a bench. He gestures for me to join him.

“Where are you headed?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, and I laugh.

“I’m trying to cross off all of the lower 48,” he adds after a moment.

Michael is a police officer with 28 years on the force, serving in the town where he was born, 30 minutes south of Atlanta. The job comes with trauma. “I’ve tried therapy, medication. None of it works. Being on the bike is literally the only time I feel free. Out here alone, riding in the wind, it’s just you and your thoughts. And it’s amazing.”

Still, he knows he’s gambling with his life. “Every time you get on a bike, someone will try to kill you,” he says, grinning in a way that doesn’t dismiss risk but makes room for it. “Not on purpose. They simply don’t see you.”

Any miscalculation on his part can also be dangerous. Michael knows this in his bones. In January, he laid down his bike when someone he was following too closely slammed on their brakes. He suffered a few broken ribs. “Hurt worse than I ever thought that would hurt,” he says.

But he treated the accident as part of the bargain. “If I get run over, I get run over,” he says. “It’s probably better than some of the other ways I could’ve left this earth.”

We talk about his hometown, where violence seems to be getting worse. “Used to be one murder a year was a big deal. Now there are several.” But he doesn’t buy the idea that the country is in inexorable decline, coming apart at the seams. “I think the bulk of people in America can sit down and share a meal or talk about anything,” he said. “There’s more we have in common than we do different.”

Here is what I will remember of Michael: his faith in community, and his belief that freedom, even with risk, is worth the ride.

“When we were planning this trip, I didn’t expect to feel this way,” Cheney tells me one afternoon. He’s logged more than 25,000 miles on the road since the end of his marriage. Now I-95 seems to be asking him, almost kindly: How much farther can you really go before you need to stop?

Since moving into his car, I’ve learned that it runs on more than gas. It runs on order, a collection of rules my son has honed in the time he’s been on the move. He pulled out the back seats to install a sleeping platform and storage, and everything has its place: stove, camera gear, water, paper towels. If I stash a sweater where his tennis shoes go, I’ll hear the quick snap of his correction.

He isn’t being fussy. He’s protecting ballast, the modest mooring he’s been able to create after losing so much.

In time he trusts me to know where to store the plates and drape damp towels. And somewhere between interstate exits, between chasing the first blush of morning and the soft spill of dusk with his camera, Cheney has also realized that he wants something more grounded than an organized car. The idea of settling down again is no longer something to resist.

I study him as he drives. I admire that he’s meeting his sorrows, moving through them, and staying open to what comes. Our pursuits aren’t so different. His search is for home, mine for country. Both of us are circling versions of the same question, trying to find our place in a world restless with change.

“We’ve made this like a home. You know, we live in our car, but life is not bad.”

Maryanne, at left with Ángel, her partner

One night we find ourselves in a neighborhood improvised from asphalt and exhaustion. About 30 people live in their cars next to a rest area. Most are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Together they’ve turned an in-between place into something enduring.

Among them: Brian, once an HVAC installer, sidelined by a fall from a roof. Joe, who works as a pizza maker at a local restaurant. Mary Beth, unhoused now for more than two years, who unwinds at night with an episode of The Andy Griffith Show on her phone. “When you lose your home, you lose a lot of things,” she says. “But one of the first things you lose is neighbors.” Here she’s found them again, the fabric our country depends on.

The residents tape holiday decorations to their dashboards, give one another birthday cards. They gather to watch the sunset through the large windows of the rest-area café, sometimes lingering to gossip. They call out good night before climbing into their cars to sleep.

Maryanne and her husband, Ángel, give us the lay of the land. “Liz lives in that green car. Brian is in that brown car. Tina and her sons live in this one,” Maryanne says. “They’re like family for us now. We’ve made this like a home. You know, we live in our car, but life is not bad.”

Together forty years, with four kids to show for it, Maryanne and Ángel were evicted last year. They tell us their love story: They worked at the same grocery store, he in produce, she in the meat and fish department. “He wrote me love letters in Spanish,” Maryanne says. She’d taken only a little bit of Spanish in school. “I had to spend hours trying to figure out what he wrote.”

Ángel, now in his seventies, is recovering from a leg operation and visits the hospital frequently to have his bandages changed. “I’m in pain,” he admits, wincing.

They’ve lost so much, but not each other.

This place. It’s remarkable. And infuriating. People who’ve built lives, worked, raised children, paid taxes, now exposed to every hard edge. That night Cheney and I enter briefly into their community, sleeping in the parking lot. Rain taps on the car roof while I lie awake, listening, thinking about loss. How to guard against it, and how to lean on others when it happens.

As dawn breaks, the women at the rest area gather. Men stretch. Coffee steams in Styrofoam cups. As Cheney and I pull away, I watch the makeshift neighborhood shrink in the rearview mirror, half in shadow, half in light.

When we reach Maine, I know that I’ve found what I was looking for with Cheney: a bond reforged. In a thousand fleeting gestures, we’ve recovered our rhythm and ease. My relationship with my country remains complicated, but the America I’ve met on the road is also far more recognizable, resilient, and generous than the noise of now would have us think. Online, we’re a nation of factions. In parking lots and at picnic tables, we’re a nation of encounters. Strangers have offered small gifts freely and with care: a joke that cracks the heat, a baseball cap, a paper cup of fresh orange juice, a story about a stray cat hitching a ride across state lines atop an engine before emerging at a rest stop with a startled meow. 

Before ending our trip, Cheney and I step into what feels like a loop of time, detouring to a rambling three-story house where I lived with his father the summer before my senior year in college. We wander around the house, now gutted for renovation, and climb to the second-floor porch overlooking Kenduskeag Stream. I remember sitting there on warm evenings with the man I would marry, imagining the future.

Later we hike the Beehive Loop trail in Acadia National Park, clinging to iron rungs drilled into a cliff face. Sometimes Cheney extends a hand back to help me up. The scramble demands trust—in the metal, the rock, each other—and a willingness to keep moving, even when the next hold is out of sight.

The lesson of the cliff follows me back to the highway. Do I belong in America? The truest answer is: for now. Because belonging is a practice, a choice remade again and again, even as trust frays and the horizon blurs. It means offering what we can, and receiving what comes. Public life doesn’t pause; it unfolds continuously, sometimes violently, and it spills into private life, upsetting our balance. But we can turn our grief into guardrails and keep groping our way forward, one handhold at a time.

Maybe this is what hope looks like today: stopping, listening, recognizing one another. Treating presence itself as a radical act. Deciding, day after day, to remain, to take part.

At the northern terminus of I-95, Cheney and I turn around in his car, heading back toward my home in Brooklyn. Storm clouds gather overhead, the edges rimmed in gold. The highway stretches on with no guarantees, still becoming.

More from The Atavist Magazine

“There Will Be No Mercy”

The After Dark Bandit

The Good Traitor

---

© 2026 The Atavist Magazine. Proudly powered by Newspack by Automattic.
Privacy Policy • Opt-out preferences • Privacy Notice for California Users