Author Archives: Alexandra Marvar

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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

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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.”

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