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    He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
    He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
    He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty
    Audiobook13 hours

    He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty

    Written by S. Jonathan Bass

    Narrated by Mirron Willis

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair-nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice. Here, in the hands of historian S. Jonathan Bass, Washington's ordeal and life are rescued from anonymity and become a moving parable of one man's survival and perseverance in a hellish system.

    He Calls Me by Lightning is both a compelling legal drama and a fierce depiction of the Jim Crow South that forces us to take account of the lives cast away by systemic racism.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 2, 2017
    ISBN9781515985563
    He Calls Me By Lightning: The Life of Caliph Washington and the Forgotten Saga of Jim Crow, Southern Justice, and the Death Penalty

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    Reviews for He Calls Me By Lightning

    3.5/5

    8 ratings1 review

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    • 4/5
      A little confusing at first, but a very detailed telling of arrest, conviction, and appeals of Caliph Washington. Bass includes tangential information such as prison construction, prison life, and electric chair executions, which can be distracting, but the information adds context to the story. The book includes a note on the archival research and records consulted in the writing of this book.