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

S. Jonathan Bass

May 2017 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Mirron Willis

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.

About the author

S. Jonathan Bass is a professor at Alabama's Samford University and the author of Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail." He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Prolific audiobook narrator Mirron Willis has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards and an Audie Award. An accomplished actor, he has appeared on stage, in films, and on television. His many theater credits include roles in Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Knock Me a Kiss, and A Raisin in the Sun.