James Bradfield worked the graveyard shift at a factory that built airplane parts in Jackson, Mississippi. It was a new job and he didn’t like the hours. He’d previously worked for a company that made radiators, but the company went out of business and Bradfield had to take the next job he could find. And so he was tired on the morning of June 26, 2011, when the detective arrived at his home and told him that Craig Anderson, his partner for 18 years, had died. He’d been hit by a truck, the detective said.
Bradfield felt his body go frozen, his mind go blank, his stomach drop. He thought about their 4-year-old son, De'Mariouz, and he realized that he did not know what to say to him. He called his mother and his pastor, Rev. Terry Davis, and they rushed over. The four of them sat down in the living room. Bradfield tried to hold back his tears. Davis turned to De'Mariouz, Bradfield recalled, and asked him if he remembered hearing about heaven at church. De'Mariouz nodded.
“That’s where Craig’s gone — to heaven,” Davis said.
“He gone to heaven? Why he gone to heaven?” De'Mariouz said.
“The Lord said he wanted him to go to heaven.”
“I’m gon’ miss him. Why he have to go like that? I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.”
De'Mariouz began crying. Bradfield couldn’t hold his tears back any longer, and they hugged and sobbed.
The next few days were a blur, and Bradfield said relatives later told him that during those days, he seemed in a trance, “zoned out,” as he made Anderson’s final arrangements. He went to the courthouse and met with District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith, who explained to him how Anderson had died. The suspects had confessed. Witnesses had given statements. A security camera captured footage — “You don’t want to see it,” a detective told him.
Bradfield, 44 at the time, learned the horrible truth — this was no accident. The suspects were teenagers. They were white. They had attacked Anderson because he was black. They had taken pleasure in his suffering. The young man who killed him had celebrated his death. This was not simply a murder. This was a lynching.
Craig Anderson and James Bradfield
Courtesy James Bradfield
Nearly 5,000 people, most of them black, were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, about 500 of them in Mississippi. More than simply murders, these were political killings, tacitly endorsed or ignored by authorities, designed to strike fear into those who might question white supremacy. The lynching of Craig Anderson echoed a brutal and violent form of racism that many locals had thought long gone. Yet here it was manifested in a group of teenagers born more than two decades after the civil rights era.
"These kids had supposedly grown up in this integrated generation."
“What disturbed so many people was the ages of the kids,” said Charles Bolton, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who has written extensively about 19th- and 20th-century Mississippi. “These kids had supposedly grown up in this integrated generation.”
Instead they had shown that sons and daughters had inherited the sins of their parents and grandparents. “The seeds were sown somewhere,” said Jody Owens, managing attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is based in Jackson, Mississippi. “You are raised to develop this. Where did these kids learn this? It’s not just an idea — it’s a culture.”
It’s a culture that bursts into public view with each instance of white supremacist violence: In the United States, white supremacist terrorists have caused more deaths (31) than jihadis have since 9/11 (26), according to the nonpartisan New America Foundation.
Over the four years following Anderson’s death, Bradfield would have to cope with the particular type of pain, confusion, and despair that had been common for black Americans for generations.
The murder of the man he loved had become a public symbol — of Mississippi’s ongoing struggle to wash away the blood staining its history, of the tensions that lingered between the sins of America’s past and the ideals it aimed to fulfill. To Bradfield, though, it was a private grief. “Nobody else could understand what I lost,” he said. “They took everything from me. That was everything.”
At the arraignment of Deryl Dedmon, the 18-year-old charged with murder, the judge set bail at $50,000, which meant Dedmon needed only $5,000 to walk out of jail. Anderson’s loved ones were shocked. Some of them gasped and shook their heads. Bradfield went into a rage. “This ain’t right!” he shouted. “This ain’t right!” And he kept shouting it over and over as the bailiffs pulled him out of the courtroom.
Bradfield remembered the stories his father and his grandmother told him about what Mississippi used to be like. His grandmother told him about the years of Jim Crow, the lynchings in the woods, and the burning crosses on lawns. His father told him about separate water fountains and schools, and about how a gang of whites beat and shot Mack Parker before throwing him in the Pearl River for allegedly raping a white woman who was likely attempting to cover up an affair with someone else.
Those days felt distant by the time Bradfield was a teenager. He was friendly with his white classmates. He dated a white girl for a few months. He had white neighbors and saw white people at all the places he hung out around town — the roller-skating rink, the movie theater, the football games. With each year, he saw fewer and fewer of them, though. Jackson’s white residents were fleeing for the suburbs. In the early 1980s, white people made up more than half of Jackson’s population. By the mid-'90s, the city was nearly 70% black.
He lived with his grandmother in north Jackson then. Every few weeks, he drove out to Madison County to visit some family, and on one of those visits, his cousin told him she knew somebody she wanted him to meet. She gave him Craig Anderson’s phone number, Bradfield called the next morning, and the two met that afternoon. For their first date they drove 45 minutes into Louisiana to buy lottery tickets and then drove 45 minutes back, with nothing but conversation to occupy themselves. They fell for each other that day, and soon they were together every weekend.
They made a good pair. Anderson’s warm demeanor loosened up Bradfield, whose cautious temperament and organized mind kept Anderson in check. They took care of each other. When Bradfield played his regular card games, Anderson fixed him a plate. When Anderson hit the pool halls, Bradfield served him drinks. Anderson cooked Bradfield hearty, delicious meals. Bradfield surprised Anderson with trips out of town, to Chicago, New Orleans, Miami. In those cities, they held hands and kissed in public, which they never felt comfortable doing in Jackson.
After three years of dating, Anderson moved in with Bradfield. Two years later, they bought a house. They joined a local church and sang in the choir. It was Bradfield’s idea to adopt De'Mariouz, and at first Anderson was hesitant because he wasn’t sure they’d be able to handle a newborn. But from the minute De'Mariouz came home with them, “he jumped right into being Mr. Mom,” Bradfield said. He changed the diapers, bought the clothes, installed the car seat, set up the bassinet, and bought more toys than Bradfield thought their son needed. “He spoiled the baby,” Bradfield said.
When De'Mariouz was older and asked if his parents could buy him a candy bar or a stuffed animal, it was Anderson who indulged him while Bradfield played bad cop. Anderson went overboard on Christmas, putting up the lights and ornaments and persuading Bradfield that they should get De'Mariouz something big and nice and expensive, like a baby grand piano.
By then the men both knew they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. Mississippi did not recognize same-sex marriage, but Anderson and Bradfield planned their own private ceremony. They drove to New Orleans and during dinner at a restaurant in a hotel on Canal Street, they spoke their vows and exchanged rings. A few months later, Anderson got hired for a job as a production technician at a Nissan plant. The job paid much more than his previous one and he didn’t think he’d get it. “He was jumping around, smiling like it was the best day of his life,” Bradfield said. They celebrated with a trip to Memphis.
“Those were the years when we were like, This is it. We gon’ like our life. We both got good jobs. We were living real comfortable. We had everything we wanted,” Bradfield said. “We had the home. We had the child. We go to church, we go to work, we pay our taxes. Go to work and come home to your family — that’s all you can ask for.”
The couple planned to celebrate Anderson’s 48th birthday, on June 30, 2011, with a trip to Chicago. On his way to work on the evening of June 25, Bradfield called to remind Anderson that he should start packing soon. Then he said "I love you" and headed into the factory. It was the last time they spoke.
Craig Anderson, his cousin known as CousinD, and James Bradfield are seen in this undated handout photo.
Courtesy James Bradfield
The night Craig Anderson was killed, a group of teenagers gathered for a birthday party on a farm in the suburbs of Jackson. Soon their names would become infamous, but for now they were merely high school students getting drunk around a bonfire on a warm summer night: Deryl Dedmon, John Aaron Rice, Dylan Butler, Kirk Montgomery, Shelbie Richards, Sarah Graves, John Blalack, Jonathan Gaskamp, Robert Rice, Joseph Dominick.
Late in the night, Dedmon suggested they go into Jackson to “fuck up a nigger,” Blalack told police. Blalack said that Dedmon seemed “bloodthirsty.” Dedmon told his friends that a group of black people had stolen his wallet in Jackson the night before, Montgomery told police. “Deryl was upset that he had got robbed in Jackson and he was having girl trouble also,” Montgomery said. Richards and Graves tried to persuade others to join. Blalack collected empty beer bottles.
They had done this before. At least four times over the previous three months, the teens had terrorized black people in Jackson, a mostly black city they called “Jafrica,” according to court documents.
The first time, Dedmon, Blalack, Robert Rice, John Aaron Rice, Gaskamp, and Montgomery threw beer bottles at black pedestrians, then beat up a drunken black man outside a golf course. The second time, Dedmon, Montgomery, Blalack, Robert Rice, and John Aaron Rice accelerated their Jeep toward a black pedestrian crossing the street, then swerved out of the way at the last moment.
The third time, Dedmon, Graves, Richards, Robert Rice, John Aaron Rice, and Montgomery drove into a residential area, rolled down the window, and told a man standing on the corner that they wanted to buy drugs. When the man approached, Blalack punched him in the face and they sped off.
The fourth time, Dedmon, Blalack, Dominick, Butler, and Montgomery threw beer bottles at black people they passed on the street. They hit at least one person, who fell to the ground. They then stopped at a sporting goods store, where Blalack bought a slingshot, which they used to shoot metal ball bearings at black people they drove past.
On the night of the birthday party, seven of them headed into Jackson. Montgomery drove Butler, John Aaron Rice, and Blalack in his white Jeep. Graves and Richards rode in Dedmon’s green pickup truck. It was a 15-minute drive into Jackson and Montgomery’s group arrived first, just past 4:30 a.m.
They threw bottles at homeless black people they passed, then pulled into the parking lot of a motel just off the highway, where they saw Craig Anderson standing beside an orange Chevy Avalanche. Montgomery told Dedmon to meet them there. Rice and Blalack got out of the car and approached Anderson, and Anderson said that he had locked his keys inside his truck. He asked if they had a coat hanger to open the truck. The teens told police that Anderson appeared drunk and that they continued the conversation to stall him until Dedmon arrived. His truck pulled up a few minutes later. Dedmon stepped out and shouted, “Nigger, get away from my truck!”
Rice threw the first punch. Anderson fell to the ground. Dedmon jumped on top of him and punched him in the head repeatedly. “I did hear Deryl call him a stupid nigger and he was cussing him while he was hitting him,” Butler told police. The barrage lasted about a minute or two. When it was over, Dedmon took Anderson’s wallet, Blalack and Montgomery told police. Then Rice and Dedmon headed back to their vehicles. Dedmon raised a fist and shouted, “White power!” and somebody in the Jeep responded, "White power!” Montgomery’s Jeep drove off.
Screen shot of the CCTV footage
When he got back into his truck, Dedmon said, “Stupid nigger,” according to Graves, and then, just as Dedmon was about to turn onto the road, he stopped. In his headlight beams, Dedmon saw Anderson stumbling to his feet at the edge of the parking lot. Dedmon backed up and angled his truck at Anderson. Then he hit the gas, jumped the curb, and ran him over. As the green truck took off down the road, two witnesses at the motel heard the woman in the passenger's seat, Richards, shout “Fucking nigger!” out the window.
Montgomery said Dedmon called and told him, “I ran that nigger over.” The two groups reconvened at a McDonald’s around the corner. Dedmon “had this big smirk on his face,” Montgomery said. Dedmon walked around to the front of his truck. He was “looking at it, laughing,” Butler said.
At least three witnesses had seen the truck hit Anderson. They described the vehicle to police and ran to the victim. One witness, Charlotte Shaw, saw the white Jeep and the green pickup drive past the parking lot on the way back to the highway. Shaw told police, “They were pointing and laughing.”
A Hinds County Sheriff's Department deputy directs Deryl Dedmon to a seat in a Hinds County court room, March 21, 2012 prior to his pleading guilty to murder and committing a hate crime for his involvement in the death of James Craig Anderson.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP Photo
Details of the murder slowly trickled out to the public. Police officers testified, lawyers held press conferences, local news outlets spoke to witnesses, a judge raised Dedmon’s bail to $800,000, and the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division opened an investigation. Then, on Aug. 8, CNN broadcast the security camera footage showing the beating and the murder, and the story made national headlines. Outrage spread across the country.
“People were shocked,” said Winston Thompson III, the lawyer who represented Anderson’s family. “We’ve always had racial issues in Mississippi, but prior to this happening, I never would have thought it would have been that systematic, that pervasive, that virulent: This is what they did for fun.”
It might not have been so shocking decades before, in the years before white people fled Jackson by the thousands, when white supremacy held the force of law. From 1877 to 1950, 22 people were lynched in Jackson’s Hinds County, more than anywhere else in the state, according to a study by the Equal Justice Initiative.
In June 1963, a white supremacist shot and killed civil rights activist Medgar Evers in front of his Jackson home. In 1967, Ku Klux Klan members bombed the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Jackson and two months later bombed the home of its rabbi, who had been a vocal supporter of the civil rights movement. Racist aggression was a constant in those years, and locals recalled white people driving past Jackson State University, a historically black school, shouting slurs at students.
Anderson’s murder revealed that the racist violence from those years had not completely vanished in the decades since. Yet the community refused to be terrorized. In mid-August, around 500 people marched through the city and gathered for a vigil in the parking lot where Anderson died. “We are here to unify,” one leader declared.
Later that month, activists from Atlanta organized a rally at the crime scene: “Maybe it sounds crazy, but we want to forgive what he did,” one of the them said to the crowd. In September, Anderson’s sister, Barbara Anderson Young, sent District Attorney Smith a letter on behalf of her family asking that he not seek the death penalty for Dedmon: “We also oppose the death penalty because it historically has been used in Mississippi and the south primarily against people of color for killing whites. Executing [Anderson’s] killers will not help balance the scales.”
James Bradfield did not take part in the letter. He did not attend the vigil or the rally. He did not support the tone of racial reconciliation. He stayed away from the news. He only wanted to escape it all.
Amelie Hahn holds a poster memorializing the death of James Craig Anderson in front of the federal courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, Jan. 7. 2012.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP Photo
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1QvgKLm
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