Lucius Amerson: The First Black Sheriff

In January 1967, in the heart of segregated Alabama, Lucius Amerson walked into the Macon County courthouse and raised his right hand, becoming the first Black sheriff in the Deep South since Reconstruction. The nation sent telegrams. His own deputies quit. And a state that had pledged "segregation forever" waited for him to fail. He did not fail. Over twenty years and five elections, Amerson did the most disorienting thing his enemies could imagine: he ran the office fairly, for Black and white alike, giving them nothing to strike at but his own excellence. He rebuilt a department from Black war veterans, faced down armed men in his jail, survived a patrol car that crashed and burned on a dark county road, and quietly reopened a door that terror had bolted shut in the 1870s and law had sealed in 1901. Lucius Amerson: The First Black Sheriff sets one man's story against the full sweep of his world, the Great Migration he refused to join, the Army that forged him, the murder of Sammy Younge, the bridge at Selma, the Klan in its robes, and the county that kept choosing him, then forgot him. It is the account of a hero his country celebrated cheaply and remembered late, told with heat and honesty, and grounded throughout in the historical record. He asked only to do a hard job well, to make the law hold everyone up the same, and, at the end, to fry a little catfish for his neighbors. This is the book that finally lets the record show that he was here.