Alabama’s Mitcham Wars: Essaying Mortal Wounds
By Jerry Elijah Brown

Looking Glass Books
978-1-929619-44-3
$18.94 paperback
6 x 9          
276 pages
July 2011
Biography/Memoir, Historical

An 1890s murder cold case, an account of a bloody episode that left 10 people dead, and a grandson’s discovery of his grandfather’s role in the final slaying—all these are threads in Jerry Elijah Brown’s true story of conflict and change in a backwoods district of southwest Alabama. This story has never been told from the victims’ point of view. In Alabama’s Mitcham Wars, 14 overlapping essays connect the various themes, describing the violence, the community and its pioneer background, and the life of a man accused of one of the murders.

Alabama’s Mitcham Wars deals with tensions between backcountry farmers who borrowed money to put in their cotton crops and merchant-lenders who took advantage of the crop-lien system. The tensions erupted into what came to be called the Mitcham War, which pitted a gang of local ruffians against a mob of equally lawless vigilantes. The vigilantes made no distinction between the outlaws in the community and their innocent neighbors, terrorizing them all. The violence resulted in the district being described in one state paper as Clarke County’s criminal colony.

Jerry Elijah Brown’s grandfather, Lee Brown, was arrested, jailed, and tried for the assassination of a mysterious detective who assisted the vigilantes. Lee Brown was labeled a murderer and was reported lynched. The story attracted state-wide coverage, yet was suppressed within the county by all of the parties involved. Forty years after the death of his grandfather, the author found court documents and newspaper stories detailing the complicated drama. “Although the detective’s tombstone is marked, in a graveyard at a prominent crossroads, this story was taboo. This was one story my grandfather, a noted storyteller, never told. Lee Brown was not convicted, and he died in 1960, at age 88. He was a merry man, a brave one, and he served his community and his family without bragging,” says Brown.