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Settling In ˜ 41
tening to the people of God—especially the poor and oppressed—with ears that
are well-trained by the scriptures. That was the context for my call to prison
ministry. Bible study was training my ear. The mothers of death row gave voice
to the cry. Mercy!
Within six weeks of that meeting with Viva Lamb and others, Emory Graduate
School was behind me, and I had been employed to organize “Witness
against Executions”—a national demonstration against the death penalty, held
in Atlanta during Easter weekend in 1977. Clifton provided the office space.
“Witness against Executions” brought together more than three thousand people
from around the country to say no to executions, no to vengeance and blood
retribution, no to a law of death, no to the lack of forgiveness that kills.
From there the work of Southern Prison Ministry in Georgia began. Most
of death row back then was in Reidsville, a five-hour drive into South Georgia.
So every month our old blue van would pull out, filled with mamas going to
visit their sons, with huge baskets filled with fried chicken and potato salad. It
seems like it was always 102 degrees when we would roll through Vidalia and
turn right onto the prison reservation.
By the spring of 1978 we were ready to celebrate when Earl Charles, a young
black Savannah man, walked out of the Chatham County Jail after three and a
half years of death row. It finally had become clear—even to the judge—that
Earl had been wrongly convicted. So Earl and his mother, Flossie Mae Charles,
came to Atlanta, and we had a liberation celebration at Clifton. That little
church rocked and sang. Then, of course, we ate dinner. We learned a lot from
Earl. The infamous Chatham County Jail was a rat-infested dungeon that had
once been the Savannah slave market. Slave shackles still hung from the wall of
each cell. He spent three and a half years there waiting to die for a crime he did
not commit.
How did you make it, Earl What brought you through “You know,” Earl
said, “I had to get up every morning, and I’d wash my face and I’d shave and I’d
comb my hair and get dressed. Then I’d look in the mirror and say, ‘Today
might be the day of my freedom. Today I might go home. And I’m ready.’”
Thank you. We need every lesson we can learn about how to live like people
ready for freedom.
We learned how to mourn. John Spenkelink’s execution was the first of
many in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Forming friendships with the condemned,
their families, and the victims of violence gave us a new hunger and
thirst for righteousness. It gave us new gratitude in hearing, “Blessed are those
who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
And then there was Jerry Banks, a gentle, quiet man who sat—again
wrongly convicted, innocent of the crime, young, and black—on death row for
six and a half years. I knew Jerry well. He became a friend to Ed and one who
welcomed little Hannah’s birth and held her, rocking her gently from side to