Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery

by Foster Dickson

On a chilly December afternoon in 1975, Bernard Whitehurst Jr., a 33-year-old father of four, was mistaken for a robbery suspect by Montgomery, Alabama, police officers. A brief foot chase ensued, and it ended with one of the pursuing officers shooting and killing Whitehurst in the backyard of an abandoned house. The officer claimed the fleeing man had fired at him; police produced a gun they said had been found near the body. In the months that followed, new information showed that Whitehurst, who was black, was not only the wrong man but had been unarmed, a direct contradiction of the white officer's statement. What became known as the Whitehurst Case erupted when the local district attorney and the family's attorney each began to uncover facts that pointed to wrongdoing by the police, igniting a year-long controversy that resulted in the resignation or firing of police officers, the police chief, and the city's popular New South mayor. However, no one was ever convicted in Whitehurst's death, and his family's civil lawsuit against the City of Montgomery failed. Now, more than four decades later, Whitehurst's widow and children are waging a 21st-century effort to gain justice for the husband and father they lost. The question that remains who decides what justice looks like?

In this latter-day exploration of the Whitehurst Case, author Foster Dickson reviews one of Montgomery’s never-before-told stories, one which is riddled with incompatible narratives. Closed Ranks brings together interviews, police reports, news stories, and other records to carry the reader through the fraught post-civil rights movement period when the "unnecessary" shooting of Bernard Whitehurst Jr. occurred.

In our current time, as police shootings regularly dominate news cycles, this book shows how essential it is to find and face the truth in such deeply troubling matters.

272 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2018

About the author

Writer, editor, teacher in Montgomery, Alabama |
Editor of "Nobody's Home: Modern Southern Folklore"

Reviews

[Marlin Barton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foster Dickson's Closed Ranks is an intelligent, methodical, and thorough examination of the police killing of Bernard Whitehurst Jr., an unarmed black man in Montgomery, Alabama, in the year 1975. Dickson helps us see not only the unnecessary tragedy of that moment but also the ugly and complex cover-up by police and the toll each took not only on Whitehurst's family, which was devastating, to say the least, but also the toll taken on this deep-South city. What makes the book so compelling, beyond the care with which it is written, is how it, ultimately, moves beyond the scope of a specific time and place and helps us better understand the larger history of post-civil rights America, right down to our own troubled times where we can't seem to escape our past. Highly recommended.

[David Krajicek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book that looks back at a long-overlooked police shooting scandal in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1975. A white cop shot an innocent black man, and police planted a gun at the scene to support the officer's lie that the victim, a poor father of four, had fired first. His family was never compensated, and no police officer faced real comeuppance. Author Dickson does a good job of pulling together a narrative from interviews, newspaper clippings, and (unfortunately) a paucity of court documents. This case is newly pertinent in this era of #BlackLivesMatter.