Although the federal government had promised racial equality for freed former slaves during the short period of Reconstruction, the return of white supremacy and racial subordination came quickly after federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s. Voting rights were taken away from African Americans, and a series of racially restrictive laws enforced the racial hierarchy. “Racial integrity” laws were part of a plan to replicate slavery’s racial hierarchy and reestablish the subordination of African Americans. Having criminalized interracial sex and marriage, states throughout the South would use the laws to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Forbidding sex between white women and black men became an intense preoccupation throughout the South.
In the 1880s, a few years before lynching became the standard response to interracial romance and a century before Walter and Karen Kelly began their affair, Tony Pace, an African American man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, fell in love in Alabama. They were arrested and convicted, and both were sentenced to two years in prison for violating Alabama’s racial integrity laws. John Tompkins, a lawyer and part of a small minority of white professionals who considered the racial integrity laws to be unconstitutional, agreed to represent Tony and Mary to appeal their convictions. The Alabama Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1882. With rhetoric that would be quoted frequently over the next several decades, Alabama’s highest court affirmed the convictions, using language that dripped with contempt for the idea of interracial romance:
The evil tendency of the crime [of adultery or fornication] is greater when committed between persons of the two races.… Its result may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.
The U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the Alabama court’s decision. Using “separate but equal” language that previewed the Court’s infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson twenty years later, the Court unanimously upheld Alabama’s restrictions on interracial sex and marriage and affirmed the prison terms imposed on Tony Pace and Mary Cox. Following the Court’s decision, more states passed racial integrity laws that made it illegal for African Americans, and sometimes Native Americans and Asian Americans, to marry or have sex with whites. While the restrictions were aggressively enforced in the South, they were also common in the Midwest and West. The State of Idaho banned interracial marriage and sex between white and black people in 1921 even though the state’s population was 99.8 percent nonblack.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia, but restrictions on interracial marriage persisted even after that landmark ruling. Alabama’s state constitution still prohibited the practice in 1986 when Walter met Karen Kelly. Section 102 of the state constitution read:
The legislature shall never pass any law to authorise or legalise any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro.*
No one expected a relatively successful and independent man like Walter to follow every rule. Occasionally drinking too much, getting into a fight, or even having an extramarital affair—these weren’t indiscretions significant enough to destroy the reputation and standing of an honest and industrious black man who could be trusted to do good work. But interracial dating, particularly with a married white woman, was for many whites, an unconscionable act. In the South, crimes like murder or assault might send you to prison, but interracial sex was a transgression in its own unique category of danger with correspondingly extreme punishments. Hundreds of black men have been lynched for even unsubstantiated suggestions of such intimacy.
Walter didn’t know the legal history, but like every black man in Alabama he knew deep in his bones the perils of interracial romance. Nearly a dozen people had been lynched in Monroe County alone since its incorporation. Dozens of additional lynchings had taken place in neighboring counties—and the true power of those lynchings far exceeded their number. They were acts of terror more than anything else, inspiring fear that any encounter with a white person, any interracial social misstep, any unintended slight, any ill-advised look or comment could trigger a gruesome and lethal response.
Walter heard his parents and relatives talk about lynchings when he was a young child. When he was twelve, the body of Russell Charley, a black man from Monroe County, was found hanging from a tree in Vredenburgh, Alabama. The lynching of Charley, who was known by Walter’s family, was believed to have been prompted by an interracial romance. Walter remembered well the terror that shot through the black community in Monroe County when Charley’s lifeless, bullet-ridden body was found swinging in a tree.
And now it seemed to Walter that everyone in Monroe County was talking about his own relationship with Karen Kelly. It worried him in a way that few things ever had.
A few weeks later, an even more unthinkable act shocked Monroeville. In the late morning of November 1, 1986, Ronda Morrison, the beautiful young daughter of a respected local family, was found dead on the floor of Monroe Cleaners, the shop where the eighteen-year-old college student had worked. She had been shot in the back three times.
Murder was uncommon in Monroeville. An apparent robbery-murder in a popular downtown business was unprecedented. The death of young Ronda was a crime unlike anything the community had ever experienced. She was popular, an only child, and by all accounts without blemish. She was the kind of girl whom the entire white community embraced as a daughter. The police initially believed that no one from the community, black or white, would have done something so horrific.
Two Latino men had been spotted in Monroeville looking for work the day Ronda Morrison’s body was found, and they became the first suspects. Police tracked them down in Florida and determined that the two men could not have committed the murder. The former owner of the cleaners, an older white man named Miles Jackson, fell under suspicion, but there was no evidence that pointed to him as a killer. The current owner of the cleaners, Rick Blair, was questioned but considered an unlikely suspect. Within a few weeks, the police had tapped out their leads.
People in Monroe County began to whisper about the incompetence of the police. When there were still no arrests several months later, the whispers became louder, and public criticisms of the police, sheriff, and local prosecutor were aired in the local newspaper and on local radio stations. Tom Tate was elected the new county sheriff days after the murder took place, and folks started to question whether he was up to the job. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI) was called in to investigate the murder but achieved no more success solving the crime than local officials had. People in Monroeville became anxious. Local businesses posted rewards offering thousands of dollars for information leading to an arrest. Gun sales, which were always robust, increased.
Meanwhile, Walter was wrestling with his own problems. He had been trying for weeks to end his relationship with Karen Kelly. The child custody proceedings and public scandal had taken a toll on her; she had started using drugs and seemed to fall apart. She began to associate with Ralph Myers, a white man with a badly disfigured face and lengthy criminal record who seemed to perfectly embody her fall from grace. Ralph was an unusual partner for Karen, but she was in such serious decline that nothing she did made any sense to her friends and family. The relationship brought Karen to rock bottom, beyond scandal and drug use into serious criminal behavior. Together they became involved in dealing drugs and were implicated in the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman, a young woman from neighboring Escambia County.