Anatomy of Injustice Read Online Free PDF

and fast-food chains, to shop at Rosenberg’s, a clothing store that had been around since 1884, or to eat at The Ranch, a good restaurant. Blacks found Greenwood more racist than Abbeville.
    Edward’s mother, Mary Ellen Gardner, was the daughter of atenant farmer. She was so tiny as a baby, and the family was so poor, that she slept in a drawer. She was sixteen when she had her first child. She’d had a second and was pregnant with her third when she married Henry Odey Elmore. They had a son and a daughter, pneumonia and malnutrition claimed another son in his infancy, then came another daughter, and a year later Mary was pregnant again. In her eighth month, she was diagnosed with toxemia, which can be fatal or result in a mentally retarded child. Mary was hospitalized. After ten days, labor was induced. Edward Lee was born on January 13, 1959.
    Henry Elmore was listed as Edward’s father, but it is unlikely he was his biological father. Edward had reddish hair and a light complexion. Edward’s siblings and playmates taunted him that he had a white father. “His skin was lighter than mine,” said Elmore’s sister Peggy, whose biological father
was
Henry. When Edward was about two years old, Henry was struck by a car as he walked along Highway 17 in North Carolina. The driver didn’t stop. Henry died. The police never did find who hit him. “Probably didn’t try very hard,” says Peggy. “You know, black man.”
    After Henry was killed there were always men around Mary, white and black. Some stayed a few hours, others longer. Earl Johnson was around the longest, maybe four or five years, during Edward’s early adolescence. He was hardly a role model. He would go into a grocery store and furtively take a package of meat, go off to another aisle, pummel the package a bit, then insist that the grocer give him the meat or sell it at a reduced price.
    Drinking and violence were part of the scene, and Edward learned to stay away from his mother’s male friends. When Mary got drunk, he would stay away from her as well. She was jailed several times for disorderly conduct. She began giving her son beer at an early age. The family moved from one dilapidated house to another, many without electricity or running water, ahead of the rent collector or after the rent collector had caught up with and evicted them. One day, Eddie and Peggy got off the school bus in front of their public housing apartment and saw their belongings on the street; the family had been evictedagain. Shamed and embarrassed, they walked on to a relative’s house.
    The children picked cotton and peaches and picked up bottles along the roadside. “You’d get five cents from those bottles,” Peggy recalled. “We’d buy little stuff to eat, like ice cream.” On Sundays little Edward walked barefoot with his mother to Calhoun Falls Baptist Church.
    Edward started attending Branch Street Elementary School when he was six. He didn’t yet know his colors. Asked to draw a man, he drew two circles, connected them with a diagonal line, and put a squiggly tail on the bottom circle. He was absent more than a third of the time, often because he was forced to scrounge for money, picking up bottles or whatever. He was in the first grade for three years. In the second grade, the kids teased him because he was slow and dim-witted, with speech defects and tics, and his clothes were ragged. His IQ was measured at 61, which psychologists classify as within the range of “mild mental retardation.” He quit after the first semester. Edward was twelve years old before he made it to the third grade, at the Langley Milliken School, a quarter of a mile from a large mill. He and Peggy were among the eight blacks sent to integrate the school. They didn’t cause any problems. “We got along, we really got along,” Peggy said. Peggy and Eddie were close. When she became a teenager and the boys started calling, Eddie would lie on the couch pretending to be asleep, then