
          Murder At Broad River Bridge. By Bill Shipp,
Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1981, $8.95.
          By Wilson, GrantGrant Wilson
          Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, p. 15
          
          Lemuel Penn was killed without cause and anonymously by members of
the Ku Klux Klan outside Athens, Gal, in 1964. His murder was only one
of dozens in the Civil Rights era but his colonel's rank in the army
reserve and the political climate of the time made Penn's death a
national matter. The combined forces of federal and state officials
quickly found the murderers but what passed for justice in the South
in those days protected the guilty from the law.
          The history of discrimination and oppression around Athens at the
time of Penn's murder and the lives of ignorant men filled with fear
and hatred give a melancholy backdrop to Bil1 Shipp's story of the
event, the investigation and final resolution. Though brief--91
pages--Shipp's book is well-researched and is told in a clear
journalistic style that pulls the reader, resisting, back to the
confused, frightening years of the 1960s.
          The story is not pleasant but it is well done. Murder At
Broad River Bridge will be helpful to civil rights historians
and to the average reader wanting to find reaffirmation of the
principles that fought against injustice then, so those ideals may be
applied again, now. Penn's killing was one of the factors that helped
break the Klan hold over the South in the sixties. National attention
and government pressure was focused on the KKK and it withered under
the assault. But though much improved, too much stayed the same, and
today there is a small yet mounting growth in the Ku Klux
Klan. Shipp's short chronicle might not have been written but for
that. History could have noted Colonel Penn and moved on to other
atrocities but Shipp has given the fullest story possible in order
that we not avoid an important lesson.
          Asleep or awake the Klan lives, like a grub in the ground until a
spring of opportunity arrives. It's spring again, and Bill Shipp's
book reminds us that no matter what its guise the Klan deals out
violence, death and injustice which have to be countered. The lesson
must be that old battles don't always stay won but must be fought
again and again.
          
            Grant Wilson is a freelance writer and an aspiring
gentleman farmer in Kensington, Ga.
          
        