January 23, 1957 – Torture and Murder of African American Willie Edwards, Jr. in Alabama “By Mistake”

Willie Edwards, Jr., born in 1932, was a 24-year-old African American who was murdered by members of the Alabama KKK in a case of mistaken identity (i.e., he was Black, and that was close enough).

As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, the racial climate in Montgomery, Alabama was “palpably ugly” in early 1957:

A grass-roots movement of black citizens — led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — had recently forced the integration of the city transit system. The Ku Klux Klan reacted violently. Members of the Klan marched through Montgomery in an effort to terrorize black bus riders and bombed the homes and businesses of boycott supporters. Several members of a local Ku Klux Klan group decided that only the murder of a black would express their outrage.”

The Klansmen decided to look for a Black delivery truck driver suspected of dating a white woman. In a fatal move, Willie Edwards Jr., was substituting for the driver on this night in history when the Klansmen pulled him over on by a bridge along the Alabama River outside Montgomery. They mistakenly assumed that Edwards was their target and tortured him at gunpoint, then ordered him to jump 125 feet off the bridge and into the river. His decomposed body was found three months later.

The investigation turned up no suspects and was quickly closed.

According to the New York Times:

Willie Edwards’s 23-year-old wife, Sarah Jean, frantic with grief and anxiety, said she ‘just about went batty with it.’ Alone with three small children to raise, she had very little money. No one had information for her, no lawyer would look into it and her husband’s employers offered neither help nor comfort. . . . She left Montgomery with her children in 1961 and never moved back.”

In 1976, then State Attorney General Bill Baxley re-opened the Edwards case. Four people were arrested and charged with Edwards’s murder: Sonny Kyle Livingston Jr. (38), Henry Alexander (46), James York (73), and Raymond Britt Jr. Britt broke the long silence with his affidavit (in exchange for immunity), dated February 20, 1976. In the statement to Attorney General Bill Baxley, Britt described how on the night of January 23, 1957, he along with three other men beat and forced Edwards to jump off the Tyler-Goodwin Bridge into the Alabama River. Alabama Judge Frank Embry, however, dismissed the charges, even with Britt’s sworn testimony, because no cause of death was ever established. He concluded that “merely forcing a person to jump from a bridge does not naturally and probably lead to the death of such person.”