BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : AFRICAN AMERICAN " LT COLONEL LEMUEL PENN " A BLACK ARMY RESERVE OFFICER KILLED IN 1964 BY KU KLUX KLANMEN - COWARDS WHO ARE NOT HUMAN BY PLOT TO KILL GOOD HUMAN BEINGS : GOES INTO THE " HALL OF BLACK HEROES "

             BLACK            SOCIAL           HISTORY                          

                                                                                                                                                                        Community pays tribute to man killed by Klansmen

Funds raised for historical marker

By Beth Hatcher

COMER - Soft music and hard memories filled the air in Springfield Baptist Church Saturday as locals gathered to pay tribute to Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a black Army Reserve officer killed in 1964 by Ku Klux Klansmen as he traveled through Madison County on his way home to Washington D.C.

 Back | Next 

The event - organized by the newly formed Lemuel Penn Memorial Committee - paid tribute to Penn through gospel songs, prayer and a donation offered by the 200-plus crowd.

The donation will be used toward the purchase of a bronze historical marker that will pinpoint the spot at the Madison County Bridge where Penn was killed, said Dena Chandler, the committee's chairperson.

The group is also working to get the highway that runs over the bridge, Georgia Highway 172, renamed in honor of Penn, a WWII veteran killed by a shotgun blast while he traveled over the bridge with two other black Reserve officers after they'd completed their annual two-week Reserve training at Fort Benning.

Jeff Blake/Staff

 Pianist Keith Campbell leads the congregation in song Saturday as people line up to make offerings during a gospel music concert in honor of Lemuel Penn at Comer's Springfield Baptist Church.

''It's wrong to let a good man be taken by wickedness and then forgotten,'' Chandler said. A native North Carolinian, Chandler blamed the past racism of the South on the need of working class whites to find a scapegoat in those times of intensive poverty.

Chandler said the Klansmen who killed Penn - they'd been tailing his car from Athens - were motivated purely by the three men's color. On the bridge, the Klansmen drove their car up beside Penn's and pumped in two shotgun blasts, instantly killing Penn, Chandler said.

Though the South's racial climate has changed, more healing needs to be done, Chandler said, and not enough people know about Penn's story, part of the reason the committee wants the marker erected. People need to understand the past so that they won't repeat it, Chandler said .

''Take time to fix your own heart,'' Evangelist Francestine Green said at the service's start, which included remarks from several local church elders and the music of several area choirs.

Green said the service wasn't about pointing fingers or blaming anyone, but moving forward. Green, a native of Madison County, was 14 at the time of Penn's death. She said she remembered the segregation of the times and the common lessons of ''being safe'' every black person had to know. Green said her parents always taught her to be out with groups of people, never alone.

Penn too was aware of the many unspoken codes and dangers for black people in the 1960s South.

''They left at midnight specifically so they wouldn't be seen,'' Chandler said of Penn and his companions' late night journey back to D.C.

But they were seen. And Penn's death helped focus national attention on race relations in the South. Robert Benham , a justice on the Georgia Supreme Court, said Penn's death inspired him to go into law.

Special

 Locals gathered Saturday to pay tribute Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a black Army Reserve officer killed in 1964 by Ku Klux Klansmen as he traveled through Madison County on his way home to Washington D.C.

Benham, who was present at Saturday's service, had just graduated from a segregated high school in Cartersville when Penn was killed.

But Benham sees race relations changing for the better in Georgia, a sentiment echoed by many in the crowd.

''The things that bind us together are stronger than the bad memories,'' Chandler said, adding that white and black Southerners share a culture rooted in agriculture and evangelical religion.

And as he stood outside his music-filled church, the Rev. Joseph Wright, pastor at Springfield Baptist, also agreed that race relations have improved throughout the South since the 1960s. But he noted that ''just leaving people alone'' isn't enough. Madison County African-Americans may not fear lynchings anymore, but that doesn't mean that people have laid aside all their prejudice, he said. ''Hidden racism is more dangerous,'' Wright said.