Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

Chapter 5 finds Horwitz in the small Kentucky county of Guthrie, home to both the famed writer Robert Penn Warren and the racially-motivated killing of Michael Westerman, a white, Confederate sympathizer who was shot dead a by a group of African-American young men. Guthrie appears to be the type of place where people pay no homage to ideas of political correctness, as the first bar explored by Horwitz is a biker bar where a man is wearing a t-shirt proclaiming, “I’ve Got a Nigger in My Family Tree” (89).

The chapter centers on the backstory and result of the Michael Westerman killing and trial, an event that bitterly divided the community along racial lines and eventually gained national attention from groups as varied as the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan, each arriving to support their respective sides during the trial.

Although the “circumstances surrounding Westerman’s death” (95) are widely-disputed, the story goes that Westerman, whose truck was flying the Confederate Battle Flag, was chased by a group of cars driven by young African-American men who attempted to box in Westerman and his wife, and then who shot and killed him. The alleged murderers claimed, however, that the chase resulted when Westerman supposedly called the group “Niggers!” (95) before he drove off from the gas station where both parties were.

Ultimately, after a long trial, a young African-American man name Freddie Morrow is found guilty of murder. Morrow is not a local, Guthrie resident, but rather had been born and raised in Chicago, and he had only moved to Guthrie in order to escape the violence of the city and attempt to get his life on track, which he appeared to be doing before the Westerman incident occurred. Overall, Horwitz’s telling of the Westerman trial and the tragedy of Freddie Morrow shows how racial tensions in the South survive, despite the Civil War having ended nearly 150 years ago.

The Westerman trial also serves as the backdrop for the ongoing debate in Todd County of whether or not the local high school sports teams should be continued to be called “the Rebels” (99). This highlights the divide that exists between African-Americans and many white, working-class Southerners, the latter of whom believed such changes are the result of African-Americans “fixin’ to strip white people—whites that ain’t rich—of what little they got” (99) and that African-Americans “just need to get over slavery. You can’t live in the past” (99).On the other hand, there is the sentiment of a younger, African-American generation that proclaims, “We aren’t going to just take it like our parents did…times have changed” (105).