Peach Tree Times

Imagine being convicted and sentenced to death three times for a murder you didn’t commit. That’s exactly what happened to a Black sharecropper in 1948. And it occurred right here in Carrollton.

University of West Georgia history alum and current Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Chris Joyner ’92 will return to campus next Wednesday to discuss his book, “The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson,” which was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker.

Henderson was wrongfully accused in the 1948 murder of Carl “Buddy” Stevens Jr. and sentenced three separate times to die by electric chair. Each conviction was overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court. But Joyner’s true crime tome goes beyond the multitude of injustices to examine a community – and a nation – at a crossroads.

“The death of Buddy Stevens and the trial of Clarence Henderson is a pretty straightforward story, but it’s hard to really understand unless you put it in the context of the first decade after World War II,” Joyner explained. “All the themes that were driving America during that period – desire for economic expansion after the Depression and war, paranoia in politics, the Red Scare, and the beginning of the Cold War and civil rights movement. It impacted Carrollton in very concrete ways.”

One could say Joyner has been working on this project for almost 30 years. After earning two degrees in history, he returned to Carrollton to work for the Times-Georgian, the local newspaper, when his dad told him about a cold case from almost 50 years prior. His dad wasn’t especially close to Stevens, but they knew each other casually. So when Joyner got the reporter job, his dad advised him to look into it.

“One day, I pulled down the 1948 volume of The Georgian, as it was known, and started flipping through,” Joyner recalled. “I was drawn into the story. The documents drew me in the same way they would've in school, and I spent nights and weekends collecting information together about that story, very interested in how it would turn out.”

Fresh in his career, Joyner moved from assignment to assignment, and the project was put on hold until he returned to work for Georgia’s largest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. By this time, he was 20 years into his career as a reporter, which gave him more writing experience and patience that was required to finally write the book.

Original source can be found here.