Chapter Eleven

I’ll Fly Away

It was the third bomb threat in two months. As we quickly cleared the office and waited for
the police to arrive, the entire staff was nervous. We now had five attorneys, an investigator,
and three administrative staff members. Law students had started arriving for short-term
internships, which provided us with additional legal assistance and critically needed
investigative help. But none of them had signed on for bomb threats. It was tempting to
ignore them, but two years earlier an African American civil rights lawyer in Savannah,
Georgia, named Robert “Robbie” Robinson was murdered when a bomb sent to his law office
exploded. Around the same time, a federal appeals court judge, Robert Vance, was killed in
Birmingham by a mail bomb. Days later a third bomb was sent to a civil rights office in
Florida and a fourth to a courthouse in Atlanta. The bomber seemed to be attacking legal
professionals connected to civil rights. We were warned that we could be targets, and for
weeks we carefully hauled our mail packages to the federal courthouse for X-ray screenings
before opening them. After that, bomb threats were no joke.
Everyone fled the building while we discussed the likelihood of an actual bombing. The
caller had described our building precisely when making his threat. Sharon, our receptionist,
had scolded the caller. She was a young mother of two small children and had grown up in a
poor, rural white family. She spoke to people plainly and directly.
“Why are you doing this? You’re scaring us!”
She said the man had sounded middle-aged and Southern, but she couldn’t give any more
of a description. “I’m doing you a favor,” he said threateningly. “I want y’all to stop doing
what you’re doing. My first option is not to kill everybody, so you better get out of there now!
Next time there won’t be a warning.”
It had been a month since the McMillian hearing. The first time the office was threatened
the caller had made racist remarks about the need to teach us a lesson. Around the same time
I got threatening calls at home. One typical caller said, “If you think we’re going to let you
help that nigger get away with killing that girl, you’ve got another thing coming. You’re both
going to be dead niggers!”
Although I was handling other cases, I was certain the calls were in response to the