VOICE FROM THE PAST
Carlton Lewis knew Mr. Willie. He knew Willie had been in and out of Central State Hospital.
The facility, notoriously once known as the world’s largest asylum, sits 50 miles south of Greene County, where Lewis and Willie found themselves on a hot August afternoon on opposite sides of a front door.
Lewis also knew Mr. Willie was a big man. In the midst of a mental health crisis, Willie had attacked his mother and father and barricaded himself inside their sweltering home with all the doors and windows locked.
It was Lewis’ job to get Willie out of the house and back to Central State.
“Willie, are you in there?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Willie says.
“Come out here. We need to talk to you,” Lewis says.
“You need to get off my porch,” Willie responds.
“No, we’re not going to get off the porch … Come on out and talk.”
“I’m not going to tell you again to get off my porch,” Willie says.
A moment later, Lewis found himself underneath both a sweat-soaked Willie and the front door, which Willie had broken out of its frame with the rage of a charging bull.
The scene, after a struggle involving several more officers and two cans of mace, ultimately ends with a handcuffed Willie returning to Central State and sheepishly greeting the doctors once inside. Lewis, perhaps a little banged up but otherwise OK, returns to duty as a Greene County deputy.
The incident is one of the harrowing tales that opens the new five-part podcast, “Policing Greene: A Policeman at the Sunset of the Jim Crow South.” Based on the book of the same name, the podcast centers on Lewis, a real-life small-town lawman in rural east Georgia who retired in the mid-1980s after two decades of service to his community.
The podcast hosts are Carlton’s son Tom Lewis, a former Chief of Staff to Georgia Gov. Joe Frank Harris and adviser to the president of Georgia State University, and the book’s author, Hal McAlister, a longtime friend of Tom’s and a Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Georgia State.
RECORDING HISTORY
While the book was published in 2018 and is still available at Amazon.com, the podcast was produced only last year but has its origins more than 30 years ago with a conversation.
Tom, then serving as Harris’ Chief of Staff, was encouraged by a reporter who knew his father to record some of Carlton’s stories onto audio cassettes. It was 1987, Carlton was approaching retirement, and when visiting one weekend with his son, the pair did just that.
The book “Policing Greene: A Policeman at the Sunset of the Jim Crow South” was published in 2018. A podcast of the same name was released late last year.
Over several hours of conversation, Carlton recalled the attempted bank robbery that began with the shocking murder of a bank vice-president that made the national news. He recalled being shot at by a town employee, and the officers who got shot — one fatally — while he served as Chief of Police.
He told the stories of fighting alongside his Black partner, Johnny Grimes, who would go on to retire as a lieutenant colonel with the Georgia State Patrol. The pair would, on occasion, bust up juke joints for curfew violations and Carlton, more often than not, would go to bat for the men he locked up when it came time to face the judge.
“Ironically, when the next week rolled around, a lot of times Dad would go to the judge and say, ‘You know, your honor, I think we ought to go lenient on him, because he can’t make any money if he’s in jail, and he’s got kids at home,’” Tom says. “The judge would say, ‘Well, you arrested him.’ And Dad would reply, ‘Well, he was breaking the law, but he also needs to feed his family.’”
Carlton spoke about staking out a moonshine still, arresting Hosea Williams for drunk driving and getting bored while providing security for Kenny Rogers. He recounted the story of Willie, who broke the door down on top of him.
He told story after story while Tom and a friend rolled tape.
“I got him to do it, and I was so glad I did, because he passed away suddenly about 10 weeks later,” Tom says. It’s a lesson that family history can disappear in, literally, a heartbeat.
When Tom’s granddaughter began asking about her great-grandfather’s exploits, Tom dusted off the tapes and gave them a listen. He also shared them with his friend McAlister, who by then had penned a number of titles, including books about the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he was working to build the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy in the early 1990s when he and Tom first met at Georgia State.
THE TIMES WERE A'CHANGING
The stories Carlton told took place over the course of his 22-year law enforcement career, which didn’t begin until he was already 48 years old, in 1964. It was a time of tectonic cultural shifts, particularly in the South.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public places, and outlawed employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. The Voting Rights Act, passed the following year, prohibited literacy tests and increased federal oversight of the election process — moves aimed at ensuring Black Americans could exercise their right to vote amid the efforts of some Southern officials to bar them from the polls.
Having served in the Navy, Carlton had been a partner in a successful dry cleaning business after being discharged. He later owned a filling station, where Tom remembers working as an attendant as young as 10 years old.
Carlton went on to work for Standard Coffee, becoming its top salesman in Georgia, Tom says, before being approached by Greene County Sheriff L.L. Wyatt to join his team as a deputy.
It meant a huge pay cut, but it was what he felt he had to do.
“I wasn’t completely satisfied,” Carlton is recorded saying, referring to his earlier careers. “I had a drive to do something, and I enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed every minute I’ve had policing. … To make a good policeman you’ve got to love people and you’ve got to want to help people.”
It was that compassion — “He was a Christian in what I call the golden-rule sense,” says McAlister — that marked Carlton’s career in law enforcement.
“To enforce the law, he would never walk away from a fight. He would walk into juke joints knowing he was going to get into fights with people and have to drag them out, but he knew when to turn it off,” McAlister says. “And he never killed anybody. His mentor and boss, Sheriff L.L. Wyatt, shot and killed nine people … But in the heat of battle (Carlton) would just not do it. He knew when it was time to quit. When he had control, he wouldn’t take it any further.”
After a few years as a deputy and then chief deputy under Wyatt, Carlton was appointed Chief of Police in Union Point, a small town about 7 miles northeast of the county seat of Greensboro. He worked to enforce the law with an even hand in a community made up of residents about equal parts white and Black.
When Sheriff Wyatt died in 1977, Black residents urged Carlton to run for the office, but he declined and stayed on at Union Point to finish his career.
While the community was not immune to racism and prejudice, Tom says, it had leaders working to do the right thing — leaders like a school superintendent who moved to desegregate the schools without being forced by the courts to do so. Tom’s mother, in fact, was the first white teacher to raise her hand to volunteer to teach at the Black school.
“Greene County was not free from racism by any means,” Tom says. “But we had, I think, the right people in place to try to ease that tension and Dad, the way he policed, he did that.”
SHARING THE MESSAGE
Following the publication of “Policing Greene,” Tom was encouraged to produce a podcast based on the book.
Steve Clarke, a friend of Tom’s who serves alongside him on the board of a nonprofit organization, also happens to be the chairman of the board of Team BlueLine, a national 501(c)(3) that assists families of police officers killed or seriously injured, physically or mentally, in the line of duty.
Clarke says Team BlueLine funded the podcast in part because it shares real stories about what real officers experience.
“A lot of the things Carlton faced are still around today,” Clarke says. “There’s a human side to what law enforcement officers do.”
Joking that it “hit the best-seller list in Union Point in its second week,” Tom says the interest in the book has been encouraging, and he hopes the podcast — which has so far been downloaded in 20 countries around the world — helps share the stories in the book more widely.
“It’s been an honor to both of us that it’s gotten the kind of attention it has all over,” Tom says.
You can find the “Policing Greene” podcast on most any podcast service you frequent.
Photos courtesy of Tom Lewis
