Random Thoughts

A tragic tale, part 5

 

August 19, 2022



By 1970, Jesse Hill Ford had become a well-known personage in his adopted hometown of Humboldt, Tennessee. Locals had come to accept him as one of their own as he and his family became part of the community.

Ford’s wife, Sally, had grown up there. Her father was a medical doctor so everyone in town knew her. Her husband was an outsider but Jesse had made lots of friends in town and often went hunting with some of them.

Jesse and Sally also belonged to the country club. They eventually had four children who attended the local public schools. The two oldest, Jesse III (known as “Jay”) and Charles, both played football for Humboldt High.

The younger children, daughters Sarah and Elizabeth, were both popular and also active in school and community activities.

Moreover, almost everyone in town knew about Ford’s success as an author of fiction, even if few of them had read anything he had written.

Then, when Ford’s novel “The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones” was turned into a movie, several scenes were shot in Humboldt, helping the town’s economy and exciting all of its citizens.

Local residents may not have read the novel, but they went to see the movie. The town’s white citizens (who made up a little more than half of the total population of 10,000) were, by and large, unhappy with the way the movie portrayed them as being racially intolerant.

This, despite the fact that the local schools were still segregated several years after the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled them to be unconstitutional.

The Ford family was suddenly not as popular as they had been! Black residents of Humboldt, however, generally liked the movie. Some of them were, in fact, relatives of the murdered undertaker upon whom Ford had modeled his fictional title character.

But the Fords’ fall from grace was just beginning. By autumn of 1970 a separate set of circumstances caused the town’s African American residents to be unhappy with the family, too – as we will see next week.

 

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