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14 The Chester Controversy On May 11, 1979, Chester County was thrust back into my life. A young black man was found dead along a Chester roadside. An autopsy determined that his death had been caused by a hit-and-run driver. Rumors circulated that the young man—Mickey McClintock—had been murdered for dating a white girl. Things reached a fever pitch when allegations were made that he had not only been murdered but had been castrated . SHAC was asked to investigate. Public attention to the incident escalated, and in time considerable interest was generated among black people throughout the area. That interest became much more intense with the arrival of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from Atlanta. The SCLC president, the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who later became a good friend and fierce supporter, called for a state investigation of the allegations and threatened to organize a march from Chester to Columbia. As things escalated, requests were made to exhume and reexamine McClintock’s body. Reverend Lowery supported those calls and sent an SCLC field organizer to Chester. Golden Frinks, the SCLC field secretary, with whom I was well acquainted, was good at arousing passions and motivating crowds. He started spending lots of time in Chester doing just that. He organized a group of local ministers, many of whom had supported me in my race for secretary of state the year before. They spent evening upon evening speaking to overflow crowds at churches throughout the county. Like so many racial disputes, the matter was boiling down to the advocacy of a civil rights organization as opposed to the role of a quasi-judicial agency seeking to resolve the issue administratively. I attended many of those mass meetings, and Mr. Frinks took to making me the target of many of his taunts. Advocacy was carrying the day. Golden Frinks made good on his threats and started leading a march from Chester to Columbia. Things were spiraling out of control. I tried everything I could to restore calm. I went so far as to offer a cash reward for any information that would be helpful and deposited five hundred dollars in a local bank to hold in escrow. At the height of the controversy, I received a visit from Chief J. P. Strom of SLED. He told me that he thought we should exhume the body, which was fine with me. But then he said that the governor was out of the country, and his staff had instructed him to coordinate his activities with me. I agreed to a second autopsy, and when the protestors and SCLC insisted that a black medical examiner perform the procedure, we brought in an African American 138 A Racial Arbiter pathologist from Washington, D.C. The result was the same as had been determined six months earlier—no castration, no murder, simple hit-and-run—a terrible tragedy for the family but no racial crime. It’s easy to get swept up in the spirit of the moment and allow rational judgment to be overwhelmed by emotion. I understood that. I probably didn’t satisfy my political supporters or make a lot of new friends by taking the dispassionate route, but I insisted that facts should determine SHAC’s outcomes. Once the facts had been determined, I charged Golden Frinks with misleading the Chester community and lying about the castration and murder. When a reporter asked Frinks for his response to my charges, he shrugged his shoulders, looked directly into the TV camera, and said: “So what? Everybody tells a little lie every now and then.” Such an outcome is never satisfying. I don’t know if anyone was ever arrested in connection with the young man’s death. Much pain had been inflicted on the Chester community for no good reason, and there seemed to be little remorse for it all. I came away with the consoling thought that SHAC, battered as it was by all the outcry and controversy, had survived a serious test. Our reputation for firmness and fairness, even in the face of difficult conditions, remained intact. ...

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