one by one, they disappeared. at least two dozen boys and girls, ages seven to seventeen, disappeared, while walking home or riding their bikes, on their way to the bank, the store or the local pool, in spring and fall, winter and summer. most of their bodies were found within a few months, in abandoned buildings or vacant lots, under bridges or deep in the woods. some of them were never found at all. For three years, from 1979 to 1981, these disappearances terrified the people of Atlanta, and the city has been haunted by them ever since. None of the murders were ever solved, although, inexplicably, twenty-two of the cases were closed after a man named Wayne Williams was convicted of two other murders in 1982, both of adult men, who police say were linked to at least ten of the missing children.
That argument failed to convince many of the children’s families, nor much of the rest of the city, and finally, last year, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms ordered the police department to reopen its investigation into the murders of kids in atlanta, as the cases came to be called. that decision has drawn attention to a series of crimes that have never really been out of the public eye. They have inspired countless exhibitions, feature films, and adaptations: a dramatic miniseries, in 1985, starring Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, and Martin Sheen; Tayari Jones’s moving novel Leaving Atlanta, published in 2002; a documentary, a decade ago, by CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien, and a different one, last year, for Research Discovery, by the production company Will Packer; a callous and uncaring podcast two years ago called “Atlanta Monster”; a more compelling season of the netflix series “mindhunter” last year.
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The most recent addition to this canon is the five-part documentary “Atlanta’s Missed and Assassinated: The Lost Children,” which began airing earlier this month on HBO. (The final episode of the series airs on Sunday.) Directed by Sam Pollard, Maro Chermayeff, Jeff Dupre and Joshua Bennett, with musician John Legend among its executive producers, this poignant and patient series begins with Major Bottom announcing that the cases will be reopened, then methodically backtracks through the events themselves. , allowing family members, community members, law enforcement officers and reporters to share their memories.
Outside of a blink of a reference in the middle of the second episode, however, the most famous of the journalists who covered the cases is not mentioned. In 1985, two years before his death, James Baldwin published “The Evidence of Things Unseen,” a short book about the Atlanta child murders. It was built on the reports he had done in the Georgian capital for Playboy, before and after the arrest of Wayne Williams, and also on his life experience as a black American. the circumstances of that report were somewhat unfavourable; when the book was published, a critic at the time complained that it consisted of too much preaching and not enough research. but the book is a riveting true-crime work that marshals the injustice of a set of cases not just or even primarily to solve them, but to make an argument about justice itself. today, his argument seems prescient. “The Evidence of Things Unseen” is less a book about the deaths of black children than one about their lives, about the violence and neglect that too often afflict them, and about the ways in which, in today’s parlance, They matter and they don’t matter. .
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walter lowe, jr., wanted to cover the atlanta child murders himself. As Playboy’s first black editor, he recognized the importance of the story, but the magazine’s editorial director insisted the story needed a bigger name, so he looked up the phone number of one of the biggest names out there. happened to them. . At the time, James Baldwin had been James Baldwin for many years. he was the author of celebrated novels and plays, his essays in magazines like harper’s and the new yorker had been collected and bound into his own books, and his photograph had appeared on the cover of time under a banner that read “the thrust of the black for equality.” Lowe phoned Baldwin in France, where he had moved from New York City more than three decades earlier, on the advice of his mentor, the novelist Richard Wright, who insisted that for black artists it was better to be from America than from America. be in it.
For Lowe, it was an agonizing call, not because his literary hero might say no to the task, but because he might say yes. In a recollection he wrote for the magazine Emerging a few years after Baldwin’s death, Lowe recalled stuttering during the call, nervously trying to coax the author out of his refuge in France and reminding him of earlier essays he had written for Playboy, including them “words of a native son” and “the uses of the blues”. Baldwin had read about the child murders in the international edition of the Times, but he had reservations about going back south, curtly informing the young editor that he was too busy for the task. That’s when Lowe realized his idol might have the wrong idea of who was on the other end of the line. “It suddenly occurred to me that he might have thought I was white,” Lowe said, so “I reframed my request in terms of writing about our murdered children.” The author interrupted to ask if Lowe was black, then said, “I didn’t know Playboy had black editors.”
That fact fell short of a yes. He went the rest of the way by agreeing to cover all of Baldwin’s expenses: two hotel rooms (one for Baldwin and his romantic partner and one for Baldwin’s longtime assistant), plus food, drinks, entertainment, and a few hundred dollars. for anything else he might need—and promising to handle every detail of the assignment himself, beginning with meeting the writer at the Atlanta airport. Baldwin’s flight was delayed and the airline announced that the arrival gate had changed, so Lowe ran from one side of Hartsfield International to the other, only to find that the announcement was wrong, and then he ran back to the original gate. When he finally saw Baldwin for the first time, the writer “was as far from sober as France was” and announced, wearily, “I give myself entirely to his care.”
For Lowe, the experience was, in the end, a bit like agreeing to be the cat-in-the-hat attaché. Mercurial, easily distracted, and demanding, Baldwin spent much of his time in Atlanta ordering room service, pedicures, visiting friends, taking calls from Coretta Scott King and Andrew Young, and drinking heavily Stolichnaya. But on the fringes of it all, Baldwin did his homework: visiting crime scenes, talking to local leaders about the case, interviewing the children’s relatives. One night, after turning on the news and learning that another child was missing, Baldwin wanted to go downtown to watch the protesters gather at City Hall. It was late and Lowe offered to take a tape recorder so Baldwin could stay at the hotel, but Baldwin insisted that he wanted to go, and once there, the student protesters recognized him. “Hello, brothers and sisters!” one of them yelled. james baldwin is here! we have brother james baldwin here!”
“brother james” was a welcome presence in town: murders and disappearances like those that occurred in atlanta rarely received the attention that usually accompanied the disappearance and murder of white children, and black writers rarely had the platform that whites were to write about crimes of any kind, let alone those with black victims. In 1952, when Zora Neale Hurston covered the murder trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman accused of killing the white doctor who raped her, it was for the Pittsburgh Courier, an influential black newspaper with a circulation of a few hundred thousand; Playboy, in the early 1980s, had a circulation of around five million. Baldwin was a national name writing for a national magazine, and he would have a larger audience for his crime story and far more space and time than a weekly newspaper could give him to report it.
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baldwin stayed in atlanta for a few weeks, though nearly a year passed before his article finally appeared. in it, she wrote that she “sometimes cursed the editor whose brainstorming she had been”, since reporting on him was one of the most difficult he had ever undertaken. For his part, Lowe later noted that “one of the unfortunate aspects of being the editor of a major periodical is that you sometimes find yourself in the awkward position of having to persuade a creative person to produce by a deadline.” “coax” was a mild way of putting it; Lowe ended up harassing one of his favorite writers over the phone, by letter, and in person, including in a shocking fight that left Lowe worried that he had ruined the entire project. That fight came about because Playboy had mocked the essay in one month’s issue, promising it would appear in the next, and as the deadline drew perilously close, Lowe’s anxiety gave way to anger. “Stop fucking with me,” he yelled at Baldwin, in the presence of the writer’s entourage, including the pedicurist who had been summoned to his room to care for an ingrown toenail. (“Now, see? I cut off Mr. Baldwin’s foot!” exclaimed the man.) “I think you’re so addicted to being the famous James Baldwin that you don’t have the stomach to write like him,” Lowe. continued. “You’re getting old. The fire’s gone. So you’re trying to drink yourself to death. When, in a brief quiet moment, Baldwin calmly asked, “Are you done?” Lowe snapped, “No, I’m not. “.
There is no trace of any of this drama in the playboy article, which Baldwin ended up turning in a day before the deadline. “the evidence of things not seen” begins near what was then the end, with the judge’s selection for the trial of wayne williams, who had been charged with murder in the case now known as atkid, an acronym in reference to the city. of residence and the age of the victims, created by the federal bureau of investigation. Baldwin presumes some knowledge on the part of his audience about the crimes, and it takes him a few pages before he offers a litany of all the murdered children: each name, age, date last seen, date of death, and cause of death. death, punctuated by the line, “take out your dead”. The first two children disappeared in July 1979, and in April of the following year, some of the mothers of the missing children banded together to form the Committee to Stop Child Killings, drawing more media attention to what would soon be would occur. there will be nine confirmed murders. a task force also met that summer, and eventually fifty officers were involved in investigating the growing number of cases, looking for suspects but also looking for links, because it was never entirely clear how many, if any, of the murders of small children were committed. related.
Even a fact as basic as the casualty count was subject to debate. while some claimed that the number of cases was overestimated, others pointed to dozens of additional children who went missing during the same three-year period but were never included in the total, and still others noted that more children went missing under similar circumstances, even after that wayne williams was assassinated. in prison all of this made the issue of guilt even more confusing. Some believed that a single serial killer was at work, if not Williams then someone else, but many did not, and there were many other theories about who was killing black children. one of the most persistent targeted pedophiles, possibly even a ring of child pornographers. Another theory claimed that the Ku Klux Klan was involved and that the murders were committed to instigate a race war. authorities further muddied the case by insisting that two adult men who were found dead must have been connected to the child murders because of where their bodies were discovered, and then because they found fiber evidence on those bodies that allegedly matched similar evidence found on ten of the murdered children.
baldwin took a particular interest in this search for connections, which he saw as both an understandable human drive and also a pathological way of thinking about black life. the ages of the victims, the places where they had disappeared, the causes of their deaths, and the places of their recovery were too different to logically connect the crimes to a single perpetrator; the only “pattern” that baldwin could see was that all the victims were black and poor and that, due to these two facts, their cases were never investigated rigorously enough. In his opinion, the belated efforts by the authorities to solve the crimes had less to do with seeking justice than with ending the press scrutiny that the murders had attracted.
Meanwhile, some members of law enforcement insisted, accurately, if defensively, that there was nothing statistically significant about these disappearances and deaths: Atlanta had one of the highest homicide rates in the country, and more than the supposed number of atlanta children. he had disappeared every year for some time. it was media interest, desperately fueled by the families of the victims, that linked the cases; eventually that interest, important as it was, became its own kind of injury. “The Black Death has never before attracted so much attention,” Baldwin wrote, but “the publicity given to the massacre becomes, in itself, one more aspect of an unforgivable violation.” the families were grateful for anything that might lead to more thorough policing and pressure on authorities, but he made a show of his pain. After the twentieth victim was found, in early 1981, Ronald Reagan, the newly elected president, was pressed for comment on the case. Eventually, in an effort to demonstrate his administration’s “color blindness,” he sent over a million dollars and his own vice president’s to Atlanta to support public safety campaigns and the criminal investigation.
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