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57 years ago my late father was living in Montgomery, Alabama, and had formed a friendship with the Negro chaplain at Kilby State Penitentiary.

He was invited, through this friendship, to witness executions at the prison, to see the state put to death a black man, Charlie Washington, who had killed a storekeeper in a hold-up, and a younger white man, Johnnie Birchfield, who had killed a younger white boy. Because he was a scholar, he felt compelled to write down what he saw and heard and smelled that night at Kilby State Penitentiary. I take up his narrative as Johnnie Birchfield is about to be lead away. My father is in the black man's cell. "Washington would not sit down he writes perhaps he thought it not fitting; perhaps it was growing nervousness that prompted him to stand, We sang with an increasing frenzy. In my mind, and I suppose in the minds of others, was the thought that we must distract his attention from what was going on across the hall. At last, through the ragged chorus of one of our songs, I heard the tramp of men walking back, the clang of Birchfield's cell door opening, and the "raising" of the hymn decided upon for his march to the death chamber - the one which he had sung with so much enthusiasm with us - "I've wandered far, away from God; now, I'm coming home." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the procession take form, the white-shirted Birchfield passing by the shuttered oubliette. Washington saw him too, and his eyes roved hungrily about the cell. As the procession moved down the aisle, he strode to the door, unmindful of us, and peered anxiously out at the tail-end as it dissappeared into the maw of the chair-room." "We were hoarse, having sung for almost three houjrs without cessation. We had already sung all of the hymns most familiar to us

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