Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

Chapter 5 finds Horwitz in the small Kentucky county of Guthrie, home to both the famed writer Robert Penn Warren and the racially-motivated killing of Michael Westerman, a white, Confederate sympathizer who was shot dead a by a group of African-American young men. Guthrie appears to be the type of place where people pay no homage to ideas of political correctness, as the first bar explored by Horwitz is a biker bar where a man is wearing a t-shirt proclaiming, “I’ve Got a Nigger in My Family Tree” (89).

The chapter centers on the backstory and result of the Michael Westerman killing and trial, an event that bitterly divided the community along racial lines and eventually gained national attention from groups as varied as the NAACP and the Ku Klux Klan, each arriving to support their respective sides during the trial.

Although the “circumstances surrounding Westerman’s death” (95) are widely-disputed, the story goes that Westerman, whose truck was flying the Confederate Battle Flag, was chased by a group of cars driven by young African-American men who attempted to box in Westerman and his wife, and then who shot and killed him. The alleged murderers claimed, however, that the chase resulted when Westerman supposedly called the group “Niggers!” (95) before he drove off from the gas station where both parties were.