A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton by Deb Miller Landau – 5⭐

“I always had this feeling that the original story I wrote didn’t go deep enough,” she says. “I felt like there were questions that weren’t adequately answered in the past, by me or anyone else, and I wanted to ask those questions. I wanted to figure out what life was really like for Lita as part of an interracial couple living in Macon and Palm Beach, Florida. What was her experience living with James? Why did it take so long for the family to get justice?”

She began to work on a book that sought to finally and fully answer those questions. Landau knew that true crime is a problematic genre that can turn tragedy into spectacle, and often reduces victims of violent crimes and their families to thinly drawn, two-dimensional caricatures.

It’s also a genre that capitalizes on violence against women and girls, and favors the stories of White women. “Best American Crime Writing had essays or articles from 25 writers that year, and I was the only woman selected,” Landau says. “In the research for this book, every single investigator that I knew of or talked to was a man. Except in the DA’s office, most of the lawyers were men. The judges were men. So, in the same way we look at stories from a White lens, we also tend to look at stories from a male lens. And that was especially true of crime at that time.”

– Excerpt from interview with Deb Miller Landau from Atlanta Magazine

I think this quote does a really good job in outlining this book. I’ve noted many times about how problematic True Crime can be, but I do think that it also has a lot of positives. In this case, telling the story of Lita McClinton.

Lita’s story deserves to be told for a verity of reasons. There is the tragedy in the way she was murdered, the way the case was handled after her death, the pure callousness of the piece of shit who had her murdered, and the fact that it took so long for her and her family to get justice.

The story of a man having his wife murdered so he doesn’t have to deal with divorce and the financial fallout is unfortunately, a tale as old as time. Men committing such acts and getting away with it, especially in the 80’s, is also unfortunately not unusual. The patriarchy is going to patriarchy and has always protected men like this and will continue to do so.

I do think that in Lita’s case, there was more than just misogyny in the mix though, race absolutely added to her not getting justice sooner. Her race and her husbands privilege!

This piece of shit love bombed this young woman because he wanted to ‘shock’ people in his racist bubble. He forced her to go from a very racist neighbourhood — Macon, Georgia — to Palm Beach, Florida. Home of some of the trashiest humans that can be found from what I gathered. Also the most racist. To me it feels like dickhead Jim did this to punish Lita. I think he wanted a Black wife for the shock value, and after he made her fall in love with him, defy her family for him, and give up a lot of herself for him, he decided to punish her. Moving to trashville Palm Beach was the final straw in a long line of humiliation he meted out, and she left and filed for divorce. Dickhead Jim couldn’t fathom not only her leaving, but her having the audacity to demand to be properly compensated for putting up with his nasty ass.

What followed was him ruining multiple lives and getting away with doing it for far too long!

This story is truly tragic, my heart absolutely broke for Lita’s family, those who remember her, and those who unfortunately never got to meet her. They seem like an extraordinary family, who not once took their boot off the neck of dickhead Jim. Now he is will spend the rest of his life in prison, I hope they eventually get the thing that dickhead Jim loves the most, his money!

I feel like Deb Miller Landau told Lita and the McClinton’s story respectfully and factually, and it’s all the more powerful for it being told that way.