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Good Kids, Bad
City
by Kyle Swenson
c.2019, Picador, $29.00 / $38.00 Canada
289 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Your hands were clean.
Freshly washed, not a speck of dirt, they were as clean as
your conscience. You did no wrong; instead, you promoted
what was good and right. But in Good Kids, Bad City
by Kyle Swenson, past actions sometimes don’t matter.
Over a decade ago, somewhere near Kyle Swenson’s desk at a
Cleveland-area weekly newspaper, letters piled up from
prisoners begging for journalistic investigation of denied
crimes. Like many newsfolk, Swenson was skeptical of those
vows of innocence, so he dismissed the letters and others
like them. Still, because he was fresh out of ideas for his
monthly feature story, he agreed to meet someone to talk
about a crime that happened before Swenson was even born.
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Kwame Ajamu arrived with a box of papers that shocked
Swenson to his core.
On May 19, 1975, as Swenson learned, salesman Harry J.
Franks was collecting from his accounts when he was shot and
killed on a Cleveland sidewalk. Coming home from a pick-up
basketball game, Ajamu, Wiley Bridgeman, and Rickey Jackson
pushed into a surrounding crowd and saw the white man
bleeding on the concrete, but they didn’t stick around. The
situation seemed under control. Franks was dead; there was
no reason to linger.
They hadn’t been there when Franks was shot, but on May 25,
Bridgeman, Ajamu, and Jackson were arrested and charged with
murder on the basis of a false account given by a
12-year-old boy, a lie that folded into more mistruths
encouraged by corrupt police. Jackson, Ajamu, and Bridgeman
swiftly went to trial and were ultimately sentenced to
death. Their sentences were later commuted to life.
Released in 2003 after making parole, Ajamu had “talked
about his case to anyone who would listen” but no one
believed him. That changed in 2011, when a lawyer suggested
he take his story to a newspaper reporter.
They arranged to meet at a coffee house. Ajamu “was
nervous.”
“That’s when,” says Swenson, “I walked through the door.”
That sentence reads as though it should have a cape and
SuperPowers, doesn’t it? But no, there’s much more to
Good Kids, Bad City and author Kyle Swenson was merely a
catalyst: he was the listener Kwame Ajamu needed.
To help readers better understand the subtleties of this
tale and its full impact, Swenson shares the history of
Cleveland, Ohio, a highly progressive city nearly two
centuries ago but one that slowly fell victim to racism
further complicated by corruption. Thorough accounts put
things into keen perspective here, especially when we’re
invited into the home lives of the accused men and their
families and we get to know the men as boys. And yet, even
with those once-happy sightlines, this story might’ve been
just another tale of wrong accusations, except for one
thing: Swenson also tracks the accuser, the boy, as he grows
up.
That story-within-a-story mushrooms in a way that you’ll
want to see. It’ll outrage you as it fascinates. It’s a draw
that makes Good Kids, Bad City a book to get your
hands on. |
