Documentary prompts review of 60-year-old Blakely murder

BOSTON — When Clennon King showcased his documentary “Fair Game: Surviving a 1960 Georgia Lynching” in the tiny southwest Georgia community of Blakely and a day later in Albany in February of this year, he said he hoped it would be the impetus for the reopening of a case in which an 8-year-old child was raped and murdered.

It now appears that King is getting his wish.

The documentary has helped prompt a southwest Georgia district attorney to review the case for new evidence. District Attorney Ronald V. McNease Jr. of the Pataula Judicial Circuit notified King, a Boston-based documentary film director with strong ties to southwest Georgia, of the review.

“I will review the case for new evidence,” McNease wrote in a one-sentence email dated July 15 and addressed to King.

The film, which can be viewed free of charge online, was reviewed by the Offices of Gov. Brian Kemp and Attorney General Christopher Carr in Atlanta.

In May, an aide to Carr referred King to McNease’s office in responsive to King’s request that the state reopen the cold case.

“While my film makes clear the state of Georgia wrongly convicted and sentenced to death a New Jersey man who, against all odds, won his freedom, no one ever answered for the girl’s death,” King said in a statement sent to media. “Authorities now have a chance to get it right, to do their job and determine who was responsible.”

Regarding possible new evidence, King pointed out that no autopsy was ever performed on the child, who is buried in Blakely. He also noted the victim’s mother, Frances Holmes, 99, who still resides in Blakely and was listed as a witness in the original case, was never interviewed nor submitted a statement. She has never spoken publicly about her child’s murder.

According to King, many black residents, including family members of the 8-year old victim, maintain the child’s murderer was a white man and that the case was part of a cover-up to protect him.

The 63-minute film has been viewed by audiences across the country, including showings in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida and Georgia.

The film tells the story of 24-year-old Navy veteran James Fair Jr. of Bayonne, New Jersey, who in April 1960 joined a friend on a road trip home to Blakely. But their arrival in rural Early County could not have been more ill-timed, as it coincided with the alleged rape and murder of 8-year-old Yvonne Armelia Holmes, resulting in Fair being fingered as the fall guy.

Less than three days later — with no jury present or a lawyer to defend him — the amateur boxer was sentenced to Georgia’s electric chair, prompting his mother, Alice, to mount a 26-month campaign in a fight for his life.

King dedicated the documentary to the 24 known black men who were lynched in Early County between 1881 and 1960 and to his father, civil rights attorney C.B. King, who represented Fair in what he said was an effort to prevent Fair from becoming the 25th victim.

The film features several prominent figures, including Clinton presidential advisor Vernon Jordan, who was a young law clerk on the case, and Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the fourth black man to be appointed a White House cabinet secretary, who hailed from the town where the case unfolded. Also featured is former Blakely Chief of Police Charles Middleton, who offers an unvarnished and candid look into his own family’s suggested role in a lynching that took place in Early County.

Early County is the ancestral home of R&B music star Cissy Houston, her daughter Whitney Houston, and her niece Dionne Warwick, whose family migrated to New Jersey in the 1940s.

“Fair Game” marks King’s second documentary. His first, the award-winning “Passage at St. Augustine: The 1964 Black Lives Matter Movement That Transformed America,” won the Henry Hampton Award of Excellence in Documentary Filmmaking at the 2015 Roxbury International Film Festival.

File Photo: Carlton Fletcher