Anatomy of Absolute Power

Alexandra Marvar | The Atavist Magazine | December 2025 | 2,124 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 170, “The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins.”

Author’s Note: The American sheriff is an office as old as the colonies. In England, the sheriff—the reeve of the shire—was appointed by the king to maintain law and order, collect taxes for the crown, and raise the posse comitatus. After the Revolutionary War, this British import became an elected position. But 250 years on, some U.S. sheriffs seem to still want to answer to a king—and in the absence of a king, to hold absolute power. The following story was first published in 2018, in a too-short-lived magazine called Topic. At the time, I thought of my work as righting a whitewashed historical record, sharing an underrepresented perspective, filling out the context around a supposedly heroic “legend in his own time” in the Deep South. We were not quite one year into Donald Trump’s first presidential term, and constitutional sheriffs—ironically, the term for sheriffs who believe they have more authority than the Constitution when it comes to choosing whether or not to enforce federal laws—were emerging as some of his most vocal supporters. Now a year into Trump’s second term, this claque of sheriffs are ever more boldly superseding federal law on issues like immigration, voting rights, and election procedures. Revisiting this story now, I understand Lummie Jenkins differently. I’d originally considered my piece to be a history, revealing the dark truth about a man who tamped down the civil rights movement in his county while maintaining a public reputation of charm and humor. Now I also see it as a case study on the making of the constitutional sheriff and how that figure’s particular brand of power has persevered through wave after wave of democratic reform.

—Alexandra Marvar

Talk to anyone over the age of 70 in Camden, Alabama, and they can tell you a story about Lummie Jenkins, the sheriff of Wilcox County from 1939 to 1971. According to newspapers across the Deep South, Percy Columbus Jenkins—also known as Sheriff Lummie, Mr. Lummie, or just Lummie—was “a superb raconteur,” a “master psychologist,” and a “modern-day hero.” It was common lore that, unlike other sheriffs in the region, Lummie didn’t need to carry a gun, and he didn’t go prowling for suspects. Instead, he kicked back in his chair at his chinaberry-wood desk, packed his pipe with Prince Albert tobacco, and summoned the guilty parties to the Wilcox County Courthouse in downtown Camden simply by word of mouth. Out of fear or respect, the legend goes, suspects came in of their own accord.

The length of Lummie’s tenure as Wilcox County’s chief law enforcer—eight consecutive terms—broke records in Alabama. And because much of it took place before the dawn of Miranda rights, which were enshrined in law by a Supreme Court ruling in 1966, there are countless stories, some surely truer than others, about the sheriff’s knack for coercing a confession from anyone. Newspapers reported claims that he employed sorcery, mind reading, and dreaded doses of “Truth Medicine”—sips from a glass bottle of Listerine he kept in his office that sported the disclaimer “Will paralyze if you lie.” Lummie had powers, people said, that exceeded those of ordinary lawmen.

You could say that law enforcement was in his blood. His father, P. C. Jenkins Sr., was sheriff of Wilcox County from 1911 to 1914. Lummie was just 12 when he snuck out of school to watch his dad preside over a public execution by hanging in Camden’s town square. “There were so many people,” he later recalled. “It looked just like a show day.”

Wilcox County sits in Alabama’s Black Belt, so named for its rich, dark soil and concentration of Black residents. It’s a place where the legacy of slavery runs deep; immediately before the Civil War, few counties across the South had more enslaved people. The sheriff’s domain comprises the city of Camden, four small towns, and a tangle of hilly two-lane highways and red-dirt roads that weave through the overgrowth of fallen cotton empires and felled pine woods. In 1960, there were some 18,000 residents in Wilcox County, 78 percent of whom were Black. Today, the population is fewer than 10,000 and more than 70 percent of residents are Black. Then as now, Wilcox hovered near the top of the list of the nation’s poorest counties.

In 2008, Lummie’s granddaughter, Delynn Jenkins Halloran, celebrated her grandfather’s gilded reputation by self-publishing a compendium of lightly edited newspaper articles and collected praise titled Lummie Jenkins: The Unarmed Sheriff of Wilcox County. The contributors to her crowdsourced book included white family members, white journalists, white congressmen, white governors, and white sheriffs of nearby Alabama counties—as well as the white wives of many of these men. An additional source on Lummie’s legacy, from autobiographical cassette tapes he recorded in his final years, was the man himself.

On the cover of the 168-page paperback is a color photograph of the sheriff. He wears a jaunty grimace and a white cowboy hat to match the white vest buttoned over his brick-red shirt. One of his cherished pistol-themed tie clips glistens at the center of his chest. Taken for the Birmingham News in 1968, and appearing above the caption “Wilcox County’s gunless sheriff always gets his man,” the photo shows Lummie leaning against a sheriff’s cruiser before the antebellum columns of the Wilcox County Courthouse, squinting through the fat lenses of his glasses.

I visited the site of this photograph in the fall of 2018. The courthouse looked exactly the same as it does in the Birmingham News photo; even the Jim Crow–era drinking fountain still protruded, unmarked, from a patch of grass on the street corner. I’d been to the area a couple of months earlier to meet a legendary group of quilt-making artisans in a nearby community called Gee’s Bend.¹ Lummie Jenkins had been dead for forty years, but in Gee’s Bend I kept hearing mention of the late sheriff and his granddaughter’s book.

I was hard-pressed to find a cup of coffee in Camden—Hardee’s had run out—but I did come across copies of The Unarmed Sheriff on two occasions. It was on a shelf at the Wilcox County Library, upstairs from Lummie’s former office in the courthouse, where a researcher helped me locate news clippings about him. (“Mr. Lummie!” she remembered warmly, and told me that he had once given her family a puppy.) The book was also available for $16.95 at the Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, a nonprofit gallery and shop packed with gifts, paintings, and crafts, located about five hundred feet from the courthouse door.

Outside Wilcox County, copies of The Unarmed Sheriff were harder to come by. There was a used copy available on Amazon, where the book had two reviews.² One gave it five stars: “Awesome book. Very very good read.” The other was a one-star review: “Wait a minute wasn’t this the ‘infamous’ Sheriff who beat the Black woman McDuffie to death with a rubber hose? … So thankful my father got me and my Mom out of Alabama as soon as I was born.”

Gee’s Bend is an unincorporated town, tucked so deep into one of the Alabama River’s oxbow arcs that it feels (and functions) like an island. The families there can trace their roots and last names directly back to slavery. In the generations that followed the Civil War, white landowners left; Black residents stayed. The town’s geography makes it thirty-eight miles from Camden by car via the nearest bridge, or about six miles on the local ferry—an hour and a half drive or a fifteen-minute boat ride.

In 1949, during Lummie’s tenure, the government decided to change the town’s name, which was taken from plantation owner Joseph Gee. Authorities rechristened it Boykin, after a segregationist senator. Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, residents filed a request to rename their home again, this time to King. Nearly sixty years on it’s still Boykin, but most everyone calls it Gee’s Bend.

On an afternoon in October 2018, I boarded the ferry in Camden. I rode across a wide, flat reservoir to the muddy shore of the Bend. The Welcome Center served a free hot lunch to seniors on weekdays, and when I arrived a few women—all quilt makers—were picking over the carrot-and-raisin salad or skipping directly to the Moon Pies.

Lummie’s reign as sheriff ended almost a half-century ago, but several of the women remembered him well. At first the stories I got—as a white stranger asking questions in a community where outsiders are few and memories are long—felt reserved. But as the women cautiously gauged my response, their physical reactions said more than their words. When I asked Lola Pettway, then 77, if she remembered Lummie Jenkins, she recoiled, like I’d spooked her. She could remember Mr. Lummie standing at the edge of a field, watching her and her family pick cotton; something about that image sent chills through her body. Nancy Pettway, then 83, told me about how, just before she was married, Mr. Lummie made the trip over to the Bend, arrested her fiancé, and threw him in jail after hearing that he’d killed a dog that attacked him.

I left the Welcome Center and drove a few miles down dirt lanes and through rolling fields to a farm on John Gragg Road. A silver Cadillac was parked askew near some hay bales in a field of cows. Barking dogs eagerly surrounded my car. I was there to see none other than John Gragg, 88, the son of a well-known preacher and landowner in the Bend. Gragg came to the door with his walking stick and invited me into the living room of his one-story 1930s farmhouse.

“Lummie Jenkins?” Gragg said. He sat back in his recliner, his walking stick resting on his knee. “He was the boss man.” He chuckled to himself. The music from an old black-and-white western flared up from his television set. I asked him if it was true that Lummie didn’t carry a gun. “Didn’t carry a gun?” Gragg sounded amused. “He carried a gun and a nightstick.”

Virtually everything I’d read—all the profiles, op-eds, obituaries, and tributes—pegged the sheriff’s mystique to the idea that he was unarmed. But Gragg remembered a different Lummie. He also remembered the sheriff’s cronies. “He had his snitches,” Gragg said, “and they would tell him what he want to know.”

As I kept talking to people in the Bend, I heard more about this other Lummie Jenkins. The one who, if he was in a mood and caught a Gee’s Bend resident on the wrong side of the river after Camden’s eight o’clock curfew, would make them swim home, even in winter. Fear was essential to keeping white power intact, and as the civil rights movement whipped up revolutionary energy across the Black Belt, Lummie’s and his colleagues’ efforts intensified. People told me that, in 1962, as voting rights organizers started to arrive in Wilcox County, the leadership shut down the Gee’s Bend ferry, turning a short passage into an all but unmanageable journey—you needed a car, gas money, and time. This effectively cut Bend residents off from local services, including the voting registration office. Lummie reportedly made a comment about the decision that’s the stuff of legend: “We didn’t close the ferry because they were Black. We closed it because they forgot they were Black.” (The ferry would remain out of commission for forty-four years. In 2006, it was reopened with fanfare and hat-in-hand apologies.)

Gee’s Bend residents also remembered King’s visits in 1965, and the march on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, some forty miles north. They remembered walking as children and teenagers for days in the rain with King and John Lewis. They remembered gathering by the hundreds at the Camden courthouse for another demonstration, being blockaded by Lummie and Mayor F. R. Albritton, being immersed in tear gas and pummeled with smoke bombs, getting arrested, kneeling in the street, refusing to leave. They remembered the songs they sang. Some people also remembered what happened to David Colston, what happened to Della McDuffie.

Some people would have preferred not to remember that time at all.

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