Baynard Woods

Brandon Soderberg

The explosive true story of America's most corrupt police unit, the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), that terrorized the city of Baltimore for half a decade. When Baltimore police sergeant Wayne Jenkins said he had a monster, he meant he had found a big-time drug dealer—one that he wanted to rob. This is the story of Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a super group of dirty detectives who exploited the some of America’s greatest problems: guns, drugs, toxic masculinity, and hypersegregation. In the upside-down world of the GTTF, cops were robbers and drug dealers were the perfect victims, because no one believed them. When the federal government finally arrested the GTTF for robbery and racketeering in 2017, the stories of victims began to come out, revealing a vast criminal enterprise operating within the Baltimore Police Department. Cops planted heroin to cover up a fatal crash that resulted from a botched robbery. They stole hundreds of thousands of dollars, faked video evidence, and forged a letter trying to break up the marriage of one of their victims to keep his wife from paying a lawyer. And a homicide detective was killed the day before he was scheduled to testify against the crooked cops. This is the shocking history of the rise and fall of the most corrupt cops in America.

The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad

I Got a Monster

Ed McTeer was the sheriff of island-bound Beaufort County, South Carolina, for 36 years. The Boy Sheriff was only twenty-two years old when he was appointed to finish his dead fathers term in 1926; he held the office until being voted out in 1962. During that time, McTeer dealt with syndicate rum-runners, voodoo-inspired murderers, mannered Southern politicians, civil rights pioneers, and local root doctorsand in doing so became more than an ordinary lawman. After an epic battle with the locally infamous Dr. Buzzard, McTeer, a white man, claimed he was the last remaining tie to the true African Witchcraft. Using his own brand of voodoo to help govern the largely African American county, McTeer never had to carry a gun during his long tenure. After losing office, he became a full-time practitioner of the dark arts, revered by the community at large. Collector of curios, historian, poet, raconteur, and voodoo doctor, McTeer was most assuredly a man of his times and an American original. In Coffin Point, Baynard Woods mixes stories and first-hand accounts from McTeers friends, enemies, and family with archival research and critical readings of McTeers own books in order to conjure the charismatic sheriff and the bygone world he inhabited. The enthralling, sweeping story reads like an episodic novel, shedding new light on the relationship between power and belief, and demolishing the beleaguered stereotype of the rural Southern lawman.

The Strange Cases of Ed Mcteer, Witchdoctor Sheriff

Coffin Point

Jim Wilson

Scott Owens

Michael Knight

Chuck Jones

George Singleton

Shari Smith

Susan Cushman

Greg Herren

Wendy Reed

Judith Richards

Suzanne Hudson

Jennifer Horne

Jennifer Paddock

Chuck Cannon

Ed Southern

Joe Formichella

Lari White

Michael Reno Harrell

Bev Marshall

Marlin Barton

Janet Nodar

The first Shoe Burnin' occurred on a cold winter's night years ago in Alabama. When the firewood ran out, a box of old shoes provided the assembled group of friends and artists with the fuel they needed to stock the hearth and share stories and songs late into the night. The bond forged that night began a tradition of fireside Shoe Burnin's. Naturally, many of the stories and songs involved shoes -- the places they've been and the people who wore them. Now, for the first time, these works have been collected in The Shoe Burnin', Stories of Southern Soul. The hardcover book includes a companion CD of spoken word and music that captures the Southern soul.

Stories of Southern Soul

The Shoe Burnin'

"Bracing, candid, and rueful." —Kirkus Baynard Woods thought he had escaped the backwards ways of the South Carolina he grew up in, a world defined by country music, NASCAR, and the confederacy. He’d fled the South long ago, transforming himself into a politically left-leaning writer and educator. Then he was accused of discriminating against a Black student at a local university. How could I be racist? he wondered. Whiteness was a problem, but it wasn’t really his problem. He taught at a majority Black school and wrote essays about education and Civil Rights. But it was his problem. Working as a reporter, it became clear that white supremacy was tearing the country apart. When a white kid from his hometown massacred nine Black people in Charleston, Woods began to delve into his family’s history—and the ways that history has affected his own life. When he discovered that his family—both the Baynards and the Woodses—collectively claimed ownership of more than 700 people in 1860, Woods realized his own name was a confederate monument. Along with his name, he had inherited privilege, wealth, and all the lies that his ancestors passed down through the generations. In this gripping and perceptive memoir, Woods takes us along on his journey to understand how race has impacted his life. Unflinching and uninhibited, Inheritance explores what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past.

An Autobiography of Whiteness

Inheritance

Growing up in South Carolina, Baynard Woods loved country music, NASCAR, barbecue, and the confederacy--or the myth of it that had been passed down to him. He gradually came to break away from the culture he'd been raised in, leaving the state after several scrapes with the law. He prided himself on being a white ally with progressive values. But his world was turned upside down when he discovered the reality of his family's history as terrorists, murderers, and slavers, who collectively held hundreds of Black people in bondage over the course of two centuries. INHERITANCE is his journey to grapple with the country's oldest wound and its effects on his own life. As he re-examines his past, the stories in which he had once been the hero take on a different, whiter, hue. When Woods was arrested for smoking weed, he'd felt like a victim of the drug war. But when the cops asked where he got the grass, he said: "From a Black guy." When he got in trouble, his grandpa's white good-ole-boy network got him out. When he got into college after flunking through high school because of his SAT--that was whiteness. Behind every success and every failure, there now seemed to have been a force at work that he never even noticed. It was his whiteness. And even as he covered events like the Baltimore Uprising and Charlottesville as a left-wing reporter, he carried the inheritance of his ancestors--whiteness. The 2015 massacre of nine Black Charlestonians by a racist white kid from his hometown, made Woods recall a story about a great grandfather who had lynched a Black man and gone to hide out in Texas after the war. Investigating this crime and doing his best to discover the story of Peter J. Lemon, the Black county commissioner I.M. Woods assassinated in 1871, Woods comes face to face with his own whiteness. His inheritance. But even after recognizing it, he has to figure out what to do about it, asking: how can we repair the past, pay our debts, and begin to heal this ancestral curse. It's a thread most white people are too uncomfortable to follow, but Woods casts this furious indictment in a literary exploration that pulls us along toward the searing conclusion. As Woods so eloquently sums it up: "Only if we are willing to face the horror of our history can we hope to emerge from it. Only if we know the cost, can we begin to account for the enormity of the reparations that are due." Unflinching and uninhibited, Inheritance gives readers a reckoning that will shake them to the core‑and inspire them to put a stop to this unending cycle of racial hatred, violence, and destruction.

A Memoir of My Whiteness

Baynard Woods

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