Quintez Brown, Louisville Courier-Journal staff photo
One of the issues I’ve puzzled over in writing occasionally about my birth state is that all the men I read or hear about are “good”—however I might define that: prosperous, upstanding and so forth. Of course they are all white and of a certain class; the exception is Muhammad Ali and it took decades for him to be recognized as a “good” man.
The author of the article, Jonathon Sturgeon is listed as a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, that hive of literary activity, but he was born in Kentucky and I think he has probably been marinating his ideas about the place for some time; his article is hard-hitting but clear-headed, beginning with the stunning declaration, “Kentuckiana is cursed”—which will enrage all loyal Kentuckians although perhaps the sting is lessened, a little, by its being shared with Indiana. He quotes Chateaubriand, the renowned French writer, who at the time of the French Revolution sailed down the Ohio, remarking on the “magnificent country of Kentucky” but repeating the notion that the Ohio was called “The River of Blood”—which it wasn’t. Sturgeon’s ancestor at a later time ventured “dirty and drunk” into Shawnee territory where he was shot and killed, recorded in family lore as “the Sturgeon Massacre of 1812.” This incident was used as an excuse to exterminate the remaining Shawnee in their ancestral lands.
Visiting his birthplace, Crothersville, north of Louisville, for family funerals, Jonathan Sturgeon met the father of Connor Sturgeon. Connor shared with Jonathan a history of high school honors and hopes; after college graduation, Connor sailed into a job at Old National Bank in Louisville. Then both young men had nervous breakdowns which the author “cured” by a year of work as a janitor. Instead, fueled by a determination to prove that guns used to kill rich white men were too widely available, Connor murdered five colleagues at the bank and was then shot dead by the police. Jonathan of course knows his explanation was an excuse for acting out his rage and bewilderment.
After the murder, colleagues at the bank told The Washington Post that “Connor’s nepotistic rise at the bank led to his first failures as a man” who up until then had glided along a golden path.
It seems to me that this golden path is engineered routinely by good fathers, in Kentucky and elsewhere, who are unwilling to accept the shame and pain of sons who don’t qualify for positions in their father’s businesses. Daughters, rather fortunately, are “allowed” to make it or not on their own, and are seldom included in plans for continuing a dynasty. But the “Daddies,” as Jonathan describes them, never permit their sons to fail if they can prevent it.
Connor’s story contrasts in this article with the tragic story of Quintez Brown, “child of the West End,” who wrote about Louisville’s long history of racism, exposed by the murder of Breonna Taylor, whose police perpetrators remain unpunished. As a teenager, Brown, through his brilliance and political engagement, found work at The Courier-Journal where his journalism “addressed race with a worldliness the paper usually shucks for kernels of digestible history.” Eight days after the paper was awarded a Pulitzer for its coverage of Taylor’s murder, Brown disappeared. The irony of a prize being given to reporting that possibly was not up to Brown’s rigorous standards must have proved too much to bear. He was found on a bench in New York and returned to Louisville, where he bought a revolver and tried to murder Craig Greenberg, a Democratic candidate for Louisville’s mayor and one of the prominent Daddies, involved in all kinds of real estate and political schemes. Brown fired shots into Greenberg’s campaign headquarters, injuring no one, and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison.
Immediately, Greenberg’s campaign funds were swollen with large gifts from the Mamas. It’s not just the Daddies now who keep the system of privilege afloat. Individual tragedies, suicide and jail sentences, do not weigh in the scales with the importance of passing along prominence.
Your insight is as it usually is, expressed so the meaning or the questions posed resonates with clarity. Too old to be a fanboy I declare myself a fan man of the elder class. Your story telling is marked by compelling subject choice synthesized by your elaborations of the details. In this case sad tails of trauma which make for specific sorrows and general crime drama tv. Thanks for sharing the product of your talent.
Please forgive my misspelling of tales. I blame autocorrect for co-opting the keyboard.