Review of The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done by Carol Menaker
The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning with Racial Injustice
By Carol Menaker, She Writes Press, 2023
Reviewed by Pam Gates
In 1976, Carol Menaker, a young white woman living in Philadelphia, was summoned for jury duty in a high-profile murder case. The jury was sequestered; she was separated from her husband and her life for the 21 days it took from jury selection to jury decision on the fate of a young Black man, already in prison for murder of a park policeman, who had been charged again in the murder of two white prison wardens.
In her one-page first chapter, Menaker writes: “I was watching for a sign, any sign, that he may not have done the horrible things he was accused of … clues that would tell me how [he] … had got himself in so much trouble. If the clues were there, I didn’t see them. I couldn’t see them. Maybe it was because I was only 24 years old. Or maybe it was because I was white and privileged.”
That jury convicted Frederick Burton. The judge had explained to them that under the law, Burton was guilty because he was present at the murders. Menaker accepted this information and voted with the rest of the jury, including the two African Americans, to convict Freddy Burton and go back to her own life.
Menaker told the story of her jury duty many times during the ensuing years; it had been a difficult experience for her, not because of the decision, but because of the sequestration. But eventually she began to wonder about the man she had convicted. She began researching Frederick Burton, trying to find out who he really was.
She learned that he had been a young husband and father, gainfully employed and a community leader when he was first convicted. She learned that this initial conviction was based on false testimony obtained by brutal police coercion. She learned that it was highly unlikely he had participated in the prison murders – and that the judge’s admonition that Burton’s mere presence made him guilty was wrong. That admonition had been the basis for Menaker’s decision to convict, her basis for urging fellow jurors to the same decision.
What had really gone on in that high-profile case? Menaker describes the politics in 1970s Philadelphia; it was not a good time or place to be African American. The police were brutal, at least in the African American community, and the mayor backed them up. Could an African American judge preside over a fair trial of a Black man, a Black man who had already been convicted of murdering a park police officer, under such circumstances? Menaker does not accuse the judge or other jurors of unfairness. In fact, she tries very hard to be fair to everyone involved, while telling a story in which justice was not served. But as far as is possible, she is telling only her own story – and Burton’s, as well as she is able.
While looking at Burton’s life and circumstances, Menaker also began reflecting on her own past, her own values and attitudes. Growing up, her only contact with African Americans had been as family servants, people dismissed as “other,” certainly by her mother. She and Burton had not been peers; the trial in which she had participated could not have been fair. All she, and likely other jury members as well, wanted was to be done with it so they could move on.
This book reads very fast. It’s easy to relate to Carol Menaker if one is white and middle class, easy to understand her only vague awareness of the powerful forces of racism and police brutality in her community in the ‘70s when she was very young, fairly new in town, and had never been directly exposed to them. It is good to see her growth in awareness and her determination to make a difference for Frederick Burton, and for others — to do something to rectify the worst thing she has ever done.