After the bomb exploded, Denise McNair’s grandfather ventured into the rubble and recognized the 11-year-old’s lifeless body. He emerged from the destruction holding one of her shoes. Handing it to his daughter, Denise’s mother, he screamed.
“We all hold that shoe,” wrote Atlanta Constitution editor Eugene Patterson the next day in a celebrated column about the South’s collective responsibility for the racial hatred that led to the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.
We all hold that shoe.
Andrew Sheldon knows what the editor meant. Almost four decades later, Sheldon held that shoe — and its mate — for days in an Alabama courtroom. While he had not suffered the trauma of losing a loved one in the bombing, the experience of bringing the perpetrators to long-deferred justice marked him nonetheless. To deal with the difficult memories, he turned to a surprising form of therapy.
Sheldon is an Atlanta trial consultant who participated in the cold-case prosecutions of men accused in some of the most infamous hate crimes of the civil rights era. He worked on two trials that resulted in convictions of people responsible for planting the explosives that killed McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley on Sept. 15, 1963, at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
As part of the prosecution team, Sheldon was given custody of a cardboard shoebox containing one of the state’s most heartbreaking pieces of forensic evidence: the pair of black patent leather slippers that were blown off the feet of McNair that Sunday morning. The shoebox also contained a shard of concrete removed from her head.
“The contents of that box haunted me,” Sheldon says.
He had nightmares about those cases and six others he participated in during the 1990s and 2000s, all of them in Alabama and Mississippi, all involving members of the Ku Klux Klan. He helped litigate abductions, assassinations, drownings, shootings, fire bombings. His 13-year immersion into white supremacist brutality affected him as surely as long-term exposure to toxic chemicals.
More than a decade after the convictions, Sheldon, by then retired from trial consulting, turned for solace to a pursuit he had enjoyed for years: painting. A gentle, low-key man with an easy smile, he gravitated toward portraits and landscapes. But four years ago, he added an unpleasant subject. Wondering whether he could use art therapy to face his disquieting memories, he set up a canvas and sketched a still life he called “Denise’s Shoes.”
There were more paintings to come, more demons to quell.
Credit: Courtesy photo
Credit: Courtesy photo
A lawyer and a therapist
Andy Sheldon is something of a Renaissance man. In addition to painting, he has taken acting courses and played bit roles in a couple of movies shot in Georgia. He portrayed a courthouse reporter in “Till,” the 2022 film based on the Emmett Till lynching. While his brief appearance ended up getting cut, he had a memorable encounter on the set in Cartersville when one of the producers, Keith Beauchamp, introduced him to the actor playing Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader who was gunned down in his driveway in 1963.
“I’d like you to meet the man who helped select the jury that convicted your killer,” the producer told the actor.
“That,” Sheldon says, “was surreal.”
He came to his profession as a trial consultant by mingling two strains of his education, much as an artist mixes pigments.
A Miami native, Sheldon left Florida in 1960 to attend Emory University. The civil rights movement was heating up as students at the historically Black AU Center schools on the other side of town were helping launch the sit-in movement. They might as well have been on the other side of the planet to the Emory undergrad.
“We were in a bubble,” he remembers. “I read about the movement in the news, but it seemed like somebody else’s fight, like it was happening in India.”
Sheldon went on to law school and worked for Legal Aid agencies in Georgia and Florida. While he liked helping clients in need, he did not love practicing law. So in the 1970s, now married and starting a family, he went back to school at Georgia State University to earn a doctorate in psychology.
After several years of working as a therapist, it occurred to Sheldon that he could combine his areas of expertise by going into the new field of trial consulting. Trial consultants do everything from helping choose juries to running mock trials and focus groups to hone the narratives presented in court. Sheldon worked a wide range of cases — divorce, medical malpractice, environmental pollution — usually for the defense. “I had this old predilection coming out of the ‘60s that the defense was more righteous,” he says.
Then a landmark prosecution came his way. One day in 1994 he got a call about a case in Mississippi. The state was trying an aging white supremacist named Byron de la Beckwith for the assassination of Medgar Evers. Would Sheldon be interested in helping?
“As I listened to the details,” Sheldon says, “I literally started vibrating.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
More mission than job
One of the secrets to winning convictions in the Evers case and other civil rights murders was to treat them like they weren’t civil rights murders, Sheldon says.
“It takes away a lot of the pressure if you just present it as a murder. The basic fact of the Evers case is that he came home from a long day at the office, got out of his car and someone across the street shot him to death. He collapsed at his front door in front of his wife. That’s all you need right there.”
But downplaying the political aspect didn’t mean that race didn’t matter. Far from it. In preparing for the trials, Sheldon was constantly trying to divine racial attitudes, especially when it came to questioning potential jurors.
“If someone told us that Mississippi had put its racial problems in the past, that was a pretty big red flag,” he says.
Sheldon’s second case, four years later, involved a Klan leader accused of ordering the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP official and voting rights activist near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Two carloads of nightriders threw firebombs into Dahmer’s home. He fought them off by moving from window to window, firing guns at them and saving other family members, but he died of smoke inhalation.
“My family really appreciates what Andy did in that trial,” says Dennis Dahmer, who was 11 and in the house the night his father died. “And Andy did that for free. He just wanted to help.”
In 2000, when two men were indicted for the Birmingham church bombing 37 years after the fact, Sheldon called Doug Jones, the U.S. attorney bringing the case, and offered to join the prosecution.
“You could tell he wasn’t just looking for a job,” Jones says. “I could feel his commitment. He became an important part of our team.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Psychic toll
Sheldon participated in eight civil rights murder trials, helping to win convictions in seven of them. His final cases came in 2005, with a guilty verdict in the killings of three civil rights workers during the summer of 1964 — the murders depicted in the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning” — and in 2007, with a conviction in the lesser known case of two teenagers beaten and drowned in the Mississippi River a month before.
Once the trials were over, the psychic toll of reliving so much horror lingered. “It bothered me,” Sheldon says. “Whenever I heard something about the girls in the church bombing, I started crying.”
Sheldon, who studied painting at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, started the civil rights artworks in a studio at his home in the Virginia-Highland neighborhood, where he lives with his wife of 32 years, Anne. Now 80, Sheldon has an artistic family, including a painter son who went to the Art Institute of Chicago and a musician stepson who plays in the Swedish Royal Opera Orchestra.
In all, Sheldon has painted about 15 works based on racial violence. Some depict lynchings and the gleeful crowds that assembled around the dangling bodies. Some show mourning families and corpses laid out in caskets. Some are directly inspired by killings to which he helped bring some measure of justice.
One of those paintings is about a case Sheldon found especially maddening. It involved Ben Chester White, a 67-year-old farm caretaker in Mississippi who was killed when two Klansmen lured him into the woods on the false pretense of helping them find their lost hunting dog. There was only one known photo of White, a grainy black-and-white image of him atop a horse. The artist thought he looked heroic and painted a color version. But that didn’t seem enough.
“Every morning I’d walk in my studio and ask Ben what we’re going to do,” Sheldon says.
He ended up posing White against the backdrop of Stone Mountain, contrasting him with the chiseled faces of Confederate leaders on their horses.
The Dahmer killing also deeply disturbed Sheldon. He captured his emotions in a hellish scene that shows robed Klansmen igniting flames as they did the night they threw Molotov cocktails into the Dahmer home.
That was when Anne Sheldon told her husband his studio was getting too morose, so he rented a space in Avondale Estates where he could finish the most harrowing pieces without poisoning his home.
Sheldon’s last civil rights painting was more uplifting. He did a portrait of Ellie Dahmer, Vernon’s 98-year-old widow, and presented it to the family during a trip to Mississippi. The portrait hangs in the house that was rebuilt on the ashes of the one that burned down on the night of the Klan attack.
“We put it in the living room,” Dennis Dahmer says. “It reminds us that some people are committed to seeking justice.”
Credit: Courtesy photo
Credit: Courtesy photo
Healing power of art
Sheldon’s civil rights paintings are not for sale, but they have been exhibited a few times, including a show at the ArtsXchange in East Point in late 2021. The reaction was generally positive, although some visitors at the opening raised questions about a white man turning African American suffering into art, however well-intentioned.
“I understand how some people might feel that way,” says Lisa McNair, the younger sister of Birmingham church bombing victim Denise McNair. “But they don’t know Andy like we do. They don’t know how hard he and others worked on those cases, how he had to read those autopsy reports and live with all that.”
Before he started the paintings, Sheldon called McNair and sounded her out. Born a year after the bombing, McNair grew up feeling the absence of her martyred sibling and wrote about it in a book published last year, “Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew.”
Sheldon told her that he wanted to paint the evidence he had held in court, her sister’s shoes and that terrible piece of concrete. “He was very respectful about it,” she says, and gave her blessing.
McNair has seen Sheldon’s paintings and understands that everyone works through anguish and anger in different ways. She did it through writing. He did it through painting.
“I’m not happy that it was so upsetting for him,” she says. “But I’m glad that he was touched by someone else’s pain.”
For Sheldon, the art therapy worked. He no longer feels the need to paint scenes of racial terror. “Now,” he says, “I’m back to doing pretty pictures.”
“Heartbreak and Healing: An Artist’s Search for Justice.” Andrew Sheldon’s paintings inspired by his work on civil rights trials can be viewed online at andrewsheldonart.com
