Follow the Truth: Robeson County, NC's role in the James Jordan murder
In fiction writing, a sense of place sets the tone for the story to follow. In a true story, a place can be just as important as any character. In this case, Robeson County is a character, an integral part of how the James Jordan death and the trials that followed played out.
As I learned more about the history of Robeson County – the racial tensions, the claims of corruption – I started to understand that everything about what happened in this case begins and ends with this place.
If James Jordan had picked a different location to pull off the highway, would the outcome be different? In my opinion, absolutely.
If Daniel Andre Green and Larry Demery had not been raised in this place of extreme poverty and prejudice, a place where the only way out for a minority appeared to be a life of crime, would their lives have turned out differently? Absolutely.
If there were not already deeply entrenched biases about the value of minorities in the culture of Robeson County, would there have been such a rush to judgement that these teenagers were guilty of murder? I don’t think so.
The expression "there but the grace of God go I" is never truer than it is in this case. Daniel Green was smart, confident, introspective, passionate, but growing up in Robeson County did he ever really have a chance to make something of himself, to get out? We’ll never know.
Today, I’m told Robeson County, NC is a different place, that Lumbees now make up as much as 40 percent of the population and are involved in every level of local government and law enforcement. I’m told the ugly history and racial tensions of the county are buried in the past, and a new generation of Native Americans has been able to overcome this negative backstory and find success through education, hard work and a dissolution of the artificial barriers that once existed to opportunity.
But to truly understand what happened to Daniel Green, we have to go back to the Robeson County of 1993, to a place where an African-American man and a Native American man didn’t stand a chance of escaping what everybody already thought about them – that they had to be guilty of something. In episode four of the true crime podcast Follow The Truth, we take you back to the scene of the crime.
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