One SC prison chaplain’s ‘long nights in the death house’

Perhaps this story should begin with the tap-tap of a cane rapping on the floor of the so-called “death house” at the old South Carolina state penitentiary in Columbia.

Tap-tap.

In the 1940s, it was the signal a prison official, who presided over executions, gave when he was ready for the executioner to throw the switch that would begin the electrocution of a condemned prisoner.

Tap-tap.

And it’s a sound that’s part of the story of the nearly five years the Rev. Charles M. “Red” Kelly spent ministering to death row inmates at the penitentiary, when it was a grim brick edifice cleaving to the banks of the Congaree River.

Tap-tap.

Talk about a history lesson.

Of the more than 30 executions Kelly attended as prison chaplain, only six of the condemned were white; the rest, black. Justice, as it was meted out during the Jim Crow era in South Carolina, was often swift, taking place within weeks of a trial and subsequent sentencing.

On numerous occasions, multiple prisoners were executed in the wee hours of the traditional Friday morning dates with death.

But the pastor’s story is not just an historical one. It is a deeply human one too.

Red Kelly was a tall drink of water who grew up hard and fast in the Olympia mill village on the southwest side of Columbia. In 1920, when he was only 12, his father died in a hunting accident, leaving his mother to raise eight children.

He drank, smoked cigars, boxed, played cards, hung out with his buddies at the old YMCA at the corner of Whaley Street and Olympia Avenue, and delivered groceries in a wagon pulled by a mare named Nelly.

But when he was 19, he attended a revival service at the Whaley Street Methodist Church.

There, his life changed directions. He felt called to the ministry and would eventually found the First Church of the Nazarene in 1934 in Columbia.

Some nine years later, his life took yet another turn – South Carolina Gov. Olin D. Johnston appointed Kelly to be the prison chaplain at Columbia Correctional Institution, the formal name of the penitentiary.

It was a job that Kelly embraced, but one that left him, in his old age, waking in the night with torturous dreams of all that he had seen, heard and yes, even smelled, in the so-called “death house” of CCI, where condemned prisoners spent their last hours of life and where they were electrocuted in a heavy chair called “Old Sparky.”

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Foolishly, when I talked with Kelly’s son, 84-year-old Charles W. Kelly, who lives in Atlanta and has just published a book about his father’s work, I asked about the nights before scheduled executions, which his father would spend with the condemned if they asked for his presence.

I wanted to know where the pastor slept. In a nearby room? On a cot outside the prisoner’s cell, perhaps?

“During those long nights in the death house, Dad never went to sleep,” his son said.

“He spent the night standing or sitting in a small chair outside the doomed individual’s cell. He sang, read scriptures, talked and kept the prisoner company as his or her final hours ebbed away.”

Talk about a long night.

It’s hard to imagine, and perhaps that is what makes Kelly’s story so terribly fascinating; it is a window into a world few of us have ever seen.

The pastor’s prison chaplaincy officially began in January 1943 and ended in August 1947.

During that time, he ministered to and witnessed the executions of 29 men and three women – 29 strapped in the electric chair, and three inside North Carolina’s gas chamber, where Kelly had gone at Johnston’s request to see whether chamber executions were any more humane. No, Kelly reported back.

Nothing about the pastor’s story is for the faint-hearted. Kelly’s book, “Next Stop, Eternity,” is an unflinching look at his father’s work. The stories of some 30 executions are explicit, detailing horrific crimes committed and subsequent punishment carried out.

Kelly said the book is about “heartache, pain, and suffering. The chapters are factual accounts of human depravity, physical cruelty, mental torture, rape and murder. To deny that societal racism was a factor in many of the cases would be less than candid. These stories … illustrate both the unjust racial conditions that were so prevalent during the 1940s and the extreme brutality of which humans are capable, regardless of ethnicity, creed or color.”

The stories also shed light on a man who condemned prisoners professed their innocence to as well as their guilt. Prisoners who came to know God through the Nazarene preacher. Prisoners who wanted Kelly to conduct their funerals after their executions. Prisoners whose guilt the preacher had no doubt about and prisoners who he believed were innocent and who he fought for commutation of their death sentences.

Kelly has three younger brothers; two, Bruce and Jim, live in Columbia. A third brother, Philip, lives in Rhode Island.

“Originally,” Kelly said, the book was planned as a way to “tell the (Kelly) wives and younger Kelly family members of the death house ministry of our father … As we researched, we realized that our dad’s involvement in those death house events was unique and of considerable human interest … It is our belief that Dad’s death house ministry lends context and definition to a different time in our nation’s history.”

Context.

Definition.

And interesting details.

Throughout the book, anecdotes about life inside the old death house are revealed.

Prisoners most often requested fried chicken for their last meal. In the so-called “front office” of the death house, an old bell tolled the last hours prior to an execution. The Rev. E.A. Lester, a black prison chaplain who worked alongside Kelly and who had a baritone voice, was often asked by prisoners in their last hours of life to sing hymns and spirituals. News reporters who came to witness executions were sometimes invited to come in from the pre-dawn, outside the death house, to the prison guards’ dining room for a big breakfast including homemade sausage, scrambled eggs, grits and biscuits.

And then there are the graphic details of the executions that Kelly witnessed.

Consider the contents of Chapter Eight.

George Junius Stinney, Jr., a 14-year-old black boy, was convicted of murder in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina in 1944. The murder of two young girls took place on March 24 of that year.

Stinney was charged with the crime. Stinney was given a death sentence and became the youngest person in the state ever to die in the electric chair. He was put to death on June 16, 1944. Some 70 years later, a circuit court judge vacated the murder conviction, ruling Stinney’s constitutional rights had been violated.

The Stinney execution was one of the many that Kelly witnessed. The pastor ministered to the young boy before his death and also pleaded with then-Governor. Johnston to spare the teen’s life in favor of a life sentence.

Chapter Eight of “Next Stop, Eternity” paints a wrenching picture of the situation.

“The small girls Stinney was accused of killing were Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, who was only eight when she was slain … Nothing in our search of microfilmed newspaper reports, letters to Gov. Olin Johnston, court records and other files revealed how police connected George Stinney Jr. to the murders. Even so, the authorities somehow linked Stinney to the dead girls, and he repeatedly admitted the slayings to my father and other ministers … My father used the open-door status he had received from Gov. Johnston to make a plea for mercy during Stinney’s final days. He voiced his concerns and asked the governor to consider a commutation of the sentence to life in prison … Dad was troubled by the execution of one so young …”

The governor listened to the pastor but did not capitulate.

The book describes Stinney’s execution by way of Kelly’s observations. He was with the young boy before and during the execution.

“The youngster was slight of build … it was necessary to punch additional holes in the (electric) chair’s bindings before they would fit snugly around his limbs. The hole punching procedure delayed the execution for some agonizing minutes as the 14-year-old Stinney sat calmly awaiting his fate.

The Columbia Record reported the executions on June 16, 1944. The article stated, ‘Young Stinney was such a small boy that it was difficult to adjust the electrode to his right leg. After the first charge of 2400 volts was sent coursing through his body, the death mask slipped from his face and his eyes were open when two additional shots of 1400 and 500 volts followed. Dad described an even more vivid picture of Stinney’s face when the mask slipped. He told of the eyes bulging almost from their sockets and of the tortured facial grimaces that came with each jolt of electrical current.”

Kelly’s prison chaplaincy ended in August 1947.

“(Dad’s) nerves jangled and he was exhausted,” Kelly wrote in the book. “He recognized that he lacked the stamina to continue as chaplain.”

Kelly continued his ministry at the First Church of the Nazarene. In late 1947, he was elected district superintendent for the Church of the Nazarene denomination in South Carolina.

And in March, 1990, he died and was buried in the old Olympia Cemetery.

His gravestone is inscribed as follows: “He did as much as he could, for as many as he could, for as long as he could.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 11:00 AM with the headline "One SC prison chaplain’s ‘long nights in the death house’."