As a pastor to Death Row inmates across the South and as a powerful advocate appealing to prison wardens, lawyers, judges, and legislators, Joseph Ingle has come to some shocking conclusions about the United States, champion of human rights throughout the world. He began to recognize another aspect to US history: systematic oppression imposed by the very people who founded the country.
After working with death-row inmates in the killing ground of the South, where he had lost over twenty people to the executioner since 1979, Rev. Ingle made his way to Harvard University on a Merrill Fellowship in 1991 where he began a twenty-year process of reading, writing and continued work with the condemned. Here, he began to comprehend what he had been experiencing in the United States, foremost advocate of democratic government and a champion of human rights throughout the world. He found it difficult to even face the contradictions he perceived. And he began to ask whether, in fact, we have to consider the government of our country in terms of tyranny.