Saturday, July 25, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, excerpt four)

from The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan by Laurence Leamer:

Mobile fancied itself better on racial matters than the rest of Alabama, but from what Eddy was learning, that was not the case. When he first got to town, Eddy went into the Mobile police headquarters to meet with the detectives investigating the Donald murder. They threw the n word back and forth across the room like a Ping-Pong ball. That did not happen any longer among the cops Eddy knew, and as they were using this language, a black detective was sitting at his desk within earshot.

Eddy believed that four of the five main white detectives were probably racists. He was convinced that these men thought their primary task was to protect good, decent white people against a violent underclass of black drug dealers, pimps, robbers, welfare cheaters, and other hustlers. These officers, he feared, would be disinclined to indict Klan members for killing a young black man.



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