Sublime

As Hamer and her associates prepared to leave, they saw that police officers had surrounded the old school bus in which they had traveled to the courthouse. Hamer later described the scene in vivid detail: “By the time the eighteen of us going in two by two had finished taking the literacy test—now there’s people, mind you, there that day with

(And I could hook my right hand on the strap, which gave me something to do with that arm. How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.)

On October 5, the Supreme Court refused to hear Coke Stevenson’s petition that it consider Black’s stay of the injunction. On January 31, 1949, the Court rejected Stevenson’s petition for a trial on the merits of the case. The hearing Judge Davidson had ordered would never be resumed. The remaining ballot boxes were never to be opened. The

He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.

“Hereafter,” he commanded, “no slaves should be allowed to come into your lines at all; if any come without your knowledge, when owners call for them deliver them.”

Introduced to a party of people who ignore their own chauffeur, he protests: “I have not met this gentleman

Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to