Word: decatur
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TOMMY LEE HINES is a 26-year-old mentally retarded citizen of Decatur, Alabama. Today he is an unwitting martyr in the struggle for civil rights...
...February, mid-March, and early May of this year, three white Decatur women were raped; $300 dollars was stolen from one of the victims. For weeks Decatur police searched for a black man fitting the rather vague description. On May 23 they arrested Tommy Lee Hines...
Richard Hines said, "They sure messed that boy up," referring to his newly-jailed son. The Hines family has always lived in Decatur's low-income housing projects. The father is retired and his mother has never worked. Their only source of income is Richard's monthly retirement check...
...Decatur has a past. The celebrated Scottsboro boys case of the 1930s-in which eight of nine black youths were sentenced to death on highly dubious charges of raping two white women-was retried there and led to four new convictions. Decatur peacefully integrated its schools and public facilities in the 1960s, but as soon as Hines was indicted in June, racial tension began rising. Demonstrators from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference appeared in front of the city hall and put up tents on the grass. Hines' arrest was "a setup," said the Rev. R.B. Cotton-reader, a leader...
...away, was not much of an improvement. Only about 1% of its 14,200 people are black, so it was no surprise that the nine men and three women selected for the jury were all white. On the eve of the trial, Hines supporters began a protest march from Decatur to Cullman. They were stopped at the Cullman town line by police and jeering Klansmen. Twenty-three blacks were arrested...