Laurence Leamer

“If jurors were looking for a way to come back finding for the UKA, Mays had given it to them. Senator Michael Figures made the plaintiff’s final arguments. He had been there on Herndon Street the morning of the lynching, and he had seen Donald’s body hanging from a tree. He had been”
― Laurence Leamer, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan – American History and the Civil Rights Case That Transformed Race Relations

“There had not been a lynching in America in a quarter century, and no one standing looking at the body had ever seen such a crime, but they had heard about it from family members and read about it in social science books in school. And they believed they knew what had occurred. White men had lynched a black man, and they had done it to send a message of intimidation and terror. This was something they thought would never happy again, and many of the black onlookers wept, others fell to the ground beating their fists against the earth.”
― Laurence Leamer, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan