This time, four of the arsonists were so brazen that the first FBI agents on the scene found them still there watching the blaze, drinking beer. Arrested, the four suspects confessed to the FBI. Justice Department lawyers, scrutinizing their statements as to motive, found them difficult to translate in the idiom of the Supreme Court’s opaque ruling in the 1944 Screws case, but in general they had more to do with hating Negroes than with voting rights.
