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1 Prologue The Road into Selma, Fall 1962 Traveling to Selma to visit the town where I would spend the next couple of years, I drove west on Highway 80, winding my way through the peaceful hills of Lowndes County, Alabama. The noon sun of this November day shone across vast stretches of farmland, dotted with giant rolls of hay, freshly harvested. I saw open pastures scattered with farmhouses , noticing how each farm was divided by rows of trees, and how the browning kudzu covered dying branches. Traveling the gently rolling hills and rounding the curves was like lifting the veils off a new picture along this ever-changing highway. Suddenly, sirens pierced the air and flashing lights jolted me from faraway thoughts. A long streak of black tire marks marred the road. An overturned feed truck and an old car lodged in a ditch had police officers and an emergency team scrambling around in chaos. Yellow-gold feed, spilled from the demolished grain truck, covered the ground and highway . I pulled onto the shoulder to help. Medics worked feverishly to give oxygen to the truck driver, who was hanging upside down in the cab, his head a bloody mop. They were twisting and turning his bleeding body to remove him from the crushed front seat. But it was too late. A gray-haired black man stood at the side of the road, his head gashed. Blood flowed down his face and dripped onto his body. Although he was injured, the medics completely ignored him. He was talking to two policemen and looking nervous, eyes on the ground. Behind him in the ditch was his battered black car, early 1950s, with the back end smashed. He explained what had happened, describing the accident. He said that the huge open-bed truck, overloaded with feed, had barreled over the steep hill behind him. Apparently, when the truck approached his slower-moving car going downhill, it had too much momentum to 2 IN PEACE AND FREEDOM stop. When the grain truck driver attempted to veer around the car, he clipped the rear end, knocking the black man’s vehicle over an embankment . The grain truck screeched and careened off the road, somersaulted, and landed upside down, the white driver trapped inside. The police officers were discussing whether or not to charge the black man with reckless driving. Even though it was his car that had been hit, they figured that he was somehow responsible. It was clear to me before I had even crossed into the city limits that blacks in Selma felt totally powerless in situations with white people. There was so much fear that they became immobilized. I used the information I gathered from this event to learn as much as I could about why Selma was such a devastating place for blacks. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this incident was indicative of the deep-seated racial conflict that was present in this small Alabama town. Furthermore, it foreshadowed the many controversies and tragedies that were to come in my next two years of living in Selma. ...

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