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215 A RIPE AREA AT THE TIME eugene pasto, a small-time Memphis crook who specialized in forgery, had a definite talent for his trade.“Pasto was not well educated—didn’t finish high school, but he was smart,” Kenneth Mayfield, the Tupelo lawyer who ended up representing him, recalled.1 “Real high IQ guy. I heard that he was so talented , that you could sign your name, and he would sign right under it, and you couldn’t tell which was your real signature. He was just that good. A super forger.” On Thursday, March 18, 1976, Pasto and his girlfriend drove to Tupelo from Memphis to cash a few bad checks at Tupelo stores. He had done it before, but this time things didn’t work out so well: on their way back to Memphis, Pasto and his girlfriend were stopped by the Tupelo police and arrested for forging checks. They were taken to the Tupelo city jail, where two veteran police detectives in their early forties, Dale Cruber and Roy Sandefer, were called in to question them. The woman was soon released, as it became clear that Pasto was the one to charge. But the two officers, who were white and had grown up in Northeast Mississippi, began focusing more on Pasto’s love life than on his crime. Pasto was black; Pasto’s girlfriend was white. Cruber and Sandefer were incensed. Their time with him went way beyond questioning. Late that afternoon , the battered and bloodied Pasto was transferred from the Tupelo city jail to the Lee County jail to await his trial. The phone on Kenneth Mayfield’s desk rang the next morning.Eugene Pasto was on the line.“I need a lawyer,” he said, adding that he had been arrested on check charges. “Sorry,” Mayfield said.“I don’t do criminal work.” Kenneth Mayfield was a young graduate of the University of Michigan School of Law in Ann Arbor who had opened a general practice office in Tupelo that included civil rights litigation as well as handling the more routine legal services—divorces, wills, bankruptcies. Mayfield was no stranger to 12 216 A Ripe Area at the Time north Mississippi. He grew up in Okolona, twenty miles south of Tupelo. He became involved in the civil rights movement after he enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1968 and was one of six students suspended over protests they organized in early 1971. Mayfield finished his undergraduate degree at Tougaloo College, a historically black school near Jackson, Mississippi. He returned to Mississippi after law school and worked for a year in Jackson with a group of NAACP lawyers specializing in civil rights cases. In June 1974, a little less than two years before Eugene Pasto’s phone call, Mayfield moved to Tupelo to start his own practice.He was especially interested in civil rights cases.While the area had not seen any racial demonstrations, there was little question that the city government, along with many businesses, treated African Americans as far less than equals.“North Mississippi was a ripe area at the time,” Mayfield recalled. The civil rights movement of the past decade or so had all but bypassed Tupelo and north Mississippi. Only about a quarter of the area’s population was black, and as changes came, Tupelo’s white business leaders had solid working alliances with the local black leaders to keep racial animosity in check. The public schools had been integrated peacefully; the city had none of the private white-only Christian academies that had sprouted in other areas. The North Mississippi Community Hospital had quietly integrated. Blacks and whites worked alongside each other at plants like Day-Brite. George McLean, especially , was known to the black community—going back to the rural community development days—as someone they could deal with. He could be personable and jovial without being condescending; he was interested in education and in decent-paying jobs, and he made sure that African Americans got at least a small piece of that pie. Even so, Tupelo society remained mostly segregated. While the overt separate -but-equal inequities of the past were gone,African Americans remained on the outside of white mainstream life. In employment, housing, and general social acceptance, racist attitudes lingered. Retail businesses employed no black clerks. In the city government, virtually the only black employees were garbage men. Kenneth Mayfield knew the area well...

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