Black fear: law and justice in rural Georgia.

• Author: Branch, Taylor
• Position: Crime

While liberals may have romanticized criminals, they were profoundly right to understand that the law can be a tool of oppression in the hands of racist or abusive police Taylor Brunch's new book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, is a meticulous and sweeping account of the fight Jbr racial justice. Here he dissected for Washington Monthly readers some of the racial fears that once regularly stalked the South. This piece appeared in 1970.

"All right, get the money off the table," said Bubba-doo Wiggins, the proprietor of The Big Apple in Cuthben, Georgia, as he jumped from his perch with a can of Colt 45 and a fistful of jousecut dollars. In what resembled the routine panic of a grammar-school fire drill, he herded all the card players across the hall into a small closet on the mysterious side of the shack. The younger people scattered. The white man, a graduate student visiting the town, followed the pack, disoriented, and was the last to squeeze into the tiny room.

"What the hell is going on?" he whispered to his fellow loser.

"Beer truck," he replied, obviously amused at the other's perplexity.

Through a crack in the door, the stranger could see Bubba-doo behind the bar. He saw the proprietor put down his Colt 45 to greet two uniformed white men who ambled up and began some small talk.

"Who's that, the sheriff." whispered the white man to the loser.

"No, the police," he They go around with the beer truck every Friday."

The screen door closed again, and a rotund white man soon came into view, wheeling a half-dozen cases of beer up to the bar. He was wearing a Schlitz uniform and smoking a cigar. He left for another load.

Bubba-doo soon rapped on the door with the allclear sign, and the poker players tumbled out into the hallway. The white man ran to a window in time to watch the beer truck stir up the red dust, with the police car right behind.

Unfortunately, the poker game had evaporated. As the others filed past on their way home for supper, the stranger decided that their interest in him was directly related to whether or not his pockets were full.

"No more game here, man," observed his fellow loser.

The two losers walked across the room, past the juke-box, and out into The Big Apple's front porch, where the strains of a twilight hymn from the revival floated on the summer air.

"Whatchew doing down here in niggertown?" came a voice from the police car, which had drifted back down the road, evidently having...