bedroom. we knew the kind of young man he was. we knew the kind of family he had. some people were trying to say we don t think it s an issue that has anything to do with violation of civil rights. we don t think it has anything to do with race. we think it was some drug deal that went bad or something. we knew that wasn t the case. you could not convince anybody in the black community. so we had to live and walk through it. because we knew that he was just an innocent person. he was innocent this. they tried to deviate from the truth to take the attention from what really happened.
we knew that that element was in the community, and it was a dangerous situation as far as we were concerned. nobody at that point had any answers. we thought that an independent investigative body needed to come in and look at it. we knew that the narrative put forth was nothing near the truth. eventually, it really got close to a boiling point. it s not right for them to go around hanging black folks, you know, because we don t go out there hanging no white people. so they did assign the civil rights division of the justice department to look into it and actually put together an investigation that really brought the truth out. ultimately my father and my uncle begin to push out the
pack of cigarettes. not knowing what was waiting for him. i can only imagine what mrs. donald went through. the crowd just gathered. people started gathering there. michael figures and i, we jumped in the car. senator michael figures was the de facto leader of the black community. as a lawyer, michael was there to gather facts. we started looking around and trying to talk to people to see anybody knew exactly what happened, who was involved. someone has taken a young man hung him in a tree. who would do something this hideous in the community? what s going through my mind is who the hell did this and why?
know we weren t going to take this lying down. y all got to move, you got to move fast. you got to move and move fast. that was our thrust to them. you got to move and you got move fast. a lot of the community started coming to my mom s house and we just need to do something. some of the guys we need to get somebody, kill them too. so they were getting really angry. they were really getting frustrated. everybody was uneased. everybody was at a point where we got to do something about this. why are we living here with these type things taking place right in the middle of our community? the bottom line was the community was really about to
johnny ray kelly was lying. somehow he got enough information that he could concoct the story about seeing the edgar brothers and ralph on springhill avenue. we come to find out, he was facing burglary charges. he was looking for help. but i suspect he was manipulated by somebody else. we originally arrested the wrong people, and that s on me. that was my mistake. i went into a courtroom and moved to have the charges dismissed against them. i wanted to make sure that the black community understood that we were doing all that we could. that i cared deeply about. but i wasn t communicating with civic leaders either in the black or the white communities. and there were two separate communities.