No good ever comes up on Choctaw Ridge

So, no good ever comes up on Choctaw Ridge. I wondered if maybe that bluff Roy and J.W. were looking for that night was indeed Choctaw Ridge. It was sure sour smelling out here on this dead river. I looked down at the thick, stagnant dark water and I wondered if there were snakes in it. They had found Bobo three days later floating in the river. He had a .45 bullet in his head and they’d tied a 75-pound gin fan to his neck with barbed wire. And they’d stolen that fan. In the magazine interview they got paid $3,000 for, the half-brothers said they tried to burn his shoes for three hours and made note that Bobo’s crepe-soled shoes had been real hard to burn.

There had been a trial if you want to call it that. The big fat sheriff, Clarence Strider, fit the stereotype of a bad man with a lot of power and a badge. He made the black people who tried to attend the trial sit at the far back of the courtroom. All the black reporters from out of town had to sit at a card table apart from the white reporters. When a black congressman from Detroit arrived to witness the trial, Sheriff Strider tried to stop him from entering the courtroom until the judge overruled it. Congressman Charles Diggs was delegated to the same card table with those black reporters.

Teach’s magazine had a picture of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam sitting there in the court room. They could have…