One morning last week, in a downtown store of Columbia, Tenn., a Negro woman, her son and a white man engaged in a brief scuffle. Its cause was obscure; its result was a tragedy.
Through Tennessee's Maury County, which has had two lynchings within young Negro recollections, news of such scuffles spreads fast. All day long white men poured into town. They were mostly small farmers, and they mostly had guns.
Local Negroes rallied, too, instead of fleeing homeward in the usual pattern of fright. In Mink Slide, a rickety Negro business district, they gathered.
By dusk local peace officers had persuaded...
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