It took Haywood Patterson 17 years to get from Alabama to the North. His long trip began on a spring day in 1931, when he and eight companions were yanked off a freight train at Paint Rock, Ala., accused of raping two white girls who turned out to be common tramps. It carried him past the shadow of the electric chair three times, through the highest courts of the land and deep into the hard, rotten heart of the Alabama penal system. But in July 1948, Haywood Patterson finally made it. He escaped from Alabama's Kilby prison, crossed the...
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