Slumped in a maximum security cell in Mississippi's State Penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of a white woman in 1954, Robert Lee Goldsby, 32, a Negro, has one abiding concern: saving his skin. Last week the onetime lathe operator, whose death has been postponed five times in the past four years, won yet another legal delay, while simultaneously (and unwittingly) nudging forward the cause of Negro civil rights in the Deep South. Opening its fall term, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review —and thereby affirmed—last January's far-reaching decision of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals: that...
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