During the two weeks that he was at Fort Benning, Ga., on Army reserve duty as a lieutenant colonel last month, Lemuel Penn, 49, Negro director of vocational high schools for the District of Columbia school system, never set foot off the base. Reason: he did not want to be responsible—even inadvertently—for causing a racial incident. On the night of July 10, his training completed, Penn set out for home with two other Washington Negroes. They planned to drive straight on through, stopping only for food and fuel.
They rolled through Atlanta, on through Athens, and into the lonely hills of northeast...