National Affairs: One of the Worst Things

At the start of the uproar over Little Rock one night last September, six hooded men grabbed a Negro named Judge Aaron on a lonely road in Alabama, took him to a deserted shack, castrated him with a razor blade, poured turpentine into the wound (TIME, Sept. 16). Six members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested by Alabama police and charged with mayhem. One of the men explained: “We just wanted some nigger at random.”

Last week the first of the six, Joe P. Pritchett, 31, Exalted Cyclops of a local chapter of the Klan, stood trial for mayhem in circuit court in Birmingham. After hearing the evidence, an all-Southern, all-white jury deliberated 40 minutes, returned a verdict of guilty. Alabama-born Judge Alta King sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment—the maximum permissible under Alabama law. “This is one of the worst things ever to come before my bench,” said the judge. “I have found nothing in the testimony to justify less than the limit.”