For the first six decades of Willie Gill's life, the winding dirt road next to his house in Chilton County, Alabama, was a nuisance. If trucks weren't churning its surface into clouds of red dust, rains were turning it into a swamp. Gill, who is black, never really expected the all-white county commission to do much about it. "But Mr. Agee, he come and put in a paved road just about last year," Gill reports. "I'm glad to have it."
Gill is no fire-breathing radical. Nor is Bobby Agee, a 43-year-old funeral director who six years ago became the county's first...
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