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Hersey treads carefully amid the welter of conflicting stories about the killings; he gives all the participants, as it were, their day in court. But he leaves no doubt as to where his own sympathies lie. The Negro youths, he asserts, were "executed" not for being snipers but for "being considered punks, for making out with white girls, for being in some vague way killers of a white cop, for running riot—for being black young men and part of the black rage of the time."