We discussed the Trenton Six, the case of young blacks accused in a grocery-store killing who were being railroaded to their deaths.
In the aftermath, the state executed 56 blacks accused of being part of Turner's slave rebellion.
Friends say that Justice Marshall's resolute opposition to the death penalty stems directly from his experiences as a traveling defense lawyer for blacks accused of crimes in the South in the 1930's and 1940's.
Most blacks were forced out of Fulton in 1912, after two blacks accused of raping a white woman were hanged.
During the three-year surge of black revolt, many blacks accused of collaborating with the Government were killed by mobs that included children.
In the years before his death, he had played an outspoken role in a kind of Florida Scottsboro case, in which several young blacks accused of rape were brutally beaten, and he had helped get a more sympathetic county commissioner elected in Brevard County, where he lived.
This description could open the way to investigation of political murders by black militants of other blacks accused of collaboration with the Government.