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Content warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence.
friend,
In the spring of 1978, police in Decatur, Alabama, arrested 26-year-old Tommy Lee Hines and charged him with robbing and raping three white women.
It didn’t matter that Hines was at least four inches shorter than a description of the perpetrator, had the mental capacity of a 6-year-old and could neither read nor write the confession that he allegedly signed. He was set to go to trial that October in Cullman, some 40 miles south of Decatur.
When the trial date approached, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staged a march from Decatur to Cullman to protest his arrest. Alabama state troopers and members of the Ku Klux Klan met the protesters at the Cullman city limits, where some people were arrested for marching without a permit.
The next year, following Hines’ conviction, marchers in Decatur were attacked by about 100 Klansmen wielding clubs, baseball bats and ax handles, leaving two Klansmen and a Black woman marcher shot in the head and face, and several others injured. That incident led to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s first civil rights lawsuit against the Klan.
Almost a half-century later, descendants of those who marched for Hines are now organizing their own marches, demonstrations and rallies to protest the police shooting death of Stephen Clay Perkins in Decatur. And, like their predecessors, they are being arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights.
“Over the course of the times we’ve had rallies and demonstrations to protest there’s been nine arrests,” said Aneesah Saafiyah, one of the organizers with the racial justice group Standing In Power (SIP). Her father, Danny Saafiyah Sr., had been one of the lead organizers during the Hines protests and march. “Our protests haven’t been violent. None have been. No one has been attacking the police or anything like that. It’s just the intimidation tactics that the police use.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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