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The attempted lynching and escape of Civil Rights Speaker, James Farmer, in Plaquemine, Louisiana
TONY CLAYTON by RaeDiance Fuller, 2017
The first time CBS News came on was September the second, 1963. And what's so relevant about that is if you Google the inaugural edition, as they’re . . . he [Walter Cronkite] starts the CBS Evening News (which is the number one news now) in Nantucket, Massachusetts, talking to then president John Kennedy. Then he breaks the interview. At that time, he breaks back to Iberville Parish. There's a bunch of blacks who are in a church listening to a black Civil Rights guy. Well inside that church was my mom with a little kid three months old--myself. The whites roll into that church and they wanted to get Spivey Gordon, who's the speaker. I think his name was Spivey Gordon [James Farmer]. They rode in, they beat the blacks with cattle prongs and etcetera. My uncle was in there, Clarence Hill, who's my grandfather name--he’s named after. Beat the living daylights out of him. And CBS Evening News broke to that story. Why it's important, ultimately, they tried to get the speaker. And the black leadership back then took him and brought him to the local funeral home and put him in a hearse. Put him in a casket and drove him the only way out of Plaquemine, Louisiana. To Baton Rouge. And put him on a Greyhound bus and sent him back to Atlanta. The issue was they were looking in house to house, looking for him to hang him. Because they didn't want blacks having these Civil Rights folks there. The dumbness of the whites were they were checking every car, but when that hearse passed by, they took their hats off on their horses and let that hearse pass through and unbeknownst to them, this man was in that car. In that hearse and he got away. Link to Biography
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