Summary: | Klansmen and state troopers are waiting for them at the city limits sign. The demonstration had been organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; when they arrived in Cullman, participants were arrested for not having a permit to march. Tommy Lee Hines, a 26-year old man who was said to have the mind of a 6-year-old child, had been charged with raping three white women in Decatur. Because his lawyer argued that he could not get a fair trial in Morgan County, it was moved to Cullman, where an all-white jury convicted him of one rape and sentenced him to thirty years in prison. Two years later, a different jury found him mentally incompetent to stand trial, and he was transferred to Partlow State School and Hospital in Tuscaloosa, where he stayed for more than a decade.
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