◆ SpookStack

~4- Q. “Mr. A--you said that you thought you wife and your wife's mother hated the fact that your sons, who are white, went to school and played with the ‘colored' boys--do you think that could be a serious motive (racism, prejudice) for your family to take the lives of Atlanta's black children?” A. “Yes ma'am. Sure do. IJ mean, let me put it this way. They say, the South down here--the white people, the colored people and all--(Lincoln freed the slaves, you know)--well they say that everybody is happy and living together but there's still a lot of old folks white old folks don't feel that way. And her mother (wife's mother) was one of the ones. ...Every morning she (wife's mother) would come over bere and have a cup of co-fee with us before she went to work--and she was constantly every morning pouring that garbage in my kids' heads. .. she didn't talk about one specific boy--she didn't’ know one specific boy--she just, ‘cuse my French--she just said ’them damn niggers running over everybody. ' They were going to school with them down here at Benteen and them kids would get in fusses and fights just like any kids do--you know--but yet just because they was black, they'd come home and tell their grand- mother, and then she'd say, ‘them damn little niggers, if it wasn't for them, you wouldn't have got in a fight like that.' ... Constantly, every morning, she'd come over here and it was nigger this and nigger that. Rer daddy--when she was little--they was raise in Jones- boro. And be'd come up to Atlanta in a horse and wagon ‘bout every two weeks and he was up here. when the Ku Klux was killing colored people and carrying them to the river in a wagon, and she was bragging to them young'’uns and all--saying that's what they ought to do again." At another taping in Mr. A's home, he reported: ‘My son was bragging and said that he killed the one that was stabbed in the stomach--the one that was found over there off Moreland. As a matter of information, Mr. A lives in a predominantly black area of Atlanta. A resident of fifteen years at that address, he is one of the few whites that has remained in his community despite tbe high incidence of white flight common to urban transition. Mr. A and his family, themselves being poor, lived a similar aifestyle as their black neighbors. His immediate family members, “whem hé accuses of mass murder, were frustrated by having to contend with their black ie oe