Roadhouse Justice
Brown, Trent In 1951, Hattie Lee Barnes, a twenty-one-year-old Black woman working as an overnight caretaker and maid at a county-line beer joint in southwestern Mississippi, shot and killed a white intruder. That man, twenty-two-year-old Lamar Craft, was breaking into the bar in the early morning hours, most likely to assault Barnes sexually. She confessed immediately to shooting him, at which point local police charged her with murder. Craft's family, on...