Dying from the Unspoken War Back Home

I was sixteen when a white deputy sheriff shot and killed my twenty-five-year-old brother, Clyde, in New Hebron, Mississippi, where we had grown up. Clyde had returned home from fighting in World War II just six months earlier after being honorably discharged from the army, with combat ribbons to show for it. 

He and his girlfriend, Elma, were waiting in a long line with other blacks for the movie theater ticket booth to open (whites got their tickets at a separate booth in another area of the theater). The crowd was a bit…