National Affairs: Klan in Alabama

Judge* Aaron, a 34-year-old Negro house painter in Springdale, Ala., was talking to his girl friend on the road in front of her home one night last week when six hooded men drove up, stopped, jumped out, grabbed Aaron and stuffed him into their car. The men took Aaron to a deserted shack, castrated him with razor blades and then poured turpentine into ‘the wound.

At week’s end four whites were arrested. One was a construction worker named Joe Pritchett, the Exalted Cyclops of a local Ku Klux Klan. In the shack where the men had taken Aaron, police found stacks of White Citizens’ Council literature—and a Bible. Why had they picked on Aaron? Said one: “We just wanted some nigger at random.”

* Name, not title.