Looking back on rights struggle

To the editor:

You recently published my letter about a proposal to make same-sex sex a capital crime in California. There are times to reflect on the great social progress that has been made in this nation. I was born early in 1933, while Herbert Hoover was still President and Hitler had not yet come to power. In 1951, while I was an 18 year-old junior at Queens College, I went to Martinsville, Virginia on  a bus  caravan to  petition  the State Governor to spare the “Martinsville Seven” from execution. They were seven young black men who were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, with lightning speed for the rape of a white woman. Virginia had never executed a white man for a non-lethal  crime. Our appeal fell on deaf ears. All seven were executed within a two-day  period.

Fast forward to 1958. An illiterate black farm hand, Jimmy Wilson, was tried and convicted of robbing an elderly white woman in Alabama of $1.65 at night in her home. Apparently because  of aggravating circumstances, he was sentenced to die for this robbery. He was represented at trial and on appeal by one of the great civil rights pioneers, Fred Gray, a young Alabama lawyer who had been compelled to go to law school in Ohio in the early ‘50s, because no Alabama law school admitted blacks. After all judicial appeals failed, Alabama’s great populist Governor, Jim Folsom, Sr., commuted Wilson’s sentence to 16 years. Legally, that was as far as Folsom could go. Wilson was released in 1973.

Although that Folsom is gone to glory, his son,  Jim Folsom, Jr., is not only alive but is one of the few Democrats to win statewide office in Alabama in recent years. Fred Gray is also still alive and now 84. His legal career led him to be elected as leader of the Alabama bar association in 2001. 

Alan J. Saks