3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

ten younger brothers and sisters. All of the children but one were at home when seven
men, wearing stocking masks, walked onto the po~+ch . It was after l0 p.m .
Hearing footsteps, Wilson called through the door and asked what they wanted .
The men replied that they wanted to "sell a little politics and leave you a card." She
replied that she wasn't interested in what the men had to offer, and waited for them to
leave . When she did not hear them leave, she armed herself with a .22-caliber revolver.
After waiting for a long while, she cautiously opened the door a crack to see if the men
had left . One of the men immediately stuck a shotgun barnel through the space and fired.
Mrs . Philpot screamed . The other children were crying and screaming . Wilson fired
through the cracked door five times . "It was the idea of the masks, I guess," she later
explained . "I was scared. I didn't know what I was shooting at. I just had my hand out
the door."
One of Wilson's shots instantly killed one of the men, Leroy Parks, with a bullet
through the heart . Another, Gene Ables, was wounded in the forearm . With Parks dead
and Ables wounded, the other men fled to their cars . The two youngest men, Billy Gamel
and Jimmy Humphreys, ages eighteen and nineteen, later returned to pick up Parks' body
and take it to the hospital . Jerome Clay, sheriff of Paulding County, arnested all of the
men shortly afterward, including : Franklin Parker, the son of the publisher of the local
paper; Hoyt Prather, an automobile mechanic ; and M . A . Nichols, an automobile plant
worker . Parks, the man who was killed, worked for Billy Joe Jones, the county manager
for Marvin Griffin's re-elation campaign as governor of Georgia; Parks himself was a
~BaldmorcJ Afro-American (September 15, 1962), l .
7 6