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

candidate for county representative . Ables, the wounded man, was clerk for the city of
Dallas . The men were charged with attempted murder and violation of the state's anti-
masking law, designed to curtail illegal activity by the Ku Klux Klan .
Mrs . Philpot closed up her house and moved her family to the home of relatives .
Rebecca Wilson, who was taken into protective custody for a few days to protect against
possible retaliation, laterjoined her husband in Indianapolis . She was not charged in the
incident. It was a clear-cut case of self-defense .°°
Similar assaults on black people occurred with alarming frequency in the South .
The perpetrators were not only white tiff-raff but also civic leaders, politicians, and
businessmen . Incidents like this one were not unusual, but what happened at Kate
Philpot's house bears mention for a number of reasons. First, the attack was singular in
terms of its viciousness and seemingly arbitrary nature : poking a shotgun through the
cracked door of a stranger's home and pulling the trigger gives new meaning to cold-
blooded malevolence . Second, it was unusual because formal charges were brought
against the nightriders ; more often than not, such attacks went unprosecuted . But the
incident is most notable, not because of the men's actions, but because of Rebecca
Wilson's response . In 1962, before Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have A
Dream" speech at the March on Washington, before black southerners reaped the full-
blown successes of civil rights agitation, in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
Voting Rights Act of 1965, and long before the concept of Black Power engendered a
new and healthy sense of impertinence among black Americans, Rebecca Wilson, like
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