Latasha Harlins was fifteen. She walked into a South Central liquor store with two dollars in her hand for a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, put it down, turned to leave, and was shot in the back of the head. A jury convicted Soon Ja Du of voluntary manslaughter and found she personally used the gun. The county probation department recommended prison. The judge gave her probation. Nobody served a day. Thirteen days earlier, a man in Lake View Terrace had turned on a camcorder.

Before Jonestown, before California, there was a house at 40th and Graceland in Indianapolis. Hyacinth Thrash bought it herself, in a city the whole sundown system was built to keep her out of, and shared it with her baby sister, Zipporah. In 1957 the two of them joined a small integrated church on New Jersey Street.

Part 1 starts on a farm in Wilsonville, Alabama, rides the train north, and sits inside the Indiana of the second Klan. It tells the story of Madge Oberholtzer, whose dying declaration took down Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson, and explains causation in plain English. Then it follows the church that fed hundreds every week, walked Black women into white churches, and buried its dead in the colored section, while the man at the front was already becoming someone else.

Told mostly through Hyacinth's own memoir, The Onliest One Alive. Edith Roller arrives in Part 2.

The help was real, and so was the harm.

Content note: the Klan in Indiana, lynching, and an assault that is named but not described.

It always looks like a Thursday.