Insight: Civil rights 50 years after Martin Luther King
US lawyer James Wilson was still a child when he sat near an open field in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt and watched an effigy burn on a fiery cross. “The Ku Klux Klan used to meet by the river down from our house in Montgomery,” he says in a gravelly southern drawl. “My grandfather must have thought it was important for us to see because he put my brother and me in the car and took us down there. Some things are burned on your mind forever and that is one of them.”