In November of 1946 — just back from Europe and still in his uniform — U.S. Army veteran Hosea Williams had the audacity to try to get a glass of water at an Americus bus stop. Just a year earlier, he had spent four months in an army hospital suffering from rheumatic fever, before nearly getting crippled after he walked into an ambush that killed every member of his all-Black unit. None of that seemed to matter as the white mob beat him within an inch of his life. So bad was the beating that a Black undertaker was summoned...