Can you start out by telling us about Albert Williams? Who was he?

Albert Williams was a young man when he died in 1940.

He was 31 years old.

He was married to his high school sweetheart, Annie Mitchell Williams.

He worked as a boiler man at the Sunshine Laundry in Brownsville, Tennessee.

He was the first employee to get there every morning and get the steam up and get the laundry going.

Without him, it would not have operated.

I

I, I wonder if you wouldn't mind reading the prelude to us.

Happy to do that.

Prelude.

The Hatchie, six miles south of Brownsville, Haywood County, Tennessee, June 23, 1940.

The dead man had floated face down in the river for two days and three nights.

His macerated corpse, bloated by the Hatchie's turbid water and the summer's heat, had been exhumed from its watery grave and laid out supine on the riverbank, sightless eyes fixed on heaven.

Most white people cared not how or by whose hand the Black man had died.

I see.