On this day in 1955, white men fired shots into a Texas cafe killing 16-year-old John Earl Reese and wounding his two cousins.
by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Today October 22, 2023 Oct. 22, 1955 Family members of John Earl Reese gather around a civil rights marker honoring him. John Earl Reese, 16, and his cousins, Joyce Nelson, 13, and her sister Johnnie, 15, were drinking soft drinks and listening to music from a beat-up jukebox in a poster-plastered café near Longview, Texas, when white men fired nine shots through the window, killing him and injuring his two cousins.
” District Attorney Ralph Prince urged the all-white jury to convict Ross to deter others, but the defense lawyer urged the all-white jury to “call it a bad day and let the boy go on in life.” Although all-white jury convicted Ross of murder without malice, he received only a suspended sentence. Neither he nor Simpson spent any time behind bars. In 1989, the National Civil Rights Memorial listed Reese as one of 40 martyrs of the civil rights movement.
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