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You've gotten a lot of good replies and discussion and I can't add much more of use other than to say I lived in Alabama most of my youth and had just returned there from abroad in 1996, after having lived in southern Africa. I remember watching that film and feeling it was far too sensationalized--though I never read the Grisham novel upon which it is based so I don't know how much was Hollywood and how much was in the book. Either way, that film, as well as the film Mississippi Burning which had come out eight or so years earlier, just really struck me as off.
All of my schools when I grew up were around 60/40 black/white, and there was never any palpable tension between races that I remember. My main friend group at the lunch table consisted of entirely black guys. I was with black guys on the track team. Which is not to say there was wholesale intermixing as there wasn't--my one black friend who played sax in the band with me once chastised me for calling him at home--His parents, he suggested, wouldn't approve of him talking on the phone to a white boy. (Whether this was true or just his perception is not for me to decide.)
The only one violent episode I recall was between black gangs, and that blew over without me knowing much about its aftermath. Of course one person's experience in one city in Alabama can't be very representative.
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