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Death Bed Confessions: How the K.K.K. Killed Willie Edwards Jr.

The 1952 murder of Willie Edwards Jr.

Ana Coughlin
3 min readFeb 11, 2021
Photo credits to the History Channel

In January 1976 a man named Henry Alexander, age 64, was dying of lung cancer. He knew his death was coming soon, and he needed to clear his conscience.

So he told his third wife Diane what he did thirty-four years prior. A sense of guilt and dismay brushed over Alexander as he recounted the details.

Alexander recounted a very disturbing story. The story was about an African American man named Willie Edwards Jr., aged 24 at the time. Alexander said that he and three of his friends, Raymond Britt, Sonny Kylie Livingston Jr., and James York, forced Edwards to jump fifty-seven feet from the Tyler Goodwin Bridge in Alabama in 1952.

Alexander’s wife was left in disbelief.

The Ku Klux Klan

Henry Alexander and the other three were members of the Ku Klux Klansmen.

The civil rights movement started when Henry was growing up. As a child, his father instilled in him the values that white people are superior in all forms to that of other races. As a result of the anger that Alexander felt from the movement, he decided to join the KKK.

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Ana Coughlin
Ana Coughlin

Written by Ana Coughlin

Loves the Beach. Loves to Read. Writing is not a hobby, but a passion.

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