Lawrence T. Hoyle Jr., '65, 1938-2019
In the summer of 1968, Philadelphia lawyer Lawrence T. Hoyle Jr. traveled to Mississippi to volunteer his legal services for the civil rights movement.
As Dennis Suplee, Mr. Hoyle’s longtime friend and legal colleague, tells it, the young Philadelphian found himself taking the deposition of a superintendent from the notorious Parchman Farm prison in the Delta. Mr. Hoyle was representing African American marchers who had been locked up and then forced to drink large doses of laxative, “with predictable dehumanizing results.”
A lawyer from the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office representing the superintendent unholstered a revolver and placed it on the table with the barrel facing Mr. Hoyle and announced, “Now I’m ready to proceed."
Read more at The Philadelphia Inquirer