Last Friday, Mark Melvin, who is serving a life sentence at Kilby, filed suit in federal court against the prison’s officials and the state commissioner of corrections, claiming they have unjustly kept a book out of his hands.
The book, which was sent to him by his lawyer, is a work of history. More specifically, it is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Southern history, an investigation of the systematically heinous treatment of black prisoners in the late 19th and early 20th centuries…
…While doing research on the book in small county courthouses around the state [the author of the book] said he was met sometimes with wariness but never with outright resistance.
“To be honest, these events had slipped deep enough into the past that there weren’t very many people who even knew to be cautious about them,” he said.
Indeed, the last of the thousands of convicts who had been toiling in the deadly Birmingham coal mines were moved out in 1928. They were sent to Kilby.
