Neil Rucker

Neil Rucker was born and grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. Neil lived through the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement during the church bombings of the 1950s and the bus boycott of Dr. Martin Luther King. He saw firsthand, being the son of a high-ranking Police Official in the City of Montgomery and later becoming an Alabama State Trooper, the struggle for social equity of the African-Americans. Neil witnessed from the vantage point of an Alabama State Trooper the marches and non-violent protests of the time and how it changed African-American citizens' lives forever. He tells of standing on the Alabama State Capitol steps watching the vast crowd of protesters coming up the broad street known as Dexter Avenue. He saw Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta, leading the march. Neil continues his story of the struggle against segregation and Jim Crow laws by these heroes and ends with the story of a young man's murder and lynching in Mobile, Alabama. Neil tells how he and his brother helped solve this horrendous case with their Polygraph testing of a Klan member and a Klansman’s wife. He describes how a Mother's love of this victim crushed the Ku Klux Klan financially in Alabama.