On the night of October 13th 1952, just outside of Cairo, Georgia (Robinson’s birthplace), the car was stopped by a posse of four men. All were drunk, all were members of the Klan and none of them had served in China (two had applied, with one turned down due to bad eyesight and the other due to intoxication issues). After a brief round of questions confirming their targets, Johnson’s three fellow white passengers were shot and killed. Johnson was taken from the car, tied up, beaten and hanged as per traditional lynching style. His last words, in response to how he was feeling in the midst of his torture were reportedly, “You can’t degrade me. You’re only degrading yourselves”. To add insult to injury, Robinsons’s corpse was dumped inside his birthplace, so unrecognizable that even those who grew up with him couldn’t recognise him. He still had his Medal of Honor in his pocket. The news spread fast though, and before it was even afternoon, word had reached the White House. As Vice-President Dewey recalled, when Patton received the news, “It looked like he’d heard a close member of his family died. George looked at me and said, ‘Get Hoover on the phone. Tell him to find the bastards who did this and tell them to give to them what they did to Jack twice over’.” For having stopped a small voter registration effort, those four Klansmen had awakened the unceasing wrath of the most powerful man on Earth. You don’t just kill a US serviceman. You don’t just kill a Medal of Honor winner. And you sure as Hell don’t kill a friend of the US President. They had doomed not only themselves and their organisation, but their whole world.