Sam P. Dobyns, a 52- to 53-year-old White male Birmingham police officer, was killed on September 19, 1920, in Birmingham, Alabama, when what should have been a law-enforcement raid turned suddenly and fatally violent. The surviving online accounts agree on the broad shape of the night: Dobyns was taking part in a raid on a gambling house when gunfire broke out and he was shot. The scene reads like one of those tense early-20th-century police actions where the danger was already in the room befo
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