Charles Cole, a white man about 30 years old, was a deputy sheriff in Jefferson County working in Birmingham, Alabama, when a summer of labor violence turned deadly. Nine days earlier, another deputy had been shot during a confrontation tied to a miners’ strike, and the county was moving fast to identify who had pulled the trigger and who had helped it happen.
On Tuesday, July 24, 1894, Cole rode out with fellow deputy James Walton Smith to serve warrants on two targets described in la
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