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So tell us about where you're from originally. You told us some of this on the walk to where you come from originally from the state of Arkansas.

Walked on the banks of the Mississippi River. Worked in the fields in the 1940s. And I changed 50s and 60s. I was in Los Angeles California.

Last fall, I visited the home of a man named Jimmy Hendrix. No relation to the rock musician, although they were born just three years apart.

This Jimmy is gray-haired, roomy-eyed, with I feel like I should not let this go unremarked upon a fantastic sense of style.

Tailored shirts, nice slacks, the kind of black car coat that billows out behind him like a cape.

Jimmy and his wife live not far from downtown Indianapolis and an aging bungalow filled with family pictures and portraits of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali together and another Frederick Douglass alone.

Also, lots of fans and air purifiers. That's the wine you can hear in the background.

Jimmy's life story is one of the most extraordinary I've ever heard. A kid from the South who found a temporary home in the Black Panther movement in LA.

Before moving again, this time to the Midwest, where he worked as a union rep and factory inspector.

Then one afternoon, in the space of 60 seconds, and a dispute with a stranger in the middle of a street, everything got turned upside down.

Mr. Hendrix, what was their theory as to why it was premeditated murder? Did you know this person?

No, never seen before. That was the real deal, see.

So their argument was that you, I don't know, what was their argument?

They simply said that I was the aggressor. And my accent was, I think it said, instantaneous at six second thought.

Once it was, it was. You shot me back. What, what, what do you do?

Although Hendrix claimed at his trial that he'd been exercising his legal right to self-defense, he was sentenced to life in prison.

He could have given up, a weaker person might have. Instead, he became a frequent user of the prison library, studying the law, training himself to understand the forces that had landed him where he was.

And soon, he had a reputation among the other men at the prison. If he wasn't an actual lawyer, he was pretty close.

And his door was always open.

Well, it was my decision that I was going to do my very best to make sure that doing my career there was to live people up.

Even the worst character. And then when people come in and talk to you and they tell you stories about what happened to them, it opens a whole another door through rationality.

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