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From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. I'm Alexan.

As a kid, growing up in a close-knit community can feel like there is magic in the air.

Every morning is filled with possibility because at some point in the day, you and your friends are going to get into something.

Waving to your neighbors you've known most your life, playing to the street lights come on for better or for worse, everybody knows your name.

For Lawrence Blackman, that place was Canton, Mississippi.

I loved it for the most part. I thought that Canton was a very unique place. Most of the people here know each other, families know each other.

We go to church together, go to school together. And so I just, I really enjoyed the level of connectedness that we had and shared as a community.

Canton is the seat of Madison County, one of the wealthiest areas in Mississippi. But Canton, a mostly black town, doesn't share in that wealth.

Lawrence says as kids, he didn't really notice it. It wasn't until he went away for college and he got to see other places that he began to understand that his hometown had problems.

For decades, the Sheriff's Department had been accused of terrorizing the black community from beating black activists in the 1960s to stopping and searching black drivers and pedestrians.

They do have a reputation for being aggressive. They have a reputation for racism within the department and for policing tactics that they employ specifically in and around Canton.

But that they don't do in Riesland and Madison, which are predominantly white cities within the county.

Lawrence says this is part of the reason why he went to law school. After graduating, he came home and people started reaching out to him.

I was studying for the bar and it was well known within our neighborhood that I was preparing to enter the practice of law. And so I would always get calls from people, even before I was licensed to practice just about their different legal wells.

...