Later, as the editor of his high school paper in Mobile, Alabama, David Kirk won permission to attend a local black high school for a month. He told the authorities he was researching an article about the education of black youth. What he really wanted to do, his family said, was to try to experience how the other half lived in the Jim Crow South. (He had asked to transfer to the school full-time, coming up with the cover story only after his request was denied.) “I came out of that school shocked and radicalized”, he later wrote in an unpublished narrative of his life.