Chances

A 25-year-old Negro sharecropper laboriously, in crabbed script, wrote his last testament:

"Have you thought about some people are allowed a chance over and over again, then there are others allowed little chance some no chance at all," wrote Odell Waller. "I accidentally fell and some good people tried to help me. Others did everything they could against me so the governor and the coats dont no the true facts. In my case I worked hard from sunup until sundown trying to make a living for my family and it ended in death for me. You take big people as the President, Governors, judge, their children dont never have to suffer. They has plenty of money. . . . The penitentiary all over the United States are fulp of people ho was pore tried to work and have something, couldnt so that maid them steel an rob."

A few minutes later Odell Waller died in the electric chair in the Virginia State Penitentiary for killing his white landlord (TIME, July 6) over 50 sacks of wheat that Waller claimed were his.

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