Death at the Intersection

The 41 happy-go-lucky migrant workers in the flimsy canvas-topped truck were a typical grab-bag assortment from among the 12,000 Deep South Negro laborers who annually sweep northward with the spring to range through North Carolina. It was green-bean-picking time, and this Florida-recruited group had spent some three weeks in the state sweating through the day to feed the canneries, bedding down at night like nomads--men, women and children--in a temporary camp near Mount Olive. Now, en route from the camp to the fields at Dunn, they were rocking along nine miles from Fayetteville, where their road joins U.S. route 301.

Squinting down the highway, Gilbert Robert Peters, 25, at the wheel of a potato-laden tractor-trailer, saw the old flat-bed lumbering into the intersection, hit his brakes in a 147-ft. skid. The heavy tractor slammed into the rear of the workers' truck, threw the truck's people like broken jackstraws across the highway and into the ditches. Twelve of the crumpled people along route 301 were killed outright by the crushing fall; two more were burned alive in a bright ball of gasoline-fed flame. By week's end 20 of the migrants, including four women and a six-month-old boy, had died in what the National Safety Council sadly marked the worst truck collision in U.S. history.

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