About a year after meeting the Officers Friendly, my father drove my great-grandmother, Big Momma, back to her home in Monroe, Louisiana. Regardless of how nervous this might make a kid, everything intensifies when your family is Black and big, white, tobacco-spitting cops approach your car in the middle of nowhere. When my dad started the ignition and we were able to continue our journey to Big Momma’s house, I felt relief. Seventy-three years earlier, Robert Charles killed eight cops and about twenty civilians. This story excerpted by permission from Lens award-winning contributor Chuck Perkins’ new book, Beautiful and Ugly Too, released today by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press.