On the evening of July 29, 1978, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, 20-year-old William Bryant Tatum was sitting in a restaurant parking lot with his 18-year-old girlfriend, Nancy Hilton, when a gunman opened fire. Tatum, a junior varsity basketball player at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga described as quiet and fond of basketball, was killed; Hilton was shot and survived.

Investigators later linked the attack to Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who targeted interracial couples and Black people. Franklin confessed to Tatum’s murder and to the attempted murder of Hilton. In 1998 Franklin pleaded guilty to Tatum’s murder and received a life sentence for that crime.

Does anyone have memories of Tatum from his time at UTC or information about that night in Chattanooga?