MARTINSVILLE – Forty-nine years after somebody drove a screwdriver into Carol Jenkins-Davis' heart and left the young African-American woman to die on Morgan Street, the leaders of this much-maligned Indiana town for the first time reached out to the victim's family.

They hope to bring comfort to the Davises and also to begin changing peoples' long-held — and widely held —perception that Martinsville is a racist place.

On Thursday, some 150 townsfolk crowded into City Hall and joined hands and prayed with members of the Davis family, who came from Rushville. Martinsville mayor Shannon Kohl dedicated a "memorial stone" in Jenkins-Davis' honor at the entrance to the municipal building.

"Carol's life had enormous value and promise," the stone says. It does not go on to describe her brutal murder — it's not supposed to be a historical marker — but most people who see it already know what happened.

On the evening of Sept. 16, 1968, Jenkins-Davis, 21, was selling encyclopedias door-to-door in Martinsville, where the population was and is almost entirely white. At 9 p.m. she was found dead on the sidewalk in the 500 block of East Morgan Street, one of the town's main thoroughfares.

Martinsville's reputation was sealed.

"Before then," said Jackie Blackwell, who runs the Come 'n Git It diner on Martinsville's courthouse square, "Martinsville was just a regular old town."

In Indiana, even a "regular old town" could be an uncomfortable place if you were black. The Ku Klux Klan was a major, and very public, presence throughout the state in the 1920s, and since then Klan groups have rallied in many Indiana cities and towns, including in Martinsville in 1967, the year before Jenkins-Davis' murder. But that event was part of a multicity Klan tour, and Martinsville's mayor at the time urged his citizens to "disregard and ignore" it.

"Growing up, we were leery of all small towns of Indiana," said Wilma Moore, 66, who recently retired as senior archivist of African-American history at the Indiana History Center. Moore, who grew up in Indianapolis, is African-American. "I remember someone saying, 'Any place that's got 'green' in it, don't go there — Greenwood, Greencastle, Greenfield.'

"But Martinsville. After Carol Jenkins, Martinsville was crystalized. With the other towns, we suspected trouble. But wow, with Martinsville, we knew Carol Jenkins went there and we knew she didn't leave there."

Small towns historically have tended to be predominately white, and Martinsville (population: 12,000) even now has few black residents — just 24, according to the 2010 census. Jenkins-Davis came from almost entirely white Rushville (population: 6,300). She was one of a handful of blacks at the high school, as was her younger sister, Paulette. "We didn't really experience a lot of racism growing up," Paulette said.

But her father did. In the Rushville of the 1950s, 89-year-old Paul Davis said, if a black person wanted to go to one of the town's bars, they had to use the back door. He got around that by not going to the bars. "I said, 'I ain't going in the back door for nothing,'" Davis said.

For decades after Jenkins-Davis' murder in Martinsville, there were no arrests in the case, and that created suspicion that Martinsville police were protecting a townsman.

The crime "defined us — we've had this stigma, and we've never really faced it," said Kohl, 45, who is in her second year as mayor. In 2015 she defeated Phil Deckard, 76, who was seeking his fifth term.

In 2002, 34 years after Jenkins-Davis' murder, a witness came forward — and turned in her own father. Shirley McQueen was 7 when she and her father, Kenneth Richmond, were passing through Martinsville. He lived in Hendricks County, where he worked on a farm. He had ties to the Klan.

McQueen told Indiana State Police investigators she'd witnessed the slaying, and they believed her because she mentioned Jenkins-Davis was wearing a yellow scarf. That had not been public information. McQueen recalled her father, and another man who was with them that night, saying that Jenkins-Davis "got what she deserved."

Richmond was 70 and living in an Indianapolis nursing home when he was arrested and charged with murder. He was declared incompetent to stand trial and died of cancer four months after his arrest. According to a WTHR-13 report, he was in police custody and on his deathbed when he confessed to Jenkins-Davis' murder with a nod of his head.

That the crime appeared, for the first time, not to have been the work of a Martinsville resident had little effect on Martinsville's reputation. "The narrative of Martinsville continues to be we are a racist, bigoted community," said Joanne R. Stuttgen, who had no idea of Martinsville's history when she moved there in 1990 to study folklore at Indiana University in nearby Bloomington. Her Realtor said something about "rednecks," but the Ph.D. student from Minnesota didn't know what the word meant. Stuttgen now serves as the Morgan County historian, and is quick to notice slights to her adopted home town.

She notes, for instance, an IU student's recently circulated online petition to remove from a school building part of a mural that depicts the state's once-heavy Klan presence. Originally the petition stated that "Martinsville, just 20 miles north of Bloomington, is the headquarters of the KKK," said Stuttgen. While Martinsville, like most Indiana towns in the 1920s, had a large Klan membership, "it's definitely not true we're the headquarters of the KKK," said Stuttgen.

The reference to Martinsville was later removed from the petition.

"My freshman year at IU, I'd say I was from Martinsville and people would look all worried and say, 'Are you safe?' 'Do you go out past dark?'" said Nate Barrett, now an Indiana University sophomore and one of Martinsville's few black residents. Barrett moved there in the third grade with his mother, who is white.

Barrett said once at the Circle K gas station an elderly man looked him up and down and said, "What are you doing here?" "Just getting a Polar Pop," Barrett said, and that was that.

"I have run into the knuckleheads," he said, "but I have never felt unsafe." Barrett's best friends are still his Martinsville friends — he rooms with two of them in Bloomington. And every Thursday night he returns to Martinsville to watch football with his friends back home.

Stuttgen, however, acknowledges that the "the behavior of certain individuals in Martinsville" has bolstered the harsh popular perception. But she considers it "unreasonable to stigmatize an entire community one way or the other when a community is made up of 12,000 individuals."

Or as T.J. Fish, 75, a resident of Martinsville since 1973, put it the other day while eating breakfast with her husband at Forkey's on Morgan Street: "One bad apple, and you judge the whole community?"

But there's been more than one incident.

In 1998, the Indiana High School Athletic Association put Martinsville’s high school sports teams on a yearlong probation during which they could not have a home game, following a basketball game where a handful of fans supposedly hurled racial slurs at visiting black players from Bloomington.

In November 2001, in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the town's newspaper published a letter to the editor from Martinsville assistant police chief Dennis Nail critical of "Billy Buddha," "Hadji Hindu" and "queers." The Bloomington newspaper demanded Nail be reprimanded, but at a subsequent meeting of the Martinsville City Council, Nail was patted on the back, according to an Indianapolis Star report. One of Nail's dozens of supporters who crowded into the meeting described the police officer's letter as "one of the finest articles I've ever read in my entire life, outside of the Bible."

Both Nail's letter and the ballgame received wide publicity, which Keith Rhoades, who covers crime for the Martinsville newspaper and has lived in the town for 62 of his 65 years, says added to misperceptions about the town because certain nuances were missed. At the basketball game, for example, he said some people thought the Martinsville students were chanting "Darkies, darkies" when in fact they were chanting "Arties, Arties." The school's sports teams are the Artesians, Arties for short.

And after the Nail letter hundreds of Martinsville residents, including the president of the Chamber of Commerce, paid for an ad in the local newspaper denouncing it.

"I don't make excuses," said Rhoades. "We have idiots. But everywhere you have idiots. We're no better and no worse than anywhere else. We have some great people and some jerks. It seems like our jerks get the bigger play."

"It doesn't matter what's true," said Stuttgen, "What's believed to be true is where the power lies."

Image is a tricky thing to manage. Paoli, in Orange County, lately found itself in a harsh spotlight after one of its residents, Matthew Heimbach, gained notoriety as one of the white separatist organizers of the Charlottesville, Va., protest. In an effort at damage control, a local Mennonite church made signs that now pepper local front yards: "No matter what color your skin, No matter where you are from, No matter what you believe, We're glad you are our neighbor!" Those signs now pepper front yards in this Southern Indiana town.

PR can be hard to measure, but Martinsville's stigma, left unaddressed for more than half a century, may have stunted the town's growth. Many factors go into economic development, but an important one for small towns is their proximity to major cities. Many small towns near big cities have boomed.

But not Martinsville, even though the Morgan County seat is just 31 miles from Indianapolis, just three miles farther from the capitol city than the Hamilton County seat of Noblesville. In 1970, Martinsville's population was 9,700, compared to 7,700 for Noblesville. Today, Martinsville has 11,700 people, and Noblesville has 60,000. And countywide it's the same story, Morgan County's population going from 44,000 to 69,000, and Hamilton County's going from 54,000 to 275,000.

Over the years, private citizens of Martinsville have tried to change their town's image. Following the controversial basketball game, some organized the Albert Merritt Dinner, an annual event to honor a beloved Martinsville citizen who was black. "Doc" Merritt came to Martinsville in 1902 as a porter for one of the hotels and in his spare time formed a boys club. He took local children fishing, took them to the Presbyterian church, taught them baseball. The boys, all of them white, adored him. In 2002, the dinner's special guests were several dozen former ballplayers from Indianapolis' all-black high school, Crispus Attucks, who recalled many hard-fought games against the Artesians. The dinner was held in the Martinsville High School cafeteria, and more than 300 locals attended.

But the political leaders have been slow to embrace such outreach. In 2014, county commissioners agreed to place a shoulder-high monument to Jenkins-Davis on the courthouse square. But the monument never happened.

In 2002, on news of Richmond's arrest, The New York Times interviewed then-mayor Shannon Buskirk about Martinsville's reputation for intolerance. Buskirk, while expressing relief for the Davis family, said "I have never mistreated anybody myself, and I don't feel I have to apologize for anything."

The new mayor is trying something new. "We tried not talking about it for all those years," said Kohl, "but we need to acknowledge it — for Carol's family to heal, and for us to heal and get some closure."

Paul Davis, Carol's father, said he and his family members appreciate the town's efforts.

"There's bad people everywhere you go, and there's good people," he said.

Call IndyStar reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.