New from Harvard University Press:
Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders (Oct. 2014), by
Renee C. Romano (Oberlin College). The Press explains:
Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were
charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of a
long-deferred justice began to change in 1994, when a Mississippi jury
convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers.
Since then, more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened,
resulting in more than a dozen trials. But how much did these public
trials contribute to a public reckoning with America’s racist past? Racial Reckoning
investigates that question, along with the political pressures and
cultural forces that compelled the legal system to revisit these
decades-old crimes.
Renee C. Romano brings readers into the courthouse for the
trials of the civil rights era’s most infamous killings, including the
Birmingham church bombing and the triple murder of Andrew Goodman, James
Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner. The activists who succeeded in reopening
these cases hoped that bringing those responsible to justice would serve
to highlight the state-sanctioned racism that had condoned the killings
and the lingering effects of racial violence. Courtroom procedures,
however, worked against a deeper exploration of the state’s complicity
in murder or a full accounting of racial injustices, past or present.
Yet the media and a new generation of white southerners—a different
breed from the dying Klansmen on trial—saw the convictions as proof of
the politically rehabilitated South and stamped “case closed” on
America’s legacy of violent racism. Romano shows why addressing the
nation’s troubled racial past will require more than legal justice.
A few blurbs:
“[An] insightful new book on the cold cases of the civil rights era.”—Kevin Boyle
“Over the last two decades, the violent
death throes of Jim Crow have been replayed in courtrooms across the
South, as prosecutors have reopened some of the most notorious murders
of the civil rights era. In this wise, probing, gently skeptical book, Romano
considers why these prosecutions are happening now, the truths they
reveal and conceal, and what they tell us about America’s continuing
racial odyssey.”—James T. Campbell
More information, including an interview with the author, is available
here.
