Over the past 25 years, prosecutors have re-investigated approximately 100 murders that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s struggle to challenge “the racial order” of the South. Thirteen cases eventually produced convictions of 23 men. Professor Renee Romano of Oberlin College has written a perceptive book that analyzes the prosecutions and the phenomenon they created. More importantly, she raises hard questions about the premise that America is now a “color blind” society that has fully reckoned with its history of racial violence.
Although race-motivated murders of the mid-century took place throughout America, the book focuses most of its attention on eight cases from Alabama and Mississippi that later produced convictions. These include the murders of Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Rainey Pool, the four Birmingham girls (Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley), Ben Chester White, the three Freedom Summer activists (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner), Charles Moore and Jimmie Lee Jackson.
