Showing posts with label Jim Crow South. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jim Crow South. Show all posts

Monday, March 15, 2021

A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought tor Justice in the Jim Crow South by Ben Montgomery

"With these facts I made my way home, thoroughly convinced that a Negro's life is a very cheap thing."`~from A Shot in the Moonlight

 

Several years ago I went to a local church to hear a Metro Detroit fiber artist talk about her quilt. The quilt was huge, a stark black with thousands of names embroidered on it. 

April Anue, the artist, told us how God hounded her to make this quilt, and what it cost her, the anguish and tears that accompanied every name she embroidered. She talked about the horror of making the nooses that ornament the quilt.

The 5,ooo names on the quilt are those of African Americans who had been lynched in America between 1865 and 1965. The title of the quilt is Strange Fruit.

Strange Fruit by April Anue

Five thousand human beings, beaten, tortured, and murdered. Anue researched every name, now memorialized for all to read.

In the Jim Crow South there were black Americans who were harassed, beaten, their homes and livelihoods taken from them, their families traumatized; they were denied protection under the law by the authorities and the courts. How many tens of thousands have been forgotten, their names lost?

Ben Montgomery has brought one man back to life. A freed slave whose white neighbors gathered on moonlit night to demand he leave his hard-earned, modest home and farm. Twenty-five men who claimed to be 'friends.' A man who disguised his voice and wore a handkerchief to hide his identity called to him to come out of his home. When this black man had the audacity not to comply, shots bombarded his home, wounding him. And to protect his home and family, this man shot out his window into the crowd, killing a white man.

His name was George Dinning. He fled into the fields to hide as the white men took their fallen comrade away. The next morning, Dinning's house and barn were burned to the ground. George turned himself into the authorities when he heard that he had killed a man.

The story of that night, Dinning's trial, and what happened afterwards is devastating and moving. And, it is perplexing, for the story of Dinning protecting the sanctity of his home brought a surge of support, including that of a prominent veteran of the Confederate Army who built memorials to Confederate heroes while supporting organizations to benefit freed slaves. He was "foremost in work of charity among our race," one black minister said. 

A Shot in the Moonlight  incorporates historic documents in a vivid recreation of the events of that night, the trial, and the unexpected twists of fortune afterward. Dinning stood up to power in the courtroom, asking for reparation for his loss. Everything was stacked against him, and when he was denied justice, a deluge of editorials were printed in his defense.

In his book What Unites Us, Dan Rather talks about building consensus on the shared values we all hold dear. The sanctity of home and a man's right to protect his home and family raised sympathy of for Dinning, for every American could sympathize with protecting one's home and family.   

This is an amazing story of a brave man, a horrendous tale of hate and racism, and a revelation of race relations in America that brought chills and tears. 

I received a free book from Little, Brown Spark. My review is fair and unbiased.

I previous read Montgomery's book The Man Who Walked Backwards: An American Dreamer's Search for Meaning in the Great Depression, which I reviewed here.

A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South
by Ben Montgomery
Publication January 26, 2021
ISBN-13: 9780316535540 hardcover USD: $28/CAD: $35
ISBN-13: 9780316535564 ebook USD: $14.99 /CAD: $19.99

from the publisher

The sensational true story of George Dinning, a freed slave, who in 1899 joined forces with a Confederate war hero in search of justice in the Jim Crow south. “Taut and tense. Inspiring and terrifying in its timelessness.”(Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad )

Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by O, The Oprah Magazine

Named a "must-read" by the Chicago Review of Books

One of CNN's most anticipated books of 2021 

After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family.

So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history — one that ended with Dinning becoming the first Black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic but largely forgotten story, and the unusual convergence of characters — among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky governor William O'Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself — that allowed this unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare.

About the author

Ben Montgomery is author of the New York Times-bestselling 'Grandma Gatewood's Walk,' winner of a 2014 Outdoor Book Award, 'The Leper Spy,' and 'The Man Who Walked Backward,' coming fall 2018 from Little, Brown & Co. He spent most of his 20 year newspaper career as an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He founded the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com and helped launch the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers collective.

In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called "For Their Own Good," about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school. In 2018, he won a National Headliner award for journalistic innovation for a project exploring police shootings in Florida. He was among the first fellows for Images and Voices of Hope in 2015 and was selected to be the fall 2018 T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor at the University of Montana in Missoula.

Montgomery grew up in Oklahoma and studied journalism at Arkansas Tech University, where he played defensive back for the football team, the Wonder Boys. He worked for the Courier in Russellville, Ark., the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Texas, the Times Herald-Record in New York's Hudson River Valley and the Tampa Tribune before joining the Times in 2006. He lives in Tampa. 

Sunday, May 20, 2018

The Mercy Seat by Elizabeth H. Winthrop: Men's Justice and God's Mercy

"Surely, he thinks, in a world where such a thing as this exists, surely there can be no God." Father Hannigan in The Mercy Seat
The Mercy Seat by Elizabeth H. Winthrop is a brilliant and heart-wrenching novel. Historical Fiction set in the Jim Crow South, the book addresses relevant issues of complicity in injustice and the pressures that maintain the status quo.

The story is told through the viewpoints of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, black and white, lawman and criminal, revealing who is truly innocent and who is guilty.

On a brutally hot day, a young black man awaits midnight. He has an appointment with the electric chair.

Will was found guilty of the rape and murder of a young white woman. Will's memories flash back on a loving moment they shared and the fear that made him run away when discovered.

Will's father Frank knows his worn out mule is not up to the task, but he is determined to deliver his only son's tombstone to the cemetery.

Ora and Dale have a son in Guadalcanal. They haven't heard from him for weeks. Dale has hidden the telegram. A Northerner, Ora has never adjusted to the Jim Crow South. Behind Dale's back, she secrets candy to the young boys working in the field behind their store.

Lane is a prison trusty who is helping to deliver the electric chair. He is halfway through his sentence, having killed a man during a robbery. Sometimes, he says, working ain't enough. Especially when an accident left his father crippled. The captain in charge drinks his way along the road trip.

Father Hannigan is filled with doubt, finding New Iberia more foreign than his Madagascar mission. His job is to console the grieving but he has no words of hope.

The lawyer Polly dreads the coming of midnight, for he must witness the execution. Since boyhood, he has been haunted by the postcard of a lynching his father had given him. His wife Nell does not understand how Polly gave Will the death sentence. He keeps secret the threats he received. Their boy Gabe decides to witness the execution, hitching a ride with the family of the murdered girl.

"...he wonders if it really matters in the end what kind of justice it is--mob or legal--when the end result is death."
During the course of the day, these people question their complicity in evil, make connections, and make enemies. Some find mercy, others are dealt justice; some get away with murder.

This book has haunted me. I want to talk about it and dissect it. I think it would make a great book club pick.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Mercy Seat
by Elizabeth H. Winthrop
Grove Atlantic
Pub Date 18 May 2018
ISBN: 9780802128188

*****
The Mercy Seat begins with a quote from the song The Mercy Seat by Nick Cave, "And the mercy seat is waiting...And I'm not afraid to die." But what is the mercy seat?

The ancient Israelites' religious writings, the Torah, which Christians know as the first five books of the Old Testament, had a sacred cover, the kapporet, which Martin Luther translated as "seat of mercy." This cover protected men from the judgment of God. Sacrificial blood was sprinkled on the kapporet as an atonement for men's sins, and God would extend mercy while still being holy and just. 

The title then refers to the themes of sin and guilt and substitute sacrifice/scapegoat.