Racial Reckoning : Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders / Renee C. Romano.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Romano, Renee C., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Trials (Murder)--United States--History.

Trials (Murder).

Civil rights movements--United States--History.

Civil rights movements.

African Americans--Civil rights--History--20th century.

African Americans.

United States--Race relations.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (279 p.)

Edition:

Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Exhuming the Past

1. Crimes and Complicity during the Civil Rights Era

2. “Jim Crow” Justice

3. Reopening Civil Rights–Era Murder Cases

4. Civil Rights Crimes in the Courtroom

5. Civil Rights Trials and Narratives of Redemption

6. From Legal Justice to Social Justice

Conclusion: “We Are All Mississippians”

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jun 2020)

ISBN:

9780674966888

0674966880

9780674736177

0674736176

OCLC:

892430091