Awards

• Nominated for Frank L. & Harriet C. Owsley Award 2015
• Nominated for James A. Rawley Prize 2015
• Nominated for John Hope Franklin Publication Prize 2015
• Nominated for Littleton-Griswold Prize 2015

Overview

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. ""[A] timely and significant work Romano brilliantly demystifies the false binary of villainous white men like Beckwith or Edgar Ray Killen who represent vestiges of a violent racial past with a more enlightened color-blind society Considering the current partisan and racial divide over the prosecution of police shootings of unarmed black men, this book is a must-read for historians, legal analysts, and journalists interested in understanding the larger meanings of civil rights or racially explosive trials in America."" -Chanelle Rose, American Historical Review

Full Product Details

9780674976030

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Renee C. Romano is Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies at Oberlin College.

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