Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders

by Renee C. Romano

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674050426
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	10/14/2014
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Introduction: Exhuming the Past 1

1 Crimes and Complicity during the Civil Rights Era 15

2 "Jim Crow" Justice 42

3 Reopening Civil Rights-Era Murder Cases 66

4 Civil Rights Crimes in the Courtroom 105

5 Civil Rights Trials and Narratives of Redemption 142

6 From Legal Justice to Social Justice 169

Conclusion: "We Are All Mississippians" 199

Notes 209

Acknowledgments 257

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

[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.

American Historical Review - Chanelle Rose

An extremely important and engaging book. Romano provides a much needed link between the racist violence of our past and the persistence of white supremacy in our ‘post-racial’ era. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in justice and democracy.

Emilye Crosby

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

Since 1990, varied agendas have intersected to push for reopening the more than 100 unsolved, racially motivated murders from the civil rights era. These efforts—on the parts of family members, local groups, journalists, prosecutors, and law professors—have led not only to convictions of murderers like Edgar Ray Killen and Byron De La Beckwith, but also to commemoration, dialog—through truth commissions such as the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation—and legislation, most notably the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007. In a splendid cultural and intellectual history of this movement, Romano explores what it means… Romano observes that legal justice, even when it leads to successful prosecution, does not equal social justice.

Choice - E. R. Crowther

[An] insightful new book on the cold cases of the civil rights era.

Washington Post - Kevin Boyle

11/01/2014
Since 1994, more than 100 race-based murder cases have been reopened, including that of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Romano argues that true healing and justice needs more than a media-friendly "case closed" narrative.

Library Journal