There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou

A sweeping study of sexual assault trials in the Jim Crow South, detailing the racial and economic inequities of rape law and the resistance of ordinary women

In the early years of the twentieth century, Mississippi County, Arkansas, was a brutal and profitable place. Home to starving, landless farmers, the county produced almost 2 percent of the entire world’s cotton. It was also the site of two rape trials that made national headlines: an accusation that sent two Black men, almost certai...