Civil Rights Murders

A midnight bombing in 1966 Mississippi rocks a rural community, and its echoes reverberate down the decades. Fifty years later, a midnight knock on his door in Oxford drags former cold case detective Arlan Trahan back to that dark night. His visitor is a mysterious Ole Miss law student who calls herself Lennie, and she wants him to reopen the case of a black man she believes was wrongly accused of murdering a white family in the bombing. He initially refuses—and within days the girl is missing. More strangely, the midnight knockings on his door continue, but no one is there. The eerie ...

In the months and weeks before the fateful November 22nd, 1963, Dallas was brewing with political passions, a city crammed with larger-than-life characters dead-set against the Kennedy presidency. These included rabid warriors like defrocked military general Edwin A. Walker; the world's richest oil baron, H. L. Hunt; the leader of the largest Baptist congregation in the world, W.A. Criswell; and the media mogul Ted Dealey, who raucously confronted JFK and whose family name adorns the plaza where the president was murdered.

Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of 31 men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue-collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community.

In the darkest days of Germany, the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested and then executed by hanging at the dawn of a Spring morning. The dictator and his fools that Bonhoeffer mentioned in his books are still around. Unfortunately, no lesson is learned from the sufferings of the past and therefore history just repeats itself. Technological advancement has brought outer space increasingly in human’s reach, yet people are more passionate than even primitive societies in surrendering their willpower to the dictators. In this book, you will read the tragic story of a family ...

Emmett Till’s murder is one of the most infamous in American history; a moment that, more than any other, awakened the world to the racism of the Deep South. Yet despite growing up just a few miles from where it happened, Wright Thompson knew nothing of it until he left Mississippi. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing. Over the course of five years’ research, Thompson has learnt that almost every part of the standard account of Till’s killing is wrong.

On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the city’s history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and murdering innocent black residents during three days of bloody rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands.

A major literary figure tells “a searching tale of loss, recovery, and déja vu that is part memoir and what-if speculation, part polemic and exposé” (The Washington Post) about two generations of one family - civil rights martyr Emmett Till and his father, Louis - shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.