In the Pines
A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Mississippi Historical Society Book of the Year Award
In this “courageous and compelling … essential and critically important” book (Bryan Stevenson), an award-winning scholar of white supremacy tackles her toughest research assignment yet: the unsolved murder of a Black man in rural Mississippi while her grandfather was the local sheriff—a cold case that sheds new light on the hidden legacy of racial terror in America.
A Washington Post Noteworthy Book | An Amazon Best Book of the Month
Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic hero. This story, however, hid a dark truth.
Years later, as a rising scholar of white supremacy, Hale revisited the story about her grandfather and Versie Johnson, the man who died in his custody. The more she learned about what had happened that day, the less sense she could make of her family's version of events. With the support of a Carnegie fellowship, she immersed herself in the investigation. What she discovered would upend everything she thought she knew about her family, the tragedy, and this haunted strip of the South—because Johnson's death, she found, was actually a lynching. But guilt did not lie with a faceless mob.
A story of obsession, injustice, and the ties that bind, In the Pines casts an unsparing eye over this intimate terrain, driven by a deep desire to set straight the historical record and to understand and subvert white racism, along with its structures, costs, and consequences—and the lies that sustain it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"This is the story of a lynching and a lie," writes historian Hale (Cool Town) in her riveting investigation of a family legend. During summers spent with her grandparents in Prentiss, Miss., Hale grew up on heroic tales of her grandfather, the town sheriff, including the time he prevented the lynching of a Black man in 1947. Years later this story inspired Hale to research lynchings, including the incident in Prentiss. It was then that she discovered the horrifying truth: instead of saving Versie Johnson, a young Black man, her grandfather murdered him. Accused of raping a white woman, Johnson was held in the local jail and threatened by an angry white mob. The official story would later report that the sheriff and two highway patrolmen then took Johnson to the site of the crime, where he was shot when he "attempted to escape." Hale's years of research reveal that Johnson was actually executed. She explains that this type of "underground lynching," which "local officials arranged, participated in, or helped cover up," had become commonplace after President Truman's 1946 Civil Rights Commission cracked down on public lynchings. Hale's narrative is both deeply personal and steeped in the history of the rural Deep South. It's a harrowing look at white supremacist violence and the lies that allowed it to flourish.
