A Shot in the Moonlight
How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
The sensational true story of George Dinning, a freed slave, who in 1899 joined forces with a Confederate war hero in search of justice in the Jim Crow south. “Taut and tense. Inspiring and terrifying in its timelessness.”(Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad )
Named a most anticipated book of 2021 by O, The Oprah Magazine
Named a "must-read" by the Chicago Review of Books
One of CNN's most anticipated books of 2021
After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty-five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family.
So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history — one that ended with Dinning becoming the first Black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction.
Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic but largely forgotten story, and the unusual convergence of characters — among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky governor William O'Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself — that allowed this unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare.
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Journalist Montgomery (The Man Who Walked Backward) documents in this engrossing history the unlikely alliance between a former enslaved person convicted of murder in 1897 and a former Confederate soldier. A farmer in Simpson County, Ky., George Dinning was accosted in his home by a white mob accusing him of stealing. He was shot in the arm and fired back, killing a wealthy white farmer, and turned himself in to the county sheriff the next day. Montgomery draws from trial records and press accounts to describe how Dinning was convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to seven years in prison, pardoned by the governor of Kentucky, and awarded damages in a lawsuit against his attackers. In these efforts, Dinning was aided by Bennett Young, a Confederate soldier who led a raid on St. Albans, Vt., during the Civil War but devoted much of his later life to helping Black orphans and defending impoverished African Americans in court cases. Montgomery details the legal and political issues behind Dinning's case, but has a tougher time capturing the personalities of his key subjects, Young especially. Still, this is a rewarding and well-documented look at a neglected chapter in the fight for racial justice.
