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.
