The history is well known: On June 12, 1963, Mississippi's courageous NAACP chief, Medgar Evers, was gunned down by white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith. Tried twice by all-white juries, Beckwith escaped conviction for three decades. But then Mississippi began to confront its tormented past. And in the 1990s, when Beckwith was sent to jail by a crusading young prosecutor, the family of Medgar Evers finally got justice. Hailed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Lillian Smith Award, Of Long Memory reveals how this remarkable reversal took place. Nossiter uses the tools of memory, history, and reportage,and the clear vantage point of an outsider, a Northerner,to portray an entire state quite literally summoning up its ghosts. A new epilogue discusses other civil rights cases now being reconsidered, and skillfully shows how the South is finding a way to create justice where none had existed before.

About the Author
Adam Nossiter has been a staff writer for the New York Times and before that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is the author of The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War, and has been writing about the South for nearly 20 years. He lives in New Orleans.


Book Information
ISBN 9780306811623
Author Adam Nossiter
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Da Capo Press Inc
Publisher Hachette Books