Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of a long-deferred justice began to change in 1994, when a Mississippi jury convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers. Since then, more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened, resulting in more than a dozen trials. But how much did these public trials contribute to a public reckoning with America's racist past? Racial Reckoning investigates that question, along with the political pressures and cultural forces that compelled the legal system to revisit these decades-old crimes.

"[A] timely and significant work...Romano brilliantly demystifies the false binary of villainous white men like Beckwith or Edgar Ray Killen who represent vestiges of a violent racial past with a more enlightened color-blind society...Considering the current partisan and racial divide over the prosecution of police shootings of unarmed black men, this book is a must-read for historians, legal analysts, and journalists interested in understanding the larger meanings of civil rights or racially explosive trials in America."
-Chanelle Rose, American Historical Review

About the Author
Renee C. Romano is Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies at Oberlin College.

Awards
Nominated for John Hope Franklin Publication Prize 2015 and Frank L. & Harriet C. Owsley Award 2015 and Littleton-Griswold Prize 2015 and James A. Rawley Prize 2015 and OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award 2015 and John Phillip Reid Book Award 2015 and James Willard Hurst Prize 2015 and Ellis W. Hawley Prize 2015 and Best Book Award in Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 2015 and Wesley-Logan Prize 2015 and Goldsmith Book Prize 2016.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674976030
Author Renee C. Romano
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press