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The Ghosts of Mississippi

The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Bryon De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South

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1 of 1 copy available
Revised and reissued with a new epilogue, the award-winning classic Ghosts of Mississippi tells the inside story of one of the most rankling murder cases of the civil rights era. In this historical page-turner, National Book Award finalist Maryanne Vollers exposes a state’s struggle to confront the ghosts of its violent past in order to bring a killer to justice.
The civil rights movement was just catching fire in Mississippi on the night in 1963 when white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith crouched in the honeysuckle across the street from NAACP leader Medgar Evers’s house and shot him in the back. Three trials and thirty years later, a jury convicted Beckwith of murder and sent him to prison for life. Drawing on her rare access to the prosecutors, the Evers family and Beckwith himself, Vollers recreates the events of Evers’s life and death, weaving together a thrilling tale of racism, murder, courage, redemption, and the ultimate triumph of justice.
In a new epilogue, written on the fiftieth anniversary of Evers’s assassination, Vollers updates the main characters and examines efforts over the past two decades to bring more unpunished killers to trial. Her verdict: The ghosts of Mississippi are still restless.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 3, 1995
      Though this book is a worthwhile account of the 1963 murder of Mississippi NAACP representative Medgar Evers and the eventual conviction last year of his killer, its subtitle suggests a difficult task. Indeed, freelance journalist Vollers spends the first third of the book leading up to Evers's murder, sketching his background and that of racist killer Byron De La Beckwith, as well as their state's racial climate. She then recounts the two mistrials in the case, the paths of Beckwith and widow Myrlie Evers and the evolution in Mississippi--a new breed of politicians, greater black political power and a more aggressive press--that set the stage for a new trial. A few passages jolt: Beckwith, during his last trial in 1994, deems a dark-skinned Indian motel manager ``really a white man.'' Others resonate, as Vollers relates the patriotic Evers's earnest call for desegregation. Though somewhat broader in scope, this title is more diffuse and not as well written as Adam Nossiter's 1994 book, After Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers.

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  • English

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