Racial Violence, Justice, and the Purpose of Writing History

Why do we write? In the age of Twitter, sometimes, I forget. Thankfully, reading these two books reminded me of why. I thought of something George Orwell wrote in 1946: "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing."¹ Like Orwell, Stanley Nelson and Patrick Phillips wrote these books to expose lies—to uncover truths about how eight men died in the Delta, and how Forsyth County, Georgia became all white.

As historians, many of us aspire to have the general public read our work so that we can expose lies to them. Accomplishing this feat is easier said than done. Without watering down or oversimplifying their narratives, Nelson and Phillips speak to wide audiences in their books. They model how historians can write with passion to make a difference. Neither author is a historian by trade, but what their work lacks in scholarly engagement and historiographical contributions, they make up for it with extensive primary source research condensed into a narrative that pushes readers to act. Their purpose in writing history is not to speak to other historians, or to challenge academic interpretations of the past. As historians, we have something to learn from this approach. I write this knowing I am close to making a straw man argument, and I want to emphasize that, of course, there are historians who write with both narrative power and historiographical weight. When I read these two books, I felt a sense of outrage more keenly than I felt that I had learned something new within the broader field of history. I imagine that is how Nelson and Phillips wanted me to feel after finishing their last pages. I felt like I needed to act, to share these books with others, and press on after closing these books. They boiled my blood, as they will yours.

In Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s, Stanley Nelson packages eight years of investigative journalism into one narrative account, concentrating on eight racially motivated killings that occurred between 1964 and 1967 in locations around Ferriday, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi. Nelson serves as editor of the Concordia Sentinel, a weekly newspaper that proclaims in its masthead, "Covering Louisiana's Delta Since 1876." In 2007, Nelson learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would look into civil rights cold case murders following the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. From the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Nelson received redacted reports about the unsolved murder of Frank Morris, who died in 1964 after unknown assailants set fire to his shoe shop in Ferriday with Morris inside. Nelson wrote a 764-word article for the Concordia Sentinel, thinking that that would be all. Soon after publication, he received a phone call from Morris's granddaughter who had always wondered about why he had been murdered, who the perpetrators were, and why the case went unsolved for so long. Nelson promised to find out as much as he could about Morris. From then on, Nelson was hooked. He went on to write nearly 200 articles in the Concordia Sentinel, becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting for 2011. His efforts led to collaborations with the Cold Case Justice Initiative of Syracuse University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Cold Case Project at Louisiana State University, as well as with the FBI and U.S. attorneys. His research and reporting helped close...