Triple Tragedy in Alcolu
Triple Tragedy in Alcolu

Author: Kendall Bell

Publisher:

Published: 2020-02-05

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781622681518

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On June 16, 1944, the State of South Carolina executed 14-year-old George Stinney Jr., found guilty of killing 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker in the Clarendon County town of Alcolu. Betty June Binnicker and her 7-year-old companion, Mary Emma Thames, went missing on March 23, 1944. Searchers discovered their bodies early the next morning. Binnicker's bicycle, and its detached front wheel, had been placed on top of them. Deputies charged George Stinney Jr. with killing both girls. However, for reasons unknown, Stinney was tried only for the murder of Binnicker. 83 days after the deaths, with no appeals, George Stinney Jr. was electrocuted by the State of South Carolina. Rumors about Stinney's innocence or guilt began the day of his arrest. Since the original trial, a fictional book, movie, and several video productions loosely based on the George Stinney Jr. story added to those rumors, and some eventually came to be touted as fact. In December 2014, a judge vacated George Stinney Jr.'s conviction, ruling he did not receive a fair trial in 1944. Although the judge's ruling did not exonerate Stinney, it fed rumors that the girls may have been killed by someone else. This book is an attempt to separate fact from fiction, and an effort to give readers available information pertaining to the case. Guilty or innocent, George Stinney Jr. will forever be the youngest person executed in the United States during the Twentieth Century.

Our Vanishing Americana
Our Vanishing Americana

Author: Mike Lassiter

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-05

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781950768622

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A decade after his hugely successful "North Carolina Portrait," Lassiter offers his companion work on its sister state to the south. Traveling backroads and bypassed communities in each of South Carolina's 46 counties, he has captured the world of our grandparents, our parents and, for some of us, our youth. The book is divided according to the type of store or business. Each chapter contains an introduction highlighting a few of the people and places Lassiter encountered during his travels. The county by county index assists you in looking for places of interest. "The history of South Carolina comes alive in these pages in both pictures and words." -Jack Bass, chronicler of the American South and author or co-author of eight books, including The Palmetto State: The Making of South Carolina."

The Child in the Electric Chair
The Child in the Electric Chair

Author: Eli Faber

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2021-06-25

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1643361953

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The tragic story of the killing of 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr., the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century. How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours? Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's contemporaries—men and women alive today who still carry distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of Alcolu and the entire state—Eli Faber pieces together the chain of events that led to this tragic injustice. The first book to fully explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived—the era of lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty. As society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice, the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but rather one that continues to resonate in our own time. A foreword is provided by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at Baruch College at the City University of New York and author of several books including Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant.

Black Boys Burning
Black Boys Burning

Author: Grif Stockley

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1496812700

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On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program. Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, thirteen miles outside of Little Rock. Her son Lindsey had been confined there since January 14, after a judge for juveniles found him guilty of stealing from a neighborhood store owner. To her horror, Lindsey was not among the forty-eight boys who had clawed their way through the windows of the dormitory to safety. Instead, he was among the twenty-one boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who burned to death. Black Boys Burning presents a focused explanation of how systemic poverty perpetuated by white supremacy sealed the fate of those students. A careful telling of the history of the school and fire, the book provides readers a fresh understanding of the broad implications of white supremacy. Grif Stockley’s research adds to an evolving understanding of the Jim Crow South, Arkansas’s history, the lawyers who capitalized on this tragedy, and the African American victims. In hindsight, the disaster at Wrightsville could have been predicted. Immediately after the fire, an unsigned editorial in the Arkansas Democrat noted long-term deterioration, including the wiring, of the buildings. After the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957, the boys’ deaths eighteen months later were once again an embarrassment to Arkansas. The fire and its circumstances should have provoked southerners to investigate the realities of their “separate but equal institutions.” However, white supremacy ruled the investigations, and the grand jury declared the event to be an anomaly.

Emmett Till
Emmett Till

Author: Devery S. Anderson

Publisher: Race, Rhetoric, and Media

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781496814777

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Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. Anderson utilizes documents that had never been available to previous researchers, such as the trial transcript, long-hidden depositions by key players in the case, and interviews given by Carolyn Bryant to the FBI in 2004 (her first in fifty years), as well as other recently revealed FBI documents. Anderson also interviewed family members of the accused killers, most of whom agreed to talk for the first time, as well as several journalists who covered the murder trial in 1955. Till's death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change. Anderson's exhaustively researched book is also the basis for HBO's mini-series produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Casey Affleck, Aaron Kaplan, James Lassiter, Jay Brown, Ty Ty Smith, John P. Middleton, Rosanna Grace, David B. Clark, and Alex Foster, which is currently in active development. For six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till's murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades. Anderson covers the events that led up to this probe in great detail, as well as the investigation itself. This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago over a ten-year period to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.

Maniac
Maniac

Author: Harold Schechter

Publisher: Little A

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 9781542025317

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Relates how respected local farmer and school board treasurer Andrew P. Kehoe blew up the new primary school in Bath, Michigan in 1927, an act of vengeance that killed thirty-eight children and six adults in one of the first and worst mass murders in American history.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Author: Ambrose Bierce

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2018-08-20

Total Pages: 19

ISBN-13: 1528786017

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Classic Books Library presents this brand new edition of the short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) by Ambrose Bierce. In this text Bierce creatively uses both structure and content to explore the concept of time, from present to past, and reflecting its transitional and illusive qualities. The story is one of Bierce’s most popular and acclaimed works, alongside “The Devil’s Dictionary” (1911). Bierce (1842-c. 1914) was an American writer, journalist and Civil War veteran associated with the realism literary movement. His writing is noted for its cynical, brooding tones and structural precision.

Death Washes Ashore
Death Washes Ashore

Author: Caleb Wygal

Publisher: Franklin/Kerr Press

Published: 2021-12-07

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781735437378

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Minutes after solving his first murder, Clark Thomas receives life-changing information about his past. But time waits for no one.He receives a late-night message from Detective Moody soon after the body of a locally famous entertainer washes up on the Myrtle Beach shore. The department is under enormous pressure to solve the high-profile case quickly. They call upon Clark to help investigate but to do it quietly.Clark soon learns there was more to this entertainer than met the eye. He goes behind the curtain of the popular Gladiator Games Dinner Show and meets the performers and victim's coworkers. He learns that the entertainer with a sparkling public persona was not as squeaky clean as he appeared.Clark lends his unique ability to tie seemingly unrelated clues together as he races to solve the case. Along the way, he learns more about his wife's death. What he learns shatters his perception of the woman he once loved.

Getting Life
Getting Life

Author: Michael Morton

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-07-08

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1476756848

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“A devastating and infuriating book, more astonishing than any legal thriller by John Grisham” (The New York Times) about a young father who spent twenty-five years in prison for a crime he did not commit…and his eventual exoneration and return to life as a free man. On August 13, 1986, just one day after his thirty-second birthday, Michael Morton went to work at his usual time. By the end of the day, his wife Christine had been savagely bludgeoned to death in the couple’s bed—and the Williamson County Sherriff’s office in Texas wasted no time in pinning her murder on Michael, despite an absolute lack of physical evidence. Michael was swiftly sentenced to life in prison for a crime he had not committed. He mourned his wife from a prison cell. He lost all contact with their son. Life, as he knew it, was over. Drawing on his recollections, court transcripts, and more than 1,000 pages of personal journals he wrote in prison, Michael recounts the hidden police reports about an unidentified van parked near his house that were never pursued; the bandana with the killer’s DNA on it, that was never introduced in court; the call from a neighboring county reporting the attempted use of his wife’s credit card, which was never followed up on; and ultimately, how he battled his way through the darkness to become a free man once again. “Even for readers who may feel practically jaded about stories of injustice in Texas—even those who followed this case closely in the press—could do themselves a favor by picking up Michael Morton’s new memoir…It is extremely well-written [and] insightful” (The Austin Chronicle). Getting Life is an extraordinary story of unfathomable tragedy, grave injustice, and the strength and courage it takes to find forgiveness.