Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker

Riveting in its moment-by-moment detail, Blood Justice meticulously reconstructs the story of one of the last lynchings in America--a grim, dramatic, but nearly forgotten episode from the Civil Rights era. The year was 1959; the place, Poplarville, Mississippi. Charged with the rape of a white woman, a young black man named Mack Charles Parker was abducted from his jail cell by a white mob, beaten, carried across state lines, and ultimately shot, with his abductors leaving his body in the Pearl River. A massive FBI investigation followed and two grand juries met to investigate the case; yet no arrests or indictments were ever made. Working from previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department documents, extensive interviews with many of the surviving principals involved in the case, and a variety of newspaper accounts, Howard Smead tells the full story of the Parker lynching for the first time. He presents a vivid picture of a small Southern town gripped by racism and distrust of federal authority and of the travesty of justice that followed in the wake of murder. As Smead points out, the case is particularly fascinating in its awful ironies: Parker was very likely guilty of the crime of which he was accused; he had in fact been turned over to the authorities by other blacks; and yet the state of Mississippi could not try him successfully because of entrenched white racism. More than a chronicle of a single lynching, Blood Justice is also an indelible portrait of a time in turmoil.