Volume 51, Number 12 · July 15, 2004
The Murder of Lucy Pollard
By Caleb Crain
A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial
by Suzanne Lebsock
Norton, 442 pp., $26.95
Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the 'Fighting Editor' John Mitchell Jr.
by Ann Field Alexander
University of Virginia Press, 258 pp., $32.95
On July 12, 1895, in Lunenburg County, Virginia, a retired farmer complained to his diary that the state was spending $300 a day to keep four blacks accused of murder safe in jail. 'They should and ought to have been promptly lynched at once,' wrote Robert Allen, who had recently been elected to his twentieth consecutive term as a justice of the peace, 'for there is not the least shadow of doubt about the guilt of all four of them.'
Review, 3112 words
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