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A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South
Little, Brown Spark
ISBN13:
9780316535540
$28.00
$25.95
The little-known true story of George Dinning, a freed slave, and Colonel Bennett H. Young, a Confederate war hero, who in 1899 joined forces to take on a Kentucky mob in court after Dinning was beaten almost to death for defending his farm against white attackers. After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target? George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's house, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family. So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history -- one that ended with Dinning becoming the first black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, bestselling author Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic and largely forgotten story, and the unusual convergence of characters -- among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky governor William O'Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself -- that allowed this thrilling but unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare.
- | Author: Ben Montgomery
- | Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
- | Publication Date: January 26, 2021
- | Number of Pages: 304 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Hardcover
- | ISBN-10: 0316535540
- | ISBN-13: 9780316535540
- Author:
- Ben Montgomery
- Publisher:
- Little, Brown Spark
- Publication Date:
- January 26, 2021
- Number of pages:
- 304 pages
- Language:
- English
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- ISBN-10:
- 0316535540
- ISBN-13:
- 9780316535540