ABSTRACT
The book opens with the chilling story of the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, setting the stage for the reader to understand notions of race and justice in Mississippi during the civil rights era. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, had arrived in Mississippi three days earlier to visit family. After he allegedly propositioned a White woman, he was kidnapped, brutally murdered, and discarded in the Tallahatchie River. His murderers were prosecuted, but the jury acquitted the White men. Deputy John Ed Cothran, one of the seven sheriffs depicted in Moore's photograph (with his back to the camera), retrieved the body from the river. Hendrickson describes Cothran as a morally ambivalent man who lets others do his dirty work. On the surface, it looks like Cothran upholds the law, but he is an essential part of a political machine that sustains apartheid. This type of deception could prove fatal to a southern Black in the 1960s. At that time, Blacks needed to know whether they were dealing with a segregationist sheriff who opposed violence or a sheriff who was a "virulent racist who would deny blacks the most basic rights and indeed encourage threats to their lives and property" (46). The difference between the two types of sheriffs "could, for a black man, mean life or death" (46).
