The last remnant of the racist Redeemer agenda in the Louisiana's legal system, the nonunanimous jury-verdict law permits juries to convict criminal defendants with only ten out of twelve votes. A legal oddity among southern states, the ordinance has survived multiple challenges since its ratification in 1880. Despite the law's long history, few are aware of its existence, its original purpose, or its modern consequences. At a time when Louisiana's penal system has fallen under national sc...

Uncovering a little-known system of bound labor in the post-Reconstruction SouthAfter the constitutional end to slavery in the United States, southern white landowners replaced labor by enslaved people with systems of bound labor in which people worked to pay off debts or legal fines. Through the story of a labor camp in Georgia, Thomas Aiello takes a close look at the Deep South’s dependence on debt peonage and convict leasing systems during the post-Reconstructio...

A reinterpretation of one of America's most notorious lynchingsThe 1918 lynching of Mary Turner by a white mob in Brooks County, Georgia, is remembered and studied mainly because of the horror of an allegedly pregnant woman's murder. In Mary Turner and the Mob, author Thomas Aiello asserts that the gruesome details of Turner's execution have distracted historians from investigating the larger context of these terrible events. Turner was murdered but not pr...

This book’s predecessor, The Grapevine of the Black South, emphasized the owners of the Atlanta Daily World and its operation of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate between 1931 and 1955. In a pragmatic effort to avoid racial confrontation developing from white fear, newspaper editors developed a practical radicalism that argued on the fringes of racial hegemony, saving their loudest vitriol for tyranny that was not local and thus left no stake in the game for would-be white sa...

In the 1930s, Monroe, Louisiana, was a town of twenty-six thousand in the northeastern corner of the state, an area described by the New Orleans Item as the “lynch law center of Louisiana.” race relations were bad, and the Depression was pitiless for most, especially for the working class—a great many of whom had no work at all or seasonal work at best. Yet for a few years in the early 1930s, this unlikely spot was home to the Monarchs, a national-caliber Negro League baseball tea...

From its early days as a sport to build “muscular Christianity” among young men flooding nineteenth-century cities to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. It grew through high school gymnasiums, college pep rallies, and the fits and starts of professionalization. It was a playground game, an urban game, tied to all of the caricatures that were associated with urban culture. It struggled with integration and representati...

A reinterpretation of one of America's most notorious lynchingsThe 1918 lynching of Mary Turner by a white mob in Brooks County, Georgia, is remembered and studied mainly because of the horror of an allegedly pregnant woman's murder. In Mary Turner and the Mob, author Thomas Aiello asserts that the gruesome details of Turner's execution have distracted historians from investigating the larger context of these terrible events. Turner was murdered but not pr...

At approximately seven o’clock in the evening on May 7, 1950, Gordon Malherbe Hillman filled an empty bottle with water, capped it, and walked into his mother’s room in the pair’s fifth-floor suite at Boston’s luxurious Copley Plaza Hotel. He then edged up behind the semi-invalid woman and bludgeoned her to death. Hotel staff had planned to evict the two the following day after several weeks of unpaid rent. Mounting debts had finally broken the fifty-year-old Hillman, a now-struggling auth...

Syndicated television and radio host. Serial liar. Pioneering journalist. Convicted criminal. Close ally of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Publicity-seeking provocateur. Louis Lomax's life was a study in contradiction. In this biography, Thomas Aiello traces the complicated and fascinating arc of Lomax's life and career, showing how the contradictions, tumult, and inconsistencies that marked his life reflected those of 1960s America. Aiello takes readers from Lomax's childhood in the...

New Orleans has long been a city fixated on its own history and culture. Founded in 1718 by the French, transferred to the Spanish in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and sold to the United States in 1803, the city’s culture, law, architecture, food, music, and language share the influence of all three countries. This cultural mélange also manifests in the city’s approach to sport, where each game is steeped in the city’s history.Tracing that history from the early nineteenth century to t...

In the 20 years between 1895 and 1915, two key leaders—Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois—shaped the struggle for African American rights. This book examines the impact of their fierce debate on America's response to Jim Crow and positions on civil rights throughout the 20th century—and evaluates the legacies of these two individuals even today.The debate between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington on how to further social and economic progress for African...

A remnant of the racist post-Reconstruction Redeemer sociopolitical agenda, Louisiana’s nonunanimous jury-verdict law permitted juries to convict criminal defendants with only nine, and later ten, out of twelve votes: a legal oddity. On the surface, it was meant to speed convictions. In practice, the law funneled many convicts—especially African Americans—into Louisiana’s burgeoning convict lease system. Although it faced multiple legal challenges through the years, the law endured well af...