Revised and reissued with a new epilogue, the award-winning classic Ghosts of Mississippi tells the inside story of one of the most rankling murder cases of the civil rights era. In this historical page-turner, National Book Award finalist Maryanne Vollers exposes a state’s struggle to confront the ghosts of its violent past in order to bring a killer to justice.
The civil rights movement was just catching fire in Mississippi on the night in 1963 when white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith crouched in the honeysuckle across the street from NAACP leader Medgar Evers’s house and shot him in the back. Three trials and thirty years later, a jury convicted Beckwith of murder and sent him to prison for life. Drawing on her rare access to the prosecutors, the Evers family and Beckwith himself, Vollers recreates the events of Evers’s life and death, weaving together a thrilling tale of racism, murder, courage, redemption, and the ultimate triumph of justice.
In a new epilogue, written on the fiftieth anniversary of Evers’s assassination, Vollers updates the main characters and examines efforts over the past two decades to bring more unpunished killers to trial. Her verdict: The ghosts of Mississippi are still restless.