Renee C. Romano. Racial Reckoning

The historical significance of modern civil rights murder cases, often portrayed in films like the 1988 Mississippi Burning, have only begun to receive more scholarly attention in recent years. Renee C. Romano’s timely and significant work, Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders, is an important contribution to this growing literature. In a cogently argued and captivating account of the prosecution of high-profile civil rights cases that were reopened during the late twentieth century, Romano argues, “trials became a key site of contestation between those who wanted to harness them to the project of declaring and celebrating the end of racism in a ‘postracial’ nation and those who saw in them the potential to challenge the denial of the significance of race that was at the foundation of the new racial order” (2–3). She also contends that the legal prosecutions of overtly racist old white men ultimately pigeonholed America’s definition of racism as individual acts by a small group of bigots and as a uniquely southern phenomenon.

Civil rights · Criminology · Denial · Political science · Race (biology) · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · White supremacy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies