They Stole Him Out of Jail

They Stole Him Out of Jail PDF Author: William B. Gravely
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611179386
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
“Reminds readers that the history of lynching and racial violence in the United States is not a closed book, but an ever-relevant story.” —Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury. In They Stole Him Out of Jail, William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the “Greenville notebook” kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. Gravely meticulously recreates the case’s details, analyzing the flaws in the investigation and prosecution that led in part to the acquittals. Vivid portraits emerge of key figures in the story, including both Earle and Brown, Solicitor Robert T. Ashmore, Governor Strom Thurmond, and West, whose article “Opera in Greenville” is masterful journalism but marred by errors owing to her short stay in the area. Gravely also probes problems with memory that resulted in varying interpretations of Willie Earle’s character and conflicting narratives about the lynching itself.

They Stole Him Out of Jail

They Stole Him Out of Jail PDF Author: William B. Gravely
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611179386
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
“Reminds readers that the history of lynching and racial violence in the United States is not a closed book, but an ever-relevant story.” —Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury. In They Stole Him Out of Jail, William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the “Greenville notebook” kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. Gravely meticulously recreates the case’s details, analyzing the flaws in the investigation and prosecution that led in part to the acquittals. Vivid portraits emerge of key figures in the story, including both Earle and Brown, Solicitor Robert T. Ashmore, Governor Strom Thurmond, and West, whose article “Opera in Greenville” is masterful journalism but marred by errors owing to her short stay in the area. Gravely also probes problems with memory that resulted in varying interpretations of Willie Earle’s character and conflicting narratives about the lynching itself.

They Stole Him Out of Jail

They Stole Him Out of Jail PDF Author: William Gravely
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611179378
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Over the last quarter century, a surge in scholarship about lynching in the United States coincided with a discussion by professional historians about why the topic had long suffered from neglect. New research has made possible a more complete picture of South Carolina's lynching history. The first major study, Terence Finnegan's 1993 dissertation, compared lynching in South Carolina and Mississippi. In 2006 John Hammond Moore set lynching in the state alongside murder and dueling over four decades after 1880. Two years later a Pickens County native and professor in an English university, Bruce Baker, used a case-study approach to compare seven lynchings in the two Carolinas from Reconstruction to 1930. All have drawn upon the earlier research of two master's students who surveyed twentieth-century in-state lynchings"--

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Letter from a Birmingham Jail PDF Author: Dr Martin Luther King
Publisher: HarperOne
ISBN: 9780063425811
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Thieves of Book Row

Thieves of Book Row PDF Author: Travis McDade
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190239719
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
In Thieves of Book Row, Travis McDade tells the gripping tale of the worst book-theft ring in American history, and the intrepid detective who brought it down. Both a fast-paced, true-life thriller, Thieves of Book Row provides a fascinating look at the history of crime and literary culture.

Born Behind Bars

Born Behind Bars PDF Author: Padma Venkatraman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593112482
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
“Venkatraman has never met a heavy theme she did not like....Borrowing elements of fable, it's told with a recurring sense of awe by a boy whom the world, for most of his life, has existed only in stories.”—New York Times Book Review The author of the award-winning The Bridge Home brings readers another gripping novel set in Chennai, India, featuring a boy who's unexpectedly released into the world after spending his whole life in jail with his mom. Kabir has been in jail since the day he was born, because his mom is serving time for a crime she didn't commit. He's never met his dad, so the only family he's got are their cellmates, and the only place he feels the least bit free is in the classroom, where his kind teacher regales him with stories of the wonders of the outside world. Then one day a new warden arrives and announces Kabir is too old to stay. He gets handed over to a long-lost "uncle" who unfortunately turns out to be a fraud, and intends to sell Kabir. So Kabir does the only thing he can--run away as fast as his legs will take him. How does a boy with nowhere to go and no connections make his way? Fortunately, he befriends Rani, another street kid, and she takes him under her wing. But plotting their next move is hard--and fraught with danger--in a world that cares little for homeless, low caste children. This is not the world Kabir dreamed of--but he's discovered he's not the type to give up. Kabir is ready to show the world that he--and his mother--deserve a place in it.

I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!

I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! PDF Author: Robert E. Burns
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is the amazing true story of one man's search for meaning, fall from grace, and eventual victory over injustice. In 1921, Robert E. Burns was a shell-shocked and penniless veteran who found himself at the mercy of Georgia's barbaric penal system when he fell in with a gang of petty thieves. Sentenced to six to ten years' hard labor for his part in a robbery that netted less than $6.00, Burns was shackled to a county chain gang. After four months of backbreaking work, he made a daring escape, dodging shotgun blasts, racing through swamps, and eluding bloodhounds on his way north. For seven years Burns lived as a free man. He married and became a prosperous Chicago businessman and publisher. When he fell in love with another woman, however, his jealous wife turned him in to the police, who arrested him as a fugitive from justice. Although he was promised lenient treatment and a quick pardon, he was back on a chain gang within a month. Undaunted, Burns did the impossible and escaped a second time, this time to New Jersey. He was still a hunted man living in hiding when this book was first published in 1932. The book and its movie version, nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1933, shocked the world by exposing Georgia's brutal treatment of prisoners. I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is a daring and heartbreaking book, an odyssey of misfortune, love, betrayal, adventure, and, above all, the unshakable courage and inner strength of the fugitive himself.

In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood PDF Author: Truman Capote
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0812994388
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.

A Stolen Life

A Stolen Life PDF Author: Jaycee Dugard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451629192
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
A revelatory memoir about a young woman whose life was stolen when she was kidnapped in 1991 and remained an object of captivity for 18 years.

Hell Is a Very Small Place

Hell Is a Very Small Place PDF Author: Jean Casella
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620971380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

The Sun Does Shine

The Sun Does Shine PDF Author: Anthony Ray Hinton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250124719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--