A Shot in the Moonlight: How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South

Journalist Montgomery (The Man Who Walked Backward) documents in this engrossing history the unlikely alliance between a former enslaved person convicted of murder in 1897 and a former Confederate soldier. A farmer in Simpson County, Ky., George Dinning was accosted in his home by a white mob accusing him of stealing. He was shot in the arm and fired back, killing a wealthy white farmer, and turned himself in to the county sheriff the next day. Montgomery draws from trial records and press accounts to describe how Dinning was convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to seven years in prison, pardoned by the governor of Kentucky, and awarded damages in a lawsuit against his attackers. In these efforts, Dinning was aided by Bennett Young, a Confederate soldier who led a raid on St. Albans, Vt., during the Civil War but devoted much of his later life to helping Black orphans and defending impoverished African Americans in court cases. Montgomery details the legal and political issues behind Dinning’s case, but has a tougher time capturing the personalities of his key subjects, Young especially. Still, this is a rewarding and well-documented look at a neglected chapter in the fight for racial justice. (Jan.)