There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou

A sweeping study of sexual assault trials in the Jim Crow South, detailing the racial and economic inequities of rape law and the resistance of ordinary women In the early years of the twentieth century, Mississippi County, Arkansas, was a brutal and profitable place.Home to starving, landless farmers, the county produced almost 2 percent of the entire world’s cotton.It was also the site of two rape trials that made national headlines: an accusation that sent two Black men, almost certainly innocent, to death row; and the case of two white men, almost certainly guilty, who were likewise sentenced to death but who would ultimately face a very different fate.Braiding together these stories, Scott W. Stern examines how the Jim Crow legal system relied on selectively prosecuting rape to uphold the racial, gender, and economic hierarchies of the segregated, unequal South.But as much as rape law was a site of oppression, it was also, Stern shows, an arena of fierce resistance. Based on deep