| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post–World War II South. By Gail Williams O'Brien. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xvi, 334 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2475-5. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-4802-6.)

In February 1946, a nineteen-year-old black navy veteran was nearly lynched after he defended himself in an altercation with a white radio repairman who had botched a repair job in a department store in Columbia, Tennessee, some forty miles south of Nashville. The lynching was averted when black citizens armed themselves and some of them spirited the young man out of town, but the city was rent with violence. When law enforcement personnel raided a black section of Columbia, they were resisted, and dozens of black men were taken into custody. Before the episode was over, highway patrolmen killed two black men in the police station. Twenty-seven black men subsequently went on trial for attempted murder or as accessories to attempted murder. . . .

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