Grace Elizabeth Hale, author of In The Pines, joins Ralph Eubanks for a discussion on her award winning book. The event is sponsored by the Friendly City Books Community Connection, a special project of the CREATE Foundation, the Columbus Arts Council, and the Mississippi State University Department of History.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia, is a celebrated historian specializing in modern American culture and the U.S. South. She's contributed to major publications like The New York Times and appeared on networks such as CNN and PBS. Hale, a Carnegie Fellow, has received accolades from institutions like the Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. She authored three books, including "Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940," and resides in Charlottesville, VA.
W. Ralph Eubanks, author of "A Place Like Mississippi," explores the state's influence on American literature. His other works include "Ever Is a Long Time" and "The House at the End of the Road," praised for its insight into race and family. A contributor to prominent publications and a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Eubanks holds degrees from the University of Mississippi and the University of Michigan. He has served as the Library of Congress's director of publishing and edited the Virginia Quarterly Review. Honored with the Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award, he is currently working on "When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning."
About the Book
Winner of the Mississippi Historical Society Book of the Year Award
In this “courageous and compelling … essential and critically important” book (Bryan Stevenson), an award-winning scholar of white supremacy tackles her toughest research assignment yet: the unsolved murder of a Black man in rural Mississippi while her grandfather was the local sheriff—a cold case that sheds new light on the hidden legacy of racial terror in America.
A Washington Post Noteworthy Book
Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff in the Piney Woods of south-central Mississippi, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in his jail on suspicion of raping a white woman—only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. It was a tale straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird, with her grandfather as the tragic hero. This story, however, hid a dark truth.
Years later, as a rising scholar of white supremacy, Hale revisited the story about her grandfather and Versie Johnson, the man who died in his custody. The more she learned about what had happened that day, the less sense she could make of her family's version of events. With the support of a Carnegie fellowship, she immersed herself in the investigation. What she discovered would upend everything she thought she knew about her family, the tragedy, and this haunted strip of the South—because Johnson's death, she found, was actually a lynching. But guilt did not lie with a faceless mob.
A story of obsession, injustice, and the ties that bind, In the Pines casts an unsparing eye over this intimate terrain, driven by a deep desire to set straight the historical record and to understand and subvert white racism, along with its structures, costs, and consequences—and the lies that sustain it.