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A Shot in the Moonlight

Ben Montgomery

After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of twenty five white men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target? George Dinning, a freed slave who'd farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years, and had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning's house, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family.

So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history -- one that ended with Dinning becoming the first black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, bestselling author Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic and largely forgotten story, and the unusual convergence of characters -- among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky governor William O'Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself -- that allowed this thrilling but unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare.

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  • Classification : History
  • Pub Date : JAN 26, 2021
  • Imprint : Little, Brown Spark
  • Page Extent : 304
  • Binding : HB
  • ISBN : 9780316535540
  • Price : INR 2,130
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Ben Montgomery

Ben Montgomery is a former enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times founder of the narrative journalism website Gangrey.com and author of Grandma Gatewood's Walk. In 2010 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for a series called "For Their Own Good" about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school. He lives in Tampa with his three children.

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