Of Long Memory

Byron de la Beckwith's conviction for the murder of Medgar Evers made front-page news in papers across the country - thirty years after his original trial for the crime. Now, in Of Long Memory, Adam Nossiter recounts the fatally intertwined stories of the courageous civil-rights crusader Medgar Evers, field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP in Jackson at the time of his death in 1963, and Beckwith, the fanatical racist convicted as his killer. It is the story of how that once-outcast American state, Mississippi, has painfully confronted its past and how this process cleared the way for the revival of the case against Beckwith. The first of the decade's political assassinations, the Evers murder initiated the nation into what was to become a distressingly familiar scenario; the tearful widow, the anguished funeral procession, the hero's burial (in Evers's case, at Arlington National Cemetery), the riots, and the hints of self-questioning from a society apparently given over to violence. Nossiter's stunning, unforgettable view of Mississippi then and now, black and white, sheds a glaring new light on the largest issue of our time: race.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.