Vengeance is as old as violence, and many white southerners can trace their moral genealogy through family feuds and gentlemen’s duels, across rivers and oceans all the way back to medieval courts and biblical dynasties. Theirs was a society that not so long ago had written theft into legal treaties with Native Americans and bondage into legal deeds on the lives of African Americans; a society that until recently had believed the law elastic enough to bend without breaking, exempting lynching from the category of homicide. Like those killings, the murder of the Reverend Willie Maxwell had been
...more
