Montgomery’s ‘A Shot in the Moonlight’ a visceral, valuable history lesson
Tuesday’s unveiling of an historical marker, commemorating the 1914 lynching of John Evans on a downtown St. Petersburg street corner, did not escape Ben Montgomery’s attention.
The author of the non-fiction book A Shot in the Moonlight, which chronicles one of the earliest-known cases of a Black victim seeking financial restitution in the courts from his white attackers, recognized a pattern.
“At one point, between the Civil War and the early 20th century, Florida had more lynchings per capita than any Southern state,” said Montgomery, a writer/editor for Axios Tampa Bay. “And it wasn’t as populated as a lot of other Southern states. That’s significant. This was a state where it was clockwork, just like everywhere else.”
A Shot in the Moonlight, subtitled How a Freed Slave and a Confederate Soldier Fought for Justice in the Jim Crow South, is the story of Black Kentucky farmer George Dinning, an emancipated slave, who went on trial in 1897 for the murder of one of 25 white men who came to his home, threatened him and fired a volley of bullets into the house where he, his wife and children were sleeping. Dinning, grazed and bleeding, shot back, killing a member of the mob.
Was it self-defense?
Montgomery, a former Tampa Bay Times journalist, had grown weary of reading, and writing, stories of African Americans dying, or suffering, at the hands of white oppressors. Race relations in the United States aren’t so great today, but 100 years ago?
“If you were a Black man or woman at the time,” he explained, “outside of maybe Booker T. Washington and a couple of other Black leaders here and there, and your name was in the newspaper it was by and large either for ridicule or because you were being marched to your death. And so what we are left with now is this very whitewashed period of history.”
George Dinning’s remarkable story caught his eye. The criminal trial, and the federal trials that followed – engineered by attorney Bennett Young, the confederate soldier of the book’s subtitle – were news all over the country. Even the New York Times sent a reporter to Kentucky.
And so Montgomery the historian found ample period coverage of the case, albeit from biased white journalists. His “aha” moment, however, arrived after he’d dispatched a researcher to the State Archives of Kentucky to search the papers of Governor William O’Connell Bradley, who’d played a principal role in the drama of 1897-1900.
“She sent me photos of images she had made of the archival material,” Montgomery explained, “and it included a transcript of the entire criminal trial, and hundreds of letters written from citizens to the governor begging for Dinning’s pardon.”
Bradley had asked for the transcript, and other pertinent materials, in order to review the specifics of the case.
All those years later, there they were, in his official papers.
And so Ben Montgomery was able to make history come alive, giving A Shot in the Moonlight a visceral, you-are-there quality. Dinning, his family and the individual members of the mob that came to kill (or did they?) are quoted, verbatim, from the witness stand, like a 19th century episode of Law and Order. With very high stakes.
The book also details the horrific origins and rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Reconstruction South.
Dinning’s victory in federal court, as the first Black victim to successfully sue his attackers, set a precedent. “The federal court, at the time, was really the only place you could get justice,” said Montgomery. “A lot of the state courts were corrupt.”
It was certainly an historical milestone, but it sadly didn’t call an end to extreme, racially-motivated violence in the South. “There was this period of progressive politics right around the turn of the century,” Montgomery explained. “And Bill O. Bradley was a part of that. He passed an anti-lynching law, which was very rare in the South.
“But it was short-lived. The second Klan was revived starting around 1915, with the release of (the controversial film) Birth of a Nation, and so you see a severe uptick in Klan-style violence going all the way through what we think of as the sustained civil rights movement of the 1940s.”
Still, the author said, “Stories like this are important, I think, because the civil rights leaders that we know and celebrate – Rosa Parks, MLK and so on and so forth – they stood on the bones of these men and women who have been lost to time.”
He believes George Dinning was an American hero. “This was a guy who displayed an incredible amount of courage, and refused, number one, to die. Number two, to quit. And had the courage to seek justice at a time when it very nearly cost him his life again.”
