I know that you mentioned in the show that you had two books you wanted to talk about. Could you talk about those two books and maybe talk about how much more accessible this is? I wrote a book on my uncle’s story, an African American journalist, in 1919 in Chicago, whose job, in part, was to go out and report on what had happened to all the lynchings that had occurred in 1917 and in some of the subsequent months. The fact that he was not lynched himself was due to his good sense not to show his face in public so much. That’s a fascinating story and it shows a lot of the racism that was current at the time. You know, he just kept his head down, which is very understandable. So my book that’s just out is called The Black Hour: Fear and Loathing on the Trail of Jim Crow. It’s a little different than I thought it would be. I don’t know how many of these stories are going to make a good book, but I thought that one might. I was interested in Jim Crow in Mississippi, you know, the period between 1919 and 1934, when a lot of the segregation and Jim Crow was set up and developed by a few very vicious people, and the period in which they succeeded in making Mississippi something that was not what it had been prior to the Civil War. It was just interesting to me that a number of people I know that don’t know they are descended from slavery — that’s when people would have been enslaved — do know that their ancestors are descended from slavery because of blackface minstrel shows, you know. Well, when they were written off the plantation they still had blackface minstrel shows, which were very racist. And then they had those segregation laws, which I guess, if you think about it, is just another form of slavery, actually. It’s interesting, and it’s a story about somebody who’s not that different from you and your friends, except that he or she makes a career choice which is in line with a certain part of white society, but then has to live with the repercussions of that. Right. My uncle was very ambitious in that he wanted to be a writer, and he went to journalism school at the University of Alabama. The fact that he wasn’t lynched probably saved him, but also he was a bit of a black Republican. So I think it was fairly easy to get on his good side because he was never particularly afraid of white people. He would go to church with all kinds of white people. You know, it wasn’t just black people who were blackmailed, it was black people who lived with white people, and it was very much about just being afraid of losing your job and being fired, you know, from this place and that place. I think it was because of his political views that he was never afraid of white people. He just felt that the right side of his brain was too small to fit in a white person’s skull, and that’s where they were. It was a lot about white people being afraid of black people, and then he’s saying, “Well, you know, this guy’s not going to let me do this, so I’ll just go into the woods and I’ll kill some poachers.” [Laughs] You know, but he knew that they were poachers — if he hadn’t had some sense of ethics, he could have gotten arrested for murder. But in many cases he didn’t want to do that, and he wasn’t really an activist in terms of going out and stopping injustice, but I think what you might call what Martin Luther King, Jr. did was more a part of his personality than it was his uncle’s. But you know, I think if he were around today, I don’t think he would be marching with people who wanted to break the world up. He wouldn’t go with them. I was just struck by your point that if black people are as wealthy as white people, you would have a much harder time getting them to join a cause like segregation, because they would be more concerned about being in a better position. I think that’s true, although I also think that they’re all just not aware of what’s happening. My uncle in 1920 was fairly comfortable in black society, so he had to make a decision about what he was going to do. Of course it changed with time because this society was changing, too. There is another book I’ve written that is a more sociological point of view of lynchings in America, and it’s really about why they were happening. And it looks at both the psychological and the socioeconomic reasons for lynching. I just noticed that it was available through Amazon.com. So you wrote the book yourself. Yes. And it’s a little bit depressing that it isn’t a Barnes and Noble book. I was really surprised that I could get it on Amazon. I thought it would be like a library book that I would not be able to get on Amazon, but I’m pretty happy that it is there. I wish Barnes and Noble would take the lead and decide that the book was interesting enough that it should be on its shelf, and then someone might decide to buy it and then they wouldn’t be able to sell it, you know. They could put them in the back, but you wouldn’t be able to buy them from Barnes and Noble. Now you got to talk about your latest book, which I think is also about lynching. You wrote the book on “The Trial of Slave Killer Jake Atwell.” What is the story of Atwell? Well, this is a very sad story. Atwell is a white man. There are a lot of stories out there about the South being haunted by the Civil War, you know, the Civil War being a terrible time, that I don’t really think about all that often. But in this case, the man whose life was taken by a slave killer was very important in that part of the country and his family is still around. Atwell was born in 1855. He fought with Sherman at Vicksburg, you know, came home to Chicago after that. He worked for a while for a mining company and then went back to the coal mines in southern Illinois and worked there for a few years. So he lived all over. And at some point when the Civil War is over he decides to go back to Illinois to visit his family, and on his way back he stops off in Chattanooga, where there’s a lot of men from that part of the country who worked for the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. He’s going to visit his family, and he talks to one of these men in the company, and there’s some shooting and one of the Chattanooga men dies. So Jake Atwell is sent to prison for killing a Chattanooga man, who he believed had shot his brother. The judge in his trial believes that Atwell is a Union supporter and sets him free because there was too much evidence of his loyalty for the judge to do anything else. But they do make him leave Chattanooga and head back to Illinois, so Atwell does that, and then he goes on to Illinois. And then he heads back to Tennessee for a visit with his family. And when he gets there he finds that the only son of his sister, who was nine or ten years old at that time, was murdered on October 31, 1869, and that his murderer was lynched in the public square. The lynch mob in this particular case was made up of the man who had accused the slave killer of killing his brother, and some people who were actually involved in the murder of the slave killer’s son. They were the one who lynched him. So Atwell does some traveling in the north and comes across some of these men again. And at one point in his travels he finds that his family had been robbed of some of the possessions that his brother had been able to leave behind. So this is a very sad story, because there’s this relationship that Atwell had with his family, a sense of being abandoned, and finding that his family didn’t really have enough for him to be able to come home, which is pretty hard, I think. I know, and to have to find out that your family had not been treated fairly in the process, so it was like a death in the family as well. Well, that’s right. It was a death in the family, which wasn’t exactly the way he wanted to discover that his family was. Jake Atwell had a sister named Mary and a brother named John. I read somewhere that you used a lot of real names in your books — actual events, like the murder of Joseph St. Martin and the lynching of Bill Rainey in your book The Free-Lance Pallbearers. And I’ve noticed that a lot of your work contains a lot of real-life names, even if you have to hide their identities with initials, like the person who wrote “The Trial of Slave Killer Jake Atwell.” Is this a kind of penance you’re doing for some of the people you write about? I’ve been doing that for years now, really. Most of the time you put their names in there or at least something about what they looked like,