In September 1963, several years before I was born, a vicious set of men, angered by the march of the Civil Rights Movement, planted a bomb at the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The bomb left four young girls dead. As an adult I attended the trial of Bobby Frank Cherry, the last of the bombers to face trial. Shortly after the jury returned its guilty verdict, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth sang a few lines from the Battle Hymn of the Republic outside the Birmingham Courthouse, which perhaps not coincidentally is also the jail. That says a lot about how long it took to get “justice” for the victims of that heinous crime, and it says something about the meaning of the verdict, too. Renee Romano's Racial Reckoning returns to the racial crimes committed during the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and asks how those crimes have been depicted in court and in popular culture. Romano surveys the landscape of those prosecutions to ask what they say about our nation's reckoning with those difficult times when all African Americans and civil rights workers of any race might be subject to brutalization, even murder.

Romano's excellent book focuses on the civil rights era prosecutions of the 1990s and early 2000s. She shows how the narratives surrounding the prosecutions depicted the civil rights era crimes as great injustices having been perpetrated by a small subset of people on others. Romano reveals how those narratives, stretching from courts to popular media, have allowed our nation to escape reckoning.

Romano makes this persuasive argument by first looking back to the violence of the era of the Civil Rights Movement and making the reasonable, I am tempted to say obvious, argument that responsibility was widespread, far wider than the people who actively participated in the violence. In the 1950s and 1960s, major sections of polite society allowed, perhaps even expected, a group of violent men to do its work; in the 1990s and 2000s a subset of those same men took the fall for everyone else. The people who were the ugly face of the violent props to Jim Crow were thus isolated and held up as rare and heinous perpetrators. They were martyrs to a cause that had much wider support than we like to acknowledge. The reckoning is leveled at too small a target, and even many of those most culpable escaped justice by dying before they could be prosecuted.

Criminal trials, which focus on individual defendants, are poor vehicles for addressing larger issues. Trials cannot hold an entire society culpable, although sometimes defense attorneys try to spread the blame as they depict their clients as dependent variables, reacting to and operating as part of a larger system. To make matters worse, many of the prosecutors and those who supported prosecution employed a narrative that separated the present from the “bad old days,” and that separated the criminal defendants from everyone else. Those impulses worked to leave us with a sense that the era of civil rights crimes has closed; that it was an era of a few racists who have been prosecuted, and that it is time to move on. Such segregation of culpability appeared in the media, as well.

Moreover, the narratives told during prosecutions and the accompanying stories of redemption in the media seem aimed at white people. That is especially true for the Hollywood portrayals of the civil rights era crimes. This, then, raises the question whether it is possible to have a more accurate portrayal in the public, or whether accuracy is impossible because it will be rejected by the audience that needs to hear it and act on it. Romano captures this problem in the final chapter, which is entitled “From Legal Justice to Social Justice.” The issue for us is how to move beyond the limited and late prosecutions, because the prosecutions and depictions in the media seem to affirm the cultural changes that have taken place, and allow us to express new values, while also allowing us to escape reckoning with that past and the widespread culpability.

Still, perhaps such prosecutions can help with reconciliation, because they reflect the new consensus that such violence was wrong, and maybe with additional and difficult work, our nation will recognize the role so many people played in allowing the large and small crimes of Jim Crow to continue for so long. And when that day comes, we can all sing with Reverend Shuttlesworth “Glory, glory hallelujah, His truth is marching on.”