In 1895, memories of slavery and the Civil War were still fresh, and the tensions between blacks and whites percolated just below the surface in the South. When Lucy Jane Pollard was murdered with an ax in her home in rural Lunenburg County, Virginia, that summer, it brought these simmering issues to a boil. Pollard was fifty-six years old, white, and married to a prosperous farmer, and her murder was accompanied by the disappearance of a large sum of money from their farmhouse. A black millhand was apprehended after he was seen spending a stack of suspicious twenty-dollar bills, and in a false confession under pressure he pinned the murder on a trio of black women in Lunenburg.

What followed was a murder trial that dominated newspaper headlines for the next year and a half. In A MURDER IN VIRGINIA: Southern Justice on Trial, University of Washington history professor and Bancroft Prize-winning author Suzanne Lebsock relates the gripping details of the courtroom drama while placing the case in historical context. Lucy Jane Pollard's murder was truly a landmark case one that showcased the growing racial divide in the South following Reconstruction, the rise of White Supremacy in the South, and a discord between rural and urban politics. Lunenburg, Virginia, was after all decidedly off the beaten path situated between Richmond and the North Carolina border, and the local farmers heavily resented the involvement of state lawmakers and distant newspapermen in their affairs.

However, Lebsock wisely points out how much about the Pollard murder case defied predictions. A MURDER IN VIRGINIA highlights how the murder of a middle-aged farmer's wife generated interest way beyond the little town of Lunenburg. In Richmond, a national grassroots movement was started by the black community to aid the defendants. Lebsock also details how the poor, uneducated women proved to be quite adept at cross-examination in the courtroom. In addition, she relates how some of the white farmers from Lunenburg actually went out of their way to prevent the unlawful lynchings of their black neighbors.

Even though Lucy Jane Pollard's murder dominated headlines and underscored many of the racial, class, and urban-versus-rural issues facing the post-Reconstruction South, history has largely left it by the wayside. The other big news story of the day-the one with which the murder vied for newspaper attention-was the fantastic rise and crashing fall of Populism. While history books continue to pay great attention to Populism and the presidential race of 1896, Pollard's murder trial-which was, in its day, as racially galvanizing as the O.J. Simpson or Rodney King cases-has been ignored. Now, Lebsock has written the first and only incisive, detailed report of what took place and how it became a sign of the times.

A MURDER IN VIRGINIA is both a thrilling courtroom drama and a wise historical narrative illuminating the South in the throes of change. It also shows how the legacy of that time-for good and ill-lives on.

About the Authors
Suzanne Lebsock is the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning The Free Women of Petersburg. A Murder In Virginia won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a finalist for the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. The recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, Lebsock is Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

A Murder In Virginia: Southern Justice On Trial
By Suzanne Lebsock
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 0-393-32606-3