“A Shot in the Moonlight,” Ben Montgomery’s nonfiction account of George Dinning, a freed slave threatened to leave his home and land by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob, who is shot at and then returns fire killing a white man. Dinning is from the southern state of Kentucky, post-antebellum during the Reconstruction era.
Montgomery recounts the horrifying acts of the KKK and its white supremacy mobs terrorizing Blacks. His book covers the initial trial of Mr. Dinning and those set against him, his initial conviction and then the Governor’s intercession amidst public outrage.
This book is a heated reminder of an unfair, foregone era where Black men and women were still barely regarded as humans and accordingly, their rights were neglected. There were, however, a few who rejected the prevailing opinions of the day and stood up to defend the rights of Black men and women at great personal risk to themselves. Montgomery’s book details the heroic courage of Whites and Blacks that turned the tide of lynch mobs in the South and then changed American history.
Poems for Warriors 