The battle for civil rights was not won in the sixties – certainly not in many parts of the country. It never touched Oxford, North Carolina, where young Tim Tyson was growing up. In 1970, when a black man was killed in the town square by a Klansman and his sons, and an all-white jury acquitted the murderers, both blacks and whites were swept into a firestorm. Amid the violence and fear that enveloped the town, Tim's father attempted to bring the two sides together, only to be reviled as a traitor to both sides. Tim – now a professor of African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin – has written a memoir of that turbulent summer, and has gone back, thirty years later, to find a remnant of scorched justice.
