A Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award Finalist (Best Fact Crime) * A Virginia Literary Awards Finalist "A haunted, historical legal thriller." — Atlanta Journal-Constitution From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes "a powerfully unsettling portrait of the single most savage episode in the long decades of savagery inflicted by white southerners on their Black neighbors in the 20th century" (Douglas A. Blackmon)—the mass killing of eleven Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation in the spring of 1921 in this gripping work of true crime. On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War. Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that exposed the dark underbelly of the Jim Crow era to a public self-satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before. By turns a riveting police procedural, gripping courtroom drama, and political exposé, Hell Put to Shame also reintroduces readers to three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely faced punishment for violence against their Black neighbors. The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
