Fire on the Bayou

For the first time in print, a federal hate crimes prosecutor takes the reader inside the grand juries, courtrooms, and killing fields of the Deep South, where, as native son William Faulkner put it, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In an emotionally candid, self-effacing and plain-spoken account, Howard Feinstein tells true tales from a time many would rather forget. Secrets once thought buried forever resurface in this engaging memoir of a young attorney thrust "behind the lines" into a cauldron of hate and violence, including, the fatal Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Florida civil rights pioneer and his wife, unsolved for sixty years but not forgotten, due to the persistence of their crusading daughter; a KKK reign of terror targeting interracial association in rural south Georgia, under the protection of a drug-running sheriff and his allies; the brutal, unprovoked attack by a deputy sheriff on a house-hunter across the lake from New Orleans, who found himself in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and the wrong color; the harassment and abuse of a single mother and her young son, who moved into a previously all-white neighborhood in the mountains of central Pennsylvania; and, a vicious Klan rampage on the edge of Louisiana's cajun country, operating out of a U.S. military