Gomez-Jefferson captures the growing concern of the Black middle-class with civil rights and its persistent attempts to confront problems with tactics less confrontational than those of the sixties and seventies. More than a biography, In Darkness with God is a history of Black life during the early part of the century and a chronicle of the political and religious struggles of the first autonomous Black church in the United States.

On June 2, 1854, crowds lined the streets of Boston, hissing and shouting at federal authorities as they escorted the fugitive slave Anthony Burns to the ship that would return him to his slaveholders in Virginia. Days earlier, handbills had littered the streets decrying Burns’s arrest, and abolitionists, intent on freeing Burns, had attacked with a battering ram the courthouse in which he was detained, leaving one dead, several wounded, and thirteen in custody. In the end it would take federal officials nearly 2,000 troops and $40,000 to send Burns back to Virginia. No fugitive slave would be captured in Boston again.

Only ten days after four white students had been gunned down by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970, law enforcement officials fired upon and killed two young blacks and wounded twelve others in front of a women’s dormitory at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The first incident attracted media and public attention worldwide, overshadowing the later tragedy. Tim Spofford has not allowed the killings at Jackson State to be forgotten. Lynch Street presents the event in the context of the history of Jackson, Mississippi, as well as in the context of the student protests of the 1960s.