Racial Noir: Six Full Novels By /////

Six classic novels rife with passion, crime, betrayal, sex and violence set amidst the racial conflicts raging in the deep south in the 1950s and 60s.

A WIND IS RISING by William Russell

Acting bad came easily to everyone on the huge, isolated Mississippi delta plantation…until the tensions between the white overseers and the black sharecroppers exploded in bloodshed… leaving a white man dead and Brother Jackson, a black man, falsely jailed for murder and facing certain death in a rigged trial.

FACE OF MY ASSASSIN by Carolyn Weston and Jan Huckins

It’s 1959. Matthew Scott is a widowed, alcoholic reporter from New York who seeks personal and professional redemption when he’s sent to the Deep South to write about a town that is defying a U.S. Supreme Court decision to integrate blacks into schools. His mere presence is a catalyst that ignites long-buried racial, political, religious, and personal conflicts among the residents, both white and black, ripping the town apart. Those tensions violently explode when Scott is falsely arrested by the bigoted, tyrannical sheriff for the rape and murder of an out-spoken black schoolteacher.

HONEY IN LOUISIANA by John B. Thompson

Honey is a young, mixed-race woman involved in a tempestuous romance with a white boy. Together they discover that passion is color-blind…and dangerous. It’s a frank story of love and hate, of generosity and selfishness, of tradition-bound Southerners caught up in a conflict of races, emotions and desires…told across two raw, edgy, novels: Honey and the sequel Love in Louisiana, back in print for the first time in over seventy years and combined into one edition.

THE INTEGRATION OF MAYBELLE BROWN by Bonnie Golightly

A small town in the deep south is rocked to its racist core Maybelle Brown arrives from Philadelphia to live with her grandmother…and becomes the first black student ever enrolled in the local college. But that’s only the beginning of the explosive problems her arrival creates. Because Maybelle also becomes romantically involved with a white man, crossing an unthinkable line in a community terrified that a rising tide of color will destroy their heritage.

QUALITY by CID Rickets Sumner

“She has written the most profound approach yet to the race issue. A superior piece of literature from all angles. Every word she writes is true.” Birmingham News

Boston nursing school graduate Pinkey Johnson has blond hair, blue eyes and a secret– she’s actually black. She’s managed to fit in naturally among her new friends in the North, but she never quite fit within the small, southern town she came from. But now, on the eve of marrying a white doctor, and forced to tell him the truth about herself, she returns to Mississippi, where she must face the racism and inequities that are a way of life for blacks in the south of the 1940s. And yet she stays, struggling to find both herself and her place in a world that’s dangerously black and white.

PEOPLE FROM HEAVEN by John Sanford

“A sacred book, majestic in its rebukes of those who violate the breath and origin of humanity while professing faith and going through the motions of holiness.” Carl Sandburg

The people of Warrensburg are divided by the arrival of a nameless Black woman. Her few allies call her America Smith, while the town’s most prominent citizens try to drive her out. This clash results in rape and murder.

“Only a warm-hearted and perceptive author who believes in the potential worth of humanity could have conceived the powerful conflicts, the trenchant syllables here.” New York Herald Tribune

NOTE: These novels are a reflection of their era, a vivid snapshot of a turbulent and shameful period in our history, and contain language and situations that contemporary readers may find offensive.

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