O'Brien, Gail Williams

views updated

O'Brien, Gail Williams

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, professor of history and associate dean for graduate studies, planning, and faculty affairs.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Littleton-Griswold Prize, American Historical Association, 2001, for The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South.

WRITINGS:

The Legal Fraternity and the Making of a New South Community, 1848-1882, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1986.

The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gail Williams O'Brien is a professor of history who specializes in race relations and the criminal justice system in the post-World War II United States. Her book The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South explores a time in American history that was turbulent, but not as much so as the eras before and following it. Race riots had followed World War I, and many feared the same situation at the end of World War II. Much of the book concerns the Columbia, Tennessee, Race Riot of 1946, in which a black woman's effort to get her radio repaired led to a failed attempt to lynch the woman and her son and violence that left four police officers wounded and two black men dead. O'Brien delved into legal transcripts and conducted interviews with the participants of the incident and the violence that followed, all with an eye toward explaining how conservative elements branded protests by African Americans and labor leaders as the work of communists. In the trial that followed, many expected a quick conviction of the black defendants on charges of attempted murder by the all-white jury, but that did not happen. Nearly all the defendants were found not guilty; two were found guilty of reduced charges.

Writing in the Journal of Southern History, Michael Honey called the book "deeply textured," and Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr., writing in the Mississippi Quarterly, praised it as a "powerful portrayal" that "focuses on human beings as well as facts and institutional structures."