Description
“Squires’ . . . grandfather used to be a sheriff’s deputy who carried a gun and a clenched fist, a man whose talk with cronies used to be full of references to ‘sonofabitching judges’ and ‘goddamn niggers.’ He used to be also, Squires relates, one of the crucial muscle men at the back of a vicious cabal of power brokers headed by one Boss Crump. . . . That machine involved, for a time, much of Nashville’s leading citizenry. It engineered elections, stole votes, organized lynch mobs, ran an illegal gambling empire, and within the 1950s, when it seemed that the normal Democratic Party used to be going soft on civil rights, brokered the advent of Republicanism in one corner of the South.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“His richly-textured narrative charts the Nashville machine’s rupture with the state’s top political boss, Edward Crump of Memphis, and traces the sweeping reforms that shattered rural white keep an eye on of the state legislature. Squires dramatically reenacts the downfall of Nashville lawyer Tommy Osborne, convicted of jury tampering in 1964 after defending Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. He follows Nashville’s transformation into a crucible of the civil rights movement on this stirring chronicle of the South’s coming-of-age.”
—Publishers Weekly
Back in print (the book used to be in the beginning published by Random House in 1996) and to be had for the first time in electronic form.