Wrenching and urgent … By rooting her history in the intimate lives of survivors, Williams highlights the considerable gains of the Reconstruction era … Williams, an advocate of racial justice herself, convincingly challenges this cynical view of Reconstruction … Williams spends only two early chapters on the night raids themselves, as her real interest is in the long afterlife of these attacks. With great sensitivity and care, she details how such attacks were the start, not the culmination, of the pain and humiliation that Black survivors endured.
