Originally published: Atlanta, Ga.: Peachtree Publishers, 1981.

First published in 1981, Murder at the Broad River Bridge recounts the stunning details of the murder of Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn by the Ku Klux Klan on a back-country Georgia road in 1964, nine days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Longtime Atlanta Constitution reporter Bill Shipp gives us, with shattering power, the true story of how a good, innocent, "uninvolved" man was killed during the Civil Rights turbulence of the mid-1960s. Penn was a decorated veteran of World War II, a United States Army Reserve officer, and an African American, killed by racist, white vigilantes as he was driving home to Washington, D.C. from Fort Benning, Georgia. Shipp recounts the details of the blind and lawless force that took Penn’s life and the sorry mask of protective patriotism it hid behind. To read Murder at Broad River Bridge is to know with deep shock that it could be dated today, tonight, tomorrow. It is a vastly moving documentary drama.

The Crimson and Gold is a comprehensive narrative detailing the struggle for integration in Athens, Georgia, in the context of highly competitive football as experienced by athletes, their fellow students, teachers, journalists, and school administrators at (predominantly White) Athens High School and (African American) Burney-Harris High School and eventually Clarke Central High School—formed after the two legacy schools were forced to merge. The proud sports traditions of two high schools—both adored by their respective communities—eventually become inextricably linked with the larger battle for equal rights during the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s. In addition to the relatively well-known stories of the University of Georgia’s integration in 1961, Mark Clegg details “Freedom of Choice” transfers in the early 1960s, desegregation of businesses like the iconic Varsity restaurant, the violence perpetrated by the local chapter of the KKK, the first athletic competitions between Burney-Harris and Athens High, the resistance by large portions of both the Black and White communities to the phasing out of their beloved schools, and the tense and often violent first several years of Clarke Central’s existence. Finally, Clegg recounts the Athens High football team’s remarkable state title run—in its last year of existence in 1969. Clegg conducted extensive interviews with a number of Black and White Athenians who lived through the era, including Horace King, Richard Appleby, and Clarence Pope (Burney-Harris and Clarke Central football players who were three of the first five Black football players at UGA); former Athens mayor and Athens and Clarke Central High School football player Doc Eldridge; current DeKalb County CEO and former Georgia labor commissioner (and Burney-Harris and Clarke Central football player) Michael Thurmond; the first Black scholarship athlete at UGA and Athens High School alumnus Maxie Foster; and local writer, journalist, and publisher (Flagpole magazine) Pete McCommons.

Few whites who violently resisted the civil rights struggle were charged with crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. But the tide of a long-deferred justice began to change in 1994, when a Mississippi jury convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers. Since then, more than one hundred murder cases have been reopened, resulting in more than a dozen trials. But how much did these public trials contribute to a public reckoning with America’s racist past? Racial Reckoning investigates that question, along with the political pressures and cultural forces that compelled the legal system to revisit these decades-old crimes. “[A] timely and significant work...Romano brilliantly demystifies the false binary of villainous white men like Beckwith or Edgar Ray Killen who represent vestiges of a violent racial past with a more enlightened color-blind society...Considering the current partisan and racial divide over the prosecution of police shootings of unarmed black men, this book is a must-read for historians, legal analysts, and journalists interested in understanding the larger meanings of civil rights or racially explosive trials in America.” —Chanelle Rose, American Historical Review

In-depth portraits of the victims and their killer show three men representative of the changing South: the privileged white man, Judge Robert Smith Vance of Birmingham, who saw the necessity of political changes; the black lawyer and city alderman, Robert Robinson of Savannah, who prevailed in a segregated society to become a respected professional figure; and the embittered lifelong criminal Roy Moody, who led a brooding, solitary life on the edges of society.

Lionel Bruno Jordan was murdered on January 20, 1995, in an El Paso parking lot, but he keeps coming back as the key to a multibillion-dollar drug industry, two corrupt governments -- one called the United States and the other Mexico -- and a self-styled War on Drugs that is a fraud. Beneath all the policy statements and bluster of politicians is a real world of lies, pain, and big money. Down by the River is the true narrative of how a murder led one American family into this world and how it all but destroyed them. It is the story of how one Mexican drug leader outfought and outthought the U.S. government, of how major financial institutions were fattened on the drug industry, and how the governments of the U.S. and Mexico buried everything that happened. All this happens down by the river, where the public fictions finally end and the facts read like fiction. This is a remarkable American story about drugs, money, murder, and family.

The sickness of racism and inequality has been a part of America's DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) since 1472, and we, as Americans, do not have enough people with American grit to properly confront these issues. American grit is the passion and motivation for long-term success for yourself, your family, your colleagues, and America. It is obtained from acquiring contentment. Contentment is the state of happiness and satisfaction found through love and respect for oneself and others. Finding cont