Incognegro

 

Between 1890 and 1929, an average of 100 lynchings were reported in the American south each year, and nearly 90% of those murdered were black Americans. While the alleged crimes ranged from rape to theft to murder, the real cause of these killings was to provide social control, to enforce Jim Crow segregation.

In response, black organizations sent a handful of agents into the south to cover the events, to make sure that no murder went unnoted, to reveal the identities of those who participated in these atrocities. Once compiled, the northern black press ensured that the nation couldn’t turn a blind eye.

These investigative agents were black people who all shared similar physical traits: straight hair, European features, and skin pale enough to let them masquerade as “white.” By risking their lives to reveal the truth of lynching, these race spies became near mythic heroes to the black Americans they sought to protect, and scourges to those white southerners they sought to expose.

  

Before he can, Zane gets word that “the crime of the century” has hit Turpine, Tennessee, the very town Zane left behind as a young boy.  Apparently, two white women were rapped and murder, their bodies found naked in the woods. One black man has already been lynched in the matter, a man whose name Zane recognizes as that of a childhood friend. The sheriff is holding another black man as well, and that man’s lynching is imminent. The suspect is named is Jake “Pinchy” Pinchback—Zane Pinchback’s older, darker, brother. Now Zane is Pinchy’s only chance at survival.