Written by James P. Dady, LINK nky contributor
A Shot in the Moonlight is Ben Montgomery’s history of a deadly confrontation in 1897 between two dozen heavily-armed white nightriders and a former slave named George Dinning in Simpson County, Kentucky.
On the pretext that Mr. Dinning had engaged in some stealing in the neighborhood, the intruders demanded that he and his family surrender the 125-acre farm he’d purchased twenty years beforehand from his former slave master.
That Mr. Dinning was set upon by racial terrorists was unfortunately common in the Jim Crow era in Kentucky. What made his case remarkable is that when his assailants started shooting, Mr. Dinning shot back. A tremendous volley of gunfire was heard by neighbors, and when the shooting concluded one of the nightriders was dead, and Mr. Dinning, who survived but was wounded in the head and arm.
He was arrested and charged with murder.
Mr. Montgomery is a Florida journalist and author who writes about America’s unseemly history of racial violence. He reports in his preface of a lynching in Jackson County, Florida, in 1934, in which Claud Neal was abducted and murdered by a mob of 5,000, and of the terrorizing afterward of Mr. Neal’s family. The author describes a visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where 4,400 American lynching victims are remembered.
The contemporary effort to suppress the telling of the country’s complicated racial history; to ban books about it or the teaching of it is futile, Mr. Montgomery implies. “[O]ur violent past is still with us, and … we face a reckoning, ready or not.”
That history, tagged “critical race theory” by its critics in legislatures and their outriders in the media, keeps pouring forth as if from a bottomless well.
The Jim Crow era begun in the South after the Civil War was a web of laws, codes, and customs that presumed that Blacks were something less than full-fledged people, a subspecies emanating from the netherworld. The Jim Crow codes, at law, in society, and in commerce, regulated every exchange across the color bar, and required an elaborate set of obsequies and deference – bowing and scraping — especially in the way Black men were to behave around White women. Blacks were to be kept somewhere between subservient, if not supine, legally, socially, economically.
Jim Crow was the successor to slavery in the ongoing national distemper over race. Slavery was the system of kidnapping, human trafficking, murder, rape, child abuse, terrorism, and wage theft. The slavery business sanctioned by the authors of the U.S. Constitution impoverished the captives, of course, and enriched the slavers. Slavery was made illegal by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 when George Dunning was seven years old. It did not follow that most of the White South embraced their Black neighbors as equals, or in the North, either. The Washington Post has reported that some 1,700 members of Congress were slaveholders; some continued with Congressional careers after the slaves were freed into the twentieth century.
In the Jim Crow era, the Kentucky General Assembly, affronted that Blacks and Whites were being educated together at Berea College, made the practice illegal in 1904 with its Day Law. The constitutionality of the law was upheld in a shameful decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1908.
It had been illegal earlier in Mr. Dinning’s life for Blacks to testify in state court against Whites. A Black female rape victim could not be a complaining witness against a White rapist. Black mothers could not sue White fathers for child support. Blacks could not state a claim for inheritance against the estate of a deceased white father.
“Denying Black citizens access to the courts was a fundamental legal bulwark of institutional enslavement,” Mr. Montgomery observes. After slavery but during Jim Crow legal justice for Blacks was rare.
The original version of the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 about 100 miles south of Simpson County in Pulaski, Tennessee, and the nightriding techniques of the founders were deployed by the interlopers at Mr. Dinning’s farm on January 21, 1897.
There had been ten racial lynchings in Kentucky in the thirteen months prior to the affray in Mr. Dinning’s farmyard. “Ku Kluxing,” or “nightriding” or “whitecapping,”—extortion, torture, and murder — was common across Kentucky.
In recognition of the potential for vigilante justice, Mr. Dinning was spirited to Louisville to await trial under guard ordered by Gov. William O. Bradley. To maintain law and order, the governor also assigned two companies of soldiers to Franklin, the Simpson County seat where Mr. Dinning’s trial was to be held, to guard the participants. The presence of the soldiers incensed the locals. Gov. Bradley was hung in effigy and the soldiers attacked on the courthouse lawn.
In that environment, a local journalist wrote, “It looks like Dinning’s days on this planet are numbered with small digits.”
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Mr. Dinning’s defense was hindered by his race and by the all-White composition of the jury, of course, but also because physical evidence bearing on his claim of self-defense had been destroyed. Invaders to his property the night after the shooting had chased away his wife and children and burned the house to the ground. There was therefore to be no physical evidence in the form of bullets lodged in the structure.
Even in the Jim Crow South, with its two-tiered system of justice; one for Whites and some lesser one for Blacks, the local prosecutor had some difficulty working up a proper charge against Mr. Dinning. All of the potential witnesses for the commonwealth were on the night of the fatal business trespassers whose credibility was at issue.
The family of the dead vigilante Jodie Conn owned the most fertile and level farmland along the Red River. Family members included the leading stockman in Logan County, a prominent tobacco dealer in Franklin, a vice president of Peoples Bank, the owner of the South Kentucky Rabbitry, and the owner of the largest mule and horse trade in South Kentucky. Charles T. Conn, the father of the dead man, owned the most beautiful home in Logan County, which sat on 700 splendid acres. He had accumulated the best of the world’s material bounty and spent his winters in Florida. Mr. Conn was heard to discourage violence and said he wanted a fair trial.
But Mr. Montgomery implies that it was only after a visit from Charles Conn with the local sheriff prosecution witness materialized and an indictment of Mr. Dinning returned.
Given the prevailing sentiment against Mr. Dinning and those of his race, it is notable how well he was defended. His lawyer was J.B. Grider, a veteran practitioner and public official from Bowling Green.
In cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses, Mr. Grider drew the inference for the jury that all of the witnesses had been coached to tell the same story: that they had gone to the Dinning farm with ‘peaceful intent.’ He established the implausibility of their story: that two dozen men, heavily armed and on horseback, their faces covered, demanding that Mr. Dinning and his family abandon their homestead and move at least 50 miles away – but with friendly intent. Physical evidence of the shooting in Mr. Dinning’s, other than the wounds to his body, was destroyed by the fire. But Mr. Grider made a capable offer of proof through neighbors who testified that they had observed the marks of the bullets in the house in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
The Dinning defense was rooted in the ancient legal principle called the Castle Doctrine, which holds that it is a man’s right to own property and to defend that right with force. Mr. Dinning was legally justified, then, in attempting to repel the invaders with the same means as they were using against him, it was argued.
On July 5, 1897, and after a day’s deliberation, the jury of twelve white men found Mr. Dinning not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter, a lesser offense for he was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor in the penitentiary at Eddyville.
A sizeable share of public opinion across Kentucky and beyond was offended that Mr. Dinning had been convicted of anything.
“This is the worst outrage on law, justice, decency, and manhood that ever our poor old state has had to suffer,” wrote Lexington attorney Suydam Scott. Gov. Bradley was what today would be described as, rara avis, a liberal Republican, a moderate on racial issues. He pondered the case and the arguments for Mr. Dinning, and made history as the first Southern governor to pardon a Black criminal defendant.
“His conviction,” the governor wrote, “was procured almost entirely on the testimony of his assailants. Too long have mobs disgraced the fair name of Kentucky and while I am governor of the Commonwealth, no man, no matter how obscure or friendless, shall be punished for killing a member of a mob who comes to take his life or drive him from his home.”
Less than two weeks after his conviction, Mr. Dinning was released from Eddyville. He relocated to Jeffersonville, Indiana, swearing he would never return to Kentucky, but in September of the same year he was brutally attacked in the street in Louisville and suffered a fractured skull and the loss of an eye. The author to his credit does not ascribe a racial motive to the attackers; declining to speculate in the absence of evidence.
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By this time, Mr. Dinning had become acquainted with Bennett Young.
Mr. Young had been a colonel in the Confederal army. He had ridden with John Hunt Morgan on his raids through Northern Kentucky and elsewhere, and after the Civil War regularly attended reunions of Confederate soldiers.
Upon his return to Kentucky Col. Young earned an outsized reputation as a lawyer and orator. At the time of Mr. Dinning’s criminal trial, Col. Young was 54 years old. He was said to have tried more cases than any Kentucky lawyer of his time.
In massive contradistinction with his history of fighting to the death for the cause of slavery. Col. Young took up the cause of freed slaves after the war. He wrote that the South had been wrong. He argued that the sanctioning of slavery in the Kentucky Constitution should be removed, and for the repeal of unjust laws burdening Black people. He served as president of the Colored Orphans Home.
The author grapples with Col. Young’s change of heart.
“Maybe he faced some kind of moral reckoning and changed his ways.”
After the Civil War, the state courts of the South were forbidding places for Blacks, but Black litigants were enjoying some success suing whites for personal injury, fraud, and theft. Col. Young filed a civil suit for damages against Mr. Dinning’s Simpson County assailants in federal court in Louisville.
In assembling his case, Col. Young had a ready-made list of defendants: the witnesses in Mr. Dinning’s criminal trial. At trial, Colonel Young reduced to absurdity the justification of the invaders. He inquired of one of the assailants,
“Do you mean to say that you went there as the head of a band of armed men to drive Dinning away from home, and that you went there as his friend?”
[The witness:] “I don’t see any harm in it.”
The witness then conceded that he had commanded his companions to “squat and fire” at Mr. Dinning.
“Squat and fire?” exclaimed Col. Young. “That is a military order, isn’t it?”
The portion of Col. Young’s long, eloquent summation given by the author is too long to be digested here, but it demonstrates to the contemporary reader, particularly one versed in law, how he had earned his reputation.
The jury of twelve white men found for Mr. Dinning against six of his attackers and measured his damages at $50,000, or almost $1.7 million in today’s dollars. With that verdict and with the proceeds of a settlement Col. Young pressed in another suit, Mr. Dinning eventually collected the value of $108,000 in today’s dollars.
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It might be hoped that 125 years after the Dinning cases were heard that the national racial distemper had been cured, that racial amity had settled upon the land since George Dinning had died in 1930. This is a Pollyanish, Mr. Montgomery asserts.
“The problem with the Confederate flag and granite statues of dead soldiers is that the Civil War never ended. It devolved into skirmishes and entanglements … It rages on Facebook and in classrooms and in the streets of America still. Its agents of trouble are Proud Boys and good old boys and police with no-knock warrants and Whites who should know better but choose silence,” Mr. Montgomery writes in his preface.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, (1951).
Twenty-first century Northern Kentuckians live with some ugly facts of racial history. The Taylor-Southgate bridge from Newport to Cincinnati owes part of its name to General James Taylor, who owned human beings. Bellevue, Kentucky, is named for Gen. Taylor’s Newport mansion, where slaves were kept. Toni Morrison’s great novel Beloved, set in fictional versions of Boone County and the outskirts of Cincinnati, is the target of those who would whitewash the American legacy of racial discord.
Race history is full of ironies, and hopeful facts seep in. General Taylor’s mansion later served as a station along the Underground Railway for runaway slaves, and Gen. Taylor freed many of his slaves by the terms of his will, and gave land to a number of them. The late Ms. Morrison has become one of the most revered writers in the American literary canon.
America’s racial history is often horrific, but Ben Montgomery’s vivid account of the travails of George Dinning shows that there is always the promise of redemption.
Montgomery’s book was published by Little Brown Spark in 2021.