This year marks the 60th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, and the 30th anniversary of the police killing of the 17-year-old Harlem honor student Edmund Perry, a case which became the subject of a nonfiction book and a 1991 TV movie called Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story. This would be a good time to commemorate these events by reading books written about them.
Two books I own and plan to read are Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness by Robert Conot (Bantam, 1967), which is about the Watts Riots and Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry by journalist Robert Sam Anson (Random House, 1987).
The Chicago Tribune called Conot's book "something Capote's will never be--a work of potentially historic importance." The reviewer was probably talking about Truman Capote's crime classic, In Cold Blood.
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