Publisher's Synopsis
This is one of the most compelling, but least known, true stories of our time. It's about our police, courts, press and power politics -- how they sometimes use each other and abuse the people's trust. It's also a story of two Americans, one black, one white -- sons of the racially segregated Deep South, men who shared an unshakable ethical and social conscience for which they each, in different ways, paid an excruciating price. When World War II veterans Roosevelt Tatum and Dan Moore cried "foul" about the police and federal court in 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, powerful men in our government made postwar peacetime for both a living hell. Tatum implicated two policemen in the double bombing of the home of Martin Luther King's brother, the Rev. A.D. King. Moore alleged corruption within the federal court and the all-white grand jury that accused Tatum of lying. Here, then, is a saga that puts heat on our judicial and political systems, as well as our news media, while shedding fresh, disturbing light on how these institutions too often fail us. Here, too, is a story of inspiration, of two Americans who stand tall for principle, only to lose everything except the admiration of their families and their own self-respect, and of the remarkable newspaperman who couldn't let the story go.
