A Shot in the Moonlight

The sensational true story of George Dinning, a freed slave, who in 1899 joined forces with a Confederate war hero in search of justice in the Jim Crow South.

“Taut and tense. Inspiring and terrifying in its timelessness.” (Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad)

After moonrise on the cold night of January 21, 1897, a mob of 25 White men gathered in a patch of woods near Big Road in Southwestern Simpson County, Kentucky. Half carried rifles and shotguns, and a few tucked pistols in their pants. Their target was George Dinning, a freed slave who’d farmed peacefully in the area for 14 years and who had been wrongfully accused of stealing livestock from a neighboring farm. When the mob began firing through the doors and windows of Dinning’s home, he fired back in self-defense, shooting and killing the son of a wealthy Kentucky family.

So began one of the strangest legal episodes in American history – one that ended with Dinning becoming the first Black man in America to win damages after a wrongful murder conviction.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery resurrects this dramatic but largely forgotten story and the unusual convergence of characters – among them a Confederate war hero-turned-lawyer named Bennett H. Young, Kentucky Governor William O’Connell Bradley, and George Dinning himself – that allowed this unlikely story of justice to unfold in a time and place where justice was all too rare.