"A former Supreme Court reporter for The Washington Post, [Lane] is perfectly comfortable with the play of politics and the intricacies of the law. So while he builds an absorbing narrative of events in Colfax—his chapter on the massacre itself is riveting—he's careful to frame them within the political wars then raging in New Orleans and Washington . . . he manages to turn the case, United States v. Cruikshank, into a legal thriller, complete with crusading lawyers, courtroom confrontations and soaring declarations of principle . . . Colfax's whites dedicated the monument to their dead on a drab day in the spring of 1921. By then white supremacy was so firmly entrenched it had become a point of pride, something to celebrate in stone. And the town's whites undoubtedly thought it just as well not to mention the bones buried in unmarked graves around the Colfax courthouse. The time for silence has long since passed. Colfax will probably never build an obelisk to honor the massacre's victims. But with his gripping book, Charles Lane has given them a memorial every bit as imposing."—Kevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review