The monkey suit, and other short fiction on African Americans and justice

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In this genre-bending series of short stories, David Dante Troutt has fictionalized the history of ten classic legal cases involving African Americans, transforming his research into tales of rare force and craft. The ten cases will be familiar to many readers; included are Powell v. Alabama (1932), the principal Scottsboro Boys case; Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the first challenge to the constitutionality of segregation; and Mapp v. Ohio (1961), in which warrantless searches were deemed unconstitutional. Critical turning points in the law and the nation's history, these cases also become, in Troutt's telling, points of departure in an exploration of human feeling - and black experience. "The Tale of Almost" (inspired by The State of South Carolina v. Kelly, 1920), for example, recounts the troubles of Will Kelly, a black man accused of thinking about attacking a young white girl.