Hold Back the Night: The Legal Lynching of Jeremiah Reeves

Graveyards throughout the South are filled with innocent black men who were wrongfully sentenced to death in Jim Crow courtrooms during what southerners called a legal lynching. There is compelling evidence that such was the case with Jeremiah Reeves, Jr., a black teenager who lost his life for allegedly assaulting and raping a white woman. Hold Back the Night is his story. It is a chilling, shocking account of how a black high school student was falsely arrested, tortured and forced to confess to sexually assaulting several white women, and tragically executed for a rape that the facts and evidence strongly suggests never took place. Though Reeves’ saga is undoubtedly one of the most important episodes in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement, very little has ever been written about this case which played a critical role in the birth of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, helped fuel the nation’s burgeoning voting-rights crusade, and blatantly exposed the injustice and inequality of the southern judicial system. This book corrects these historical oversights, fills a critical void in the annals of the American Civil Rights Movement, and provides for the first time a detailed account of a young black man’s desperate but futile fight for justice.