Monroe County Murder

Monroe County Murder is a story about a young black teenager from Chicago who travels to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to visit his Auntie Carrie. The boy, Teddy, had been raised in urban Chicago and was a leader in his high school class and on the football field. In his whole life, he had never met any white folks in his all black neighborhood and school. He had no idea what was in store for him in Mississippi as he prepares to drive down into another world; that being the violent summer of 1964 during the Civil Rights drive for Colored Voters in Mississippi.
Teddy’s dad was from Mississippi and had been in the segregated US Army during the Second World War. Teddy’s dad, Aaron, had made the successful transformation from second-class tenant farmer to a respected homicide detective in the Chicago Police Department. Aaron had been sent to the Alaskan frontier to construct the Alaska-Canada Highway, also known as the Alcan during 1942. Aaron was assigned to one of the four segregated Colored General Support Regiments tasked with cutting a road from Dawson Creek, BC, Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska. This road would connect the Contiguous 48 states with the territory of Alaska for the first time. When Aaron and his buddies arrived in Alaska, the snow was deep, and the weather was colder than these Southern Colored men had ever experienced. Nevertheless, they soldiered on with pride and distinction, helping open the Alaska road ahead of the winter snow.
Aaron and the other 3600 plus Colored soldiers, who help construct the Alcan in record time, who be the vanguard concerning white’s folks perception of what Colored people could do if given half a chance. And half a chance was all they got. They had the hand-me-downs from the White Engineer Regiments, the worst food and lodging and the crappiest sections of the road to build. Despite this all, the Colored troops endured and triumphed to the amazement of the white officers.
Aaron had met his future wife in Chicago on his way to Alaska. After the war, Aaron returned to his new wife and family, settled down and became a police officer. Things were easy for Aaron and his family in his urban neighborhood in Chicago.
Trouble for the Parks family began when several years earlier, Aaron whole family had traveled to Mississippi to visit Aarons baby sister, Carrie. Teddy had met his Auntie’s next door neighbor's young blue-eyed blond headed white daughter, Billie. Billie was the first and only white girl Teddy had ever met. They were just kids at the time, but the two of them formed a bond that simmered in Teddy and Billie’s mind until that summer of 1964. As one might expect, fireworks went off in more than one way when the two were reunited at Teddy’s welcome dinner in Monroe County.Less than a decade earlier in the Mississippi Delta, a young Colored boy named Emmett Till from Chicago had been brutally murdered for just whistling at a white woman. Imagine what would happen if the two of them were caught in mixed race sexual relationship. The two thought their relationship was secret. She was dating a racist psychopath who’s father just happened to be the Grand Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. What could go wrong! Billie’s racist boyfriend, JB Rankin, had been out of town for weeks, but the word had gotten out about some local girl and an out-of-town Colored man having sex down in the river bottom. The sheriff of Monroe County had gotten a tip about some photographs that had been developed that were obscene. A Colored man and a white girl riding in the same car would get noticed one day and by the next day, everyone would have heard about it.