Thomas Byrn

Indiana Down: a Novel of the Marion Lynching Thomas Byrn

In a time of unspeakable racism, it became the most notorious lynching in American history. Marion, Indiana, August 7, 1930; two young black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, are dragged from jail, beaten, and hanged by a mob of angry whites. A third, James Cameron, barely escapes with his life. Shocked by the brutal crime -- the first in Indiana in some twenty-seven years -- State Attorney General James Ogden sends his best investigators to Marion to identify and arrest the mob leaders. In Marion the detectives find a town seething with fear and anger, in the grip of the powerful Indiana Ku Klux Klan, a town ready to explode again in violence at any moment. Walking a tightrope, the detectives arrest and indict ten men for the lynching, and their job seems to be done. But one investigator, "colored" Detective-Sergeant Theopolis Morris, realizes that things just don't add up, and refusing to back down, pushes the investigation past the limit.