
There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas
The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $29.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Nicole Cash
-
By:
-
Scott W. Stern
About this listen
A sweeping study of sexual assault trials in the Jim Crow South, detailing the racial and economic inequities of rape law and the resistance of ordinary women.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Mississippi County, Arkansas, was a brutal and profitable place. Home to starving, landless farmers, the county produced almost two percent of the entire world’s cotton. It was also the site of two rape trials that made national headlines: an accusation that sent two Black men, almost certainly innocent, to death row; and the case of two white men, almost certainly guilty, who were likewise sentenced to death but who would ultimately face a very different fate. Braiding together these stories, Scott W. Stern examines how the Jim Crow legal system relied on selectively prosecuting rape to uphold the racial, gender, and economic hierarchies of the segregated, unequal South. But as much as rape law was a site of oppression, it was also, Stern shows, an arena of fierce resistance.
Based on deep archival research, this kaleidoscopic narrative includes new information about the early career of Thurgood Marshall, who called one of the Mississippi County trials “worse than any we have had as yet,” and the anti-rape activism of Maya Angelou, who came of age in Arkansas and whose decision to write about her own sexual assault helped shape a burgeoning movement.
©2025 Scott W. Stern (P)2024 Audible Inc.People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Everything Must Go
- The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
- By: Dorian Lynskey
- Narrated by: Dorian Lynskey
- Length: 14 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia.” In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
-
-
A book that I needed
- By TJ Schreiber on 02-19-25
By: Dorian Lynskey
-
Crazy as Hell
- The Best Little Guide to Black History
- By: Hoke S. Glover III, V. Efua Prince, Reginald Dwayne Betts - introduction
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A refreshing, insightful, sacrilegious take on African American history, Crazy as Hell explores the site of America's greatest contradictions. The notables of this book are the runaways and the rebels, the badass and funky, the activists and the inmates—from Harriet Tubman, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali to B'rer Rabbit, Single Mamas, and Wakandans—but are they crazy as hell, or do they simply defy the expectations designated for being Black in America?
By: Hoke S. Glover III, and others
-
American Heretics
- Religous Adversaries to Liberal Order
- By: Jerome E. Copulsky
- Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The conversation about the proper role of religion in American public life often revolves around what kind of polity the Founders of the United States envisioned. In this book, Jerome E. Copulsky complicates this ongoing public argument by examining a collection of thinkers who, on religious grounds, considered the nation's political ideas illegitimate, its institutions flawed, and its church-state arrangement defective.
-
-
Lots of new-to-me information
- By Alonzo Nightjar on 04-07-25
-
The Trials of Nina McCall
- Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women
- By: Scott W. Stern
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the 20th century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up - usually without due process - simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan", lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness.
-
-
Unknown misogyny
- By joe sample on 06-06-20
By: Scott W. Stern
-
Waste Land
- A World in Permanent Crisis
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We are entering a new era of global cataclysm in which the world faces a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, the end of both monarchy and empire, and countless other dangers. In Waste Land, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and author of more than twenty books on world affairs, incisively explains how we got here and where we are going.
-
-
Climate / Population Alarmism in a Mask
- By ElovesK on 02-07-25
By: Robert D. Kaplan
-
Blood and the Badge
- The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation
- By: Michael Cannell
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No episode in NYPD history surpasses the depravities of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, two decorated detectives who covertly acted as mafia informants and paid assassins in the Scorsese world of 1980s Brooklyn. For more than ten years, Eppolito and Caracappa moonlighted as the mob's early warning alert system, leaking names of mobsters secretly cooperating with the government and crippling investigations by sharing details of surveillance, phone taps, and impending arrests. The Lucchese boss called the two detectives his crystal ball: Whatever detectives knew, the mafia soon learned.
-
-
amazing stories
- By robert l. on 04-02-25
By: Michael Cannell
-
Everything Must Go
- The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
- By: Dorian Lynskey
- Narrated by: Dorian Lynskey
- Length: 14 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As Dorian Lynskey writes, “People have been contemplating the end of the world for millennia.” In this immersive and compelling cultural history, Lynskey reveals how religious prophecies of the apocalypse were secularized in the early 19th century by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley in a time of dramatic social upheaval and temporary climate change, inciting a long tradition of visions of the end without gods.
-
-
A book that I needed
- By TJ Schreiber on 02-19-25
By: Dorian Lynskey
-
Crazy as Hell
- The Best Little Guide to Black History
- By: Hoke S. Glover III, V. Efua Prince, Reginald Dwayne Betts - introduction
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A refreshing, insightful, sacrilegious take on African American history, Crazy as Hell explores the site of America's greatest contradictions. The notables of this book are the runaways and the rebels, the badass and funky, the activists and the inmates—from Harriet Tubman, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali to B'rer Rabbit, Single Mamas, and Wakandans—but are they crazy as hell, or do they simply defy the expectations designated for being Black in America?
By: Hoke S. Glover III, and others
-
American Heretics
- Religous Adversaries to Liberal Order
- By: Jerome E. Copulsky
- Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The conversation about the proper role of religion in American public life often revolves around what kind of polity the Founders of the United States envisioned. In this book, Jerome E. Copulsky complicates this ongoing public argument by examining a collection of thinkers who, on religious grounds, considered the nation's political ideas illegitimate, its institutions flawed, and its church-state arrangement defective.
-
-
Lots of new-to-me information
- By Alonzo Nightjar on 04-07-25
-
The Trials of Nina McCall
- Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison "Promiscuous" Women
- By: Scott W. Stern
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the 20th century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up - usually without due process - simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan", lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness.
-
-
Unknown misogyny
- By joe sample on 06-06-20
By: Scott W. Stern
-
Waste Land
- A World in Permanent Crisis
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We are entering a new era of global cataclysm in which the world faces a deadly mix of war, climate change, great power rivalry, rapid technological advancement, the end of both monarchy and empire, and countless other dangers. In Waste Land, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and author of more than twenty books on world affairs, incisively explains how we got here and where we are going.
-
-
Climate / Population Alarmism in a Mask
- By ElovesK on 02-07-25
By: Robert D. Kaplan
-
Blood and the Badge
- The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation
- By: Michael Cannell
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No episode in NYPD history surpasses the depravities of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, two decorated detectives who covertly acted as mafia informants and paid assassins in the Scorsese world of 1980s Brooklyn. For more than ten years, Eppolito and Caracappa moonlighted as the mob's early warning alert system, leaking names of mobsters secretly cooperating with the government and crippling investigations by sharing details of surveillance, phone taps, and impending arrests. The Lucchese boss called the two detectives his crystal ball: Whatever detectives knew, the mafia soon learned.
-
-
amazing stories
- By robert l. on 04-02-25
By: Michael Cannell