To Defy the Monster

July 8, 1932, 11 PM. East Austin, an African-American district in Jim Crow Texas. Sixty-year-old Charles Johnson is driving home from Bible study when a car full of young white men swerves in front of him. A brief altercation ensues. Convinced that his life is threatened, Johnson fires his pistol and drives away. Johnson's shot kills the unarmed, eighteen-year-old son of Albert Allison, a prominent cotton landlord, influential in politics, and an advocate for racial justice. Although devastated, Allison personally thwarts a lynch mob and then insists that Austin's courts treat Johnson fairly. Nonetheless, Allison expects fairness to execute his son's killer. Johnson himself expects to be lynched, either by the mob or by the court. "To Defy the Monster" shows how the confluence of unique cultural and historical factors determines Johnson's fate and why Allison orders his family never to speak of the matter.