THE LAW: Trial by Jury

Sumner, Miss, belongs to the Deeper South—the one without its own memories of ante-bellum order or graciousness.

Sumner was snake-infested swamp until it was cleared for cotton in 1873. Like many another U.S. town, it was built around a courthouse, and its pioneers brought into the wilderness a respect for Anglo-American law. But they also brought the hatreds and half-digested lessons of Reconstruction years and a socio-economic system that would constantly conflict with the tradition of Anglo-American justice as those traditions lived and evolved among the vast majority of their countrymen....

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