Murder in McComb, a book review.
History can be personal and painful, and McComb native Trent Brown recognized that fact when he considers “Does the historian’s desire for a story outweigh their (the people involved) considerations of privacy or reticence or even fear?” This concern weighed greatly on Brown as he crafted his latest work, Murder in McComb: The Tina Andrews Case, focused on the 1969 murder of twelve-years-old Tina Andrews.
Through this historical monograph, Brown shows McComb’s social class division in the 1960s and ’70s through “the brief life and death of a white, working-class girl.” He did not seek to identify the killer through new evidence, or persuade the reader that faults were made in the state’s case, but instead uses Tina Andrews’s murder to illustrate how McComb struggled to reassert itself as a town of law and order following the violence of the 1960s.
After detailing Andrews’s murder, the book reflects on the violence that resisted the Civil Rights movement in 1960s McComb. This chapter superbly highlights the struggle and violence that briefly placed McComb as the “bombing capitol of the world.” According to the author, upper class whites’ resistance to this violence shaped McComb’s next decade as they reformed the community’s violent reputation by reinforcing a social order of respectability.
Beginning in Chapter 2, Brown chronologically follows the identification of Tina’s remains, the search for her killers, and the eventual trial and acquittal of one of the suspects. This book provides a local who’s-who of legal minds, business leaders, and lawmen; names that current residents will recognize. This section reads like a compelling crime drama, full of investigation and courtroom action, as much as the Pike County Courthouse could contain.
The one accused killer that was brought to trial happened to be a white police officer, which the author utilizes to show the desire for law and order often trumped the need for justice, regardless of the races involved. The social divisions that developed in the white community during the 1960s extended to the courtroom characterizations of the victim, her family, friends, and key witnesses as people unworthy of respect and justice, as the defense counsel’s portrayal of Tina and the crime’s witness as “ladies of ill-repute.” This contrasted with the characterizations of the accused as a person representing the order that many residents desired for the city. The jury and the public’s willingness to accept the victim and witness were from a lower class not worthy of being trusted further supported Brown’s assertion.
This book highlights how rumors, personal recollections, and poor record keeping shapes historians, journalists, and amateur sleuths’ understanding of historical events. Trent Brown identifies the challenges of collecting official source material and the continual hesitancy of individuals involved in the trails to speak with a researcher. Through investigating this case, Brown showed how memories and rumors that existed in 2018 vary from the recorded evidence, a useful reminder to apply outside of this book when discussing historical accuracy.
A small town such as McComb may not have the rosiest of histories, but it is always pleasing to see historians take time to present a well written and researched work on the community. Anyone interested in understanding and teaching local history should read this book, as it contains many aspects that would be useful for classroom instruction.