George Denning stood before a jury of white men when he was sentenced to seven years of prison for manslaughter.
What happened after that moment became a long and surprising tale, especially for a former slave in the south in the 1800s.
His story began as a misunderstanding, which quickly turned into a fight or flight response, and prompted Denning to make a decision that would greatly impact his life and others like him. In 1897, 25 white men demanded Denning, a freed slave who had been farming on his property in southwestern Kentucky, to come out of his house based on the accusation that he was a thief. After shots began showering onto the home where his family slept, Denning ran upstairs and sent one shot into the moonlight - killing a 32-year-old man of a wealthy family.
“This set in motion a plot that included him being convicted of manslaughter by an all-white jury,” Ben Montgomery, author of “A Shot in the Moonlight”, said. “It was pardoned by the governor of Kentucky, and when he got out he teamed up with a former confederate soldier named Bennett H. Young who had become a lawyer. They sued the mob in federal court and won. This was the first time ever that a Black guy sued a would-be lynch mob in court and won to the tune of, at that time, 50,000 dollars, which is equivalent to 1.2 million dollars today.”
Author Ben Montgomery tells the story of George Denning and his fight for justice alongside a former confederate soldier and lawyer, Bennett H. Young. Montgomery said the war that raged between white and Black Americans years ago never ended, making this book’s timely arrival essential to the current times.
“In my mind, the problem with the way white people in the south memorialize the Civil War is that we’re not ready to admit that the Civil War ended. It didn’t,” Montgomery said. “I feel like the end of the Civil War is still raging, this idea of white supremacy is still infecting our society and it plays out not on battlefields and with muskets, but it plays out on Facebook and in public school classrooms and high school hallways and a million different spots. George Floyd is just the latest victim of this systemic racism that we have all inherited and it’s high time that we start to deal with it.”
The entire process of researching and writing A Shot in the Moonlight took about two years, Montgomery said, and launched on Jan. 26 (publisher Little, Brown Spark). When searching for inspiration in 2018, he had an instrumental moment at the National Memorial of Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, that he notes in the preface of the book.
“I stopped there in 2018 and I stayed a night in Montgomery, and I spent about five hours at the lynching memorial. I’ve never felt what I felt standing and looking at those coffin-sized metal boxes, staring at the names of people who had been killed by white people all over, but especially in the south,” Montgomery said. “It moved me to tears and brought me to my knees. I write about it in the preface of this book, that experience, and it made me wonder which names were not on those boxes. There are 4,400 names and more added pretty regularly, but I wondered what are the stories of the people who escaped those lynchings, who fought back, who did not become victims to the mobs and that in big ways compelled me to do this book.”
The memorial is powerful, Montgomery said, because of the way it accesses those emotions that are often blanketed by racial tensions that are still seen today.
“That’s what’s so powerful about the lynching memorial. It makes white people come face to face with their own blood thirst, whether it’s yours now or something you inherited, just in your blood, your genetics,” Montgomery said. “It makes us all, myself included, stand up and take a look in the mirror and say who am I, and who do I want to be, and how do I want this world to look in the future? Am I gonna fight for justice and equity and responsible governance and humanity, or am I gonna fight for those oppressive forces that keep all of us down? That’s what we’re facing today, just like we were in 1861.”
Becoming a writer was not at the top of Montgomery’s potential careers, he said. His goal of joining his grandfather as a farmer gradually changed courses as he fell in love with his high school sweetheart and found a passion for writing while studying at Arkansas Tech University.
“I was born and raised in a little town called Slick, Oklahoma, which was a one stop sign town,” Montgomery said. “I spent my formative years on the southside of Oklahoma city and went to school at Arkansas Tech University, the Harvard of south Arkansas I like to say, where I played football for the Wonder Boys, a proud heritage. I never thought I would be a writer. I thought I would be a farmer honestly and wanted to go home and help my grandpa run cows, but I fell in love with my highschool sweetheart and she didn’t want to live on a farm. She wanted to live in New York City, so I had to find a career more suitable to get us there.”
Working as a journalist provided opportunities of growth for Montgomery. Throughout his career, he worked in west Texas, upstate New York, Tampa, and St. Petersburg, where he spent most of his paper career. After an article he worked on for the Tampa Bay Times caught the eye of literary agent Jane Dystel, Montgomery began his journey as an author.
“Jane Dystel reached out to me and said, ‘I read your story and I was wondering if you have any book ideas,’” Montgomery said. “This was sort of my dream, so I started doing books.”
Montgomery penned three history novels before his latest work. In 2014 he wrote Grandma Gatewood’s Walk based on Emma Gatewood, the first woman who hiked the Appalachian trail in 1955. To this day, Grandma Gatewood’s Walk is very successful, Montgomery said. He then penned The Leper Spy and The Man Who Walked Backward. Each novel delves into the story of a man or woman of the past and as years pass the historical events that he covers, Montgomery did not want the moments of history to disappear.
A Shot in the Moonlight was an attempt to bring a light story to a dark period of history in the making, Montgomery said. After spending three years on a news series that uncovered 40 percent of men and women shot by policemen in the state of Florida as Black, Montgomery knew he wanted to adjust his focus for his next project.
“This one came about because I wanted a story that wasn’t tragic frankly. I spent about my last three years at the newspaper working on police shootings in Florida and it was this big project,” Montgomery said. “We tried to account for six years of police shootings, so everyday I would read reports or interview people or just exist with this dark feeling of racial tragedy. I wanted a story that was not so dark I guess, so I think I was kind of consciously looking for that and I found it in the story of George Denning.”
One of the first things Montgomery did when working on his latest book was try to find George Denning’s descendents, he said. After eventually connecting with them they became involved in the process and gave Montgomery their blessing.
“A lot of people wondered whether I contacted George Denning’s family, his descendents, and what they thought about me doing the book. That’s of course a good question because I’m a white guy and I’m sort of stepping into a situation as an interloper into this man’s legacy,” Montgomery said. “Their family has been very involved and super supportive. I feel like I made new friends and that’s a pretty good feeling.”
The man who represented George Denning in court, as well as many other Black men and women during that time, was a former confederate war hero and a proud son of the south. His name was Bennett H. Young.
“He fought hard throughout the Civil War for (the) Confederacy and after the war did more than any man to promote the idea of southern chivalry, to promote and make and give life to the idea that the south was noble in its effort,” Montgomery said. “At the same time, this guy founded a Black orphanage, was friends to and with many Black men and women in and around Louisville, represented on a regular basis men and women like George Denning and who helped get access to the state and federal courts.”
Young’s legacy provides a unique and challenging perspective when facing current issues and topics, like the debate of whether the statues that memorialize confederates all over the south should or should not be taken down.
“As we talk about the future of them and if they have a place on the town square, this is the guy who raised the money for all of those statues. He leaves behind a complicated legacy that we are still dealing with,” Montgomery said. “How should we remember those men who in some cases gave their lives for this complicated cause that we’re still trying to interpret? Was it states rights, was it slavery? So I think people might find that part of the book interesting and I delve into all of those questions. This is ultimately a story that echoes what all happened in the 1890s, but these are the issues we are talking about today; it is an urgent book of history.”
Since the book’s launch on Jan. 26, Montgomery’s novel has received a great amount of support and reviews. “It became the number one bestseller on Amazon in history which means a lot and speaks to the numbers I guess, so I’m excited,” Montgomery said.
A Shot in the Moonlight is available anywhere that books are sold. To send book ideas or questions for Ben Montgomery, visit his website at Benmontgomerywrites.com.
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