University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Eudora Welty explored the troubled mentality of Mississippi’s white segregationists when in 1963 she wrote a fictional New Yorker article from the viewpoint of the man who killed civil rights leader Medgar Evers. The assassin’s wife says to her husband as he returns from shooting the African American in the back: “Well, they been asking that—why somebody didn’t trouble to load a rifle and get some of these agitators out . . . Didn’t the fella keep drumming it in, what a good idea? The one that writes a column ever’ day?”