Terror in the Night: The Klans Campaign Against the Jews
by Jack Nelson
Category: History

In 1966 the Ku Klux Klan launched a second front in the South, this one against Mississippi's small enclaves of Jews. Well assimilated within the white population, Jews had been diffident about voicing support of black civil rights. When violence erupted and Jewish voices began crying out for action, the Klan scapegoated Jews in a campaign of terror. Jack Nelson, himself a Mississippian and in the 1960s Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, had lost no time in coming home to write page-one reports on the civil rights struggle. In Terror in the Night he re-creates the chilling experiences of investigating the Klan's campaign against the Jews. He reports on the bombing of a Jackson synagogue, the dynamiting of a rabbi's house, and the Klan's marking select Mississippi Jews for execution. He reports how law enforcement's clandestine investigations, bankrolled by Mississippi Jews, helped bag the terrorists in a nearly disastrous shootout.