Death at Cross Plains follows the tragic life and career of William Luke, a white Canadian minister who became a teacher at the HBCU Talladega College in 1869. Later taking the position of schoolteacher to Black railroad workers near Talladega, Luke became caught up in a web of racial antagonisms, xenophobia, and partisan conflict rampant that characterized the Reconstruction-era South. 
 
Reconstruction in the South is a much studied and yet little understood period in the region’s history. In many areas it was marked by such violence as to have been guerrilla warfare in all but name. Death at Cross Plains is the gripping story of one local incident that illuminates the aftermath of the Civil War throughout the region. 
 

Gene L. Howard is also the author of Patterson for Alabama: The Life and Career of John Patterson, History of Rubber Workers: Gadsden, Alabama, and Pleasant Gap: A Place, An Experience. His work also includes the PBS docudrama, "Wayfaring Stranger."

​"The publisher should be congratulated for making available the account of this sad and tragic episode that occurred in Alabama during July, 1870." —Choice

"This is an admirable study, one that should encourage other popular historians to explore the extraordinary human drama of the Reconstruction era." —Florida Historical Quarterly— -

"This meticulously researched account demonstrates anew the richness of untapped local sources in revealing the texture and meaning of Reconstruction for both white and black Southerners." —Journal of Southern History

"This book gives a view of Reconstruction life, and death, in microcosm. . . . Readers of all persuasions will appreciate this new light on the Cross Plains atrocity." —American Historical Review

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