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  • Deep Delta Justice

  • A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South
  • Written by: Matthew Van Meter
  • Narrated by: Brad Sanders
  • Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)

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Deep Delta Justice

Written by: Matthew Van Meter
Narrated by: Brad Sanders
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Publisher's Summary

Finalist for 2021 Audie Award in History/Biography

The book that inspired the documentary A Crime on the Bayou

A 2021 Chautauqua Prize finalist

The "[A]rresting, astonishing history" of one lawyer and his defendant who together achieved a "[C]ivil rights milestone" (Justin Driver).

In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old Black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a White child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only White attorney at "the most radical law firm" in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful white supremacists in the South, a man called simply "The Judge". In this powerful work of character-driven history, journalist Matthew Van Meter vividly brings alive how a seemingly minor incident brought massive, systemic change to the criminal justice system. Using first-person interviews, in-depth research, and a deep knowledge of the law, Van Meter shows how Gary Duncan's insistence on seeking justice empowered generations of defendants - disproportionately poor and Black - to demand fair trials. Duncan v. Louisiana changed American law, but first it changed the lives of those who litigated it.

©2020 Matthew Van Meter (P)2020 Hachette Audio

What the critics say

"An examination of a 1966 racial confrontation and its aftermath, which 'would help dismantle the infrastructure of white supremacy that had strangled [a rural Louisiana] community for centuries'.... Will appeal to admirers of Bryan Stevenson.... Timely reading." (Kirkus)

"In his vivid new book Matthew Van Meter takes us into the world of injustice Jim Crow created, where the smallest of touches could destroy a man's life. From that darkness he draws an absorbing story of courage, resistance, and the promise of profound change. Read Deep Delta Justice for the history it recovers - and the hope it holds for our own dark time." (Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age)

"In the spirit of Melissa Fay Greene's classic Praying For Sheetrock, Matthew Van Meter takes readers to one of the most indelible yet obscure battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement and shows how grassroots heroism can topple even one of segregation's most fearsome tyrants." (Samuel G. Freedman, Columbia University professor of journalism, author of Breaking the Line)

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