When Evil Lived in Laurel
When Evil Lived in Laurel opens with a disturbing recollection. Tom Landrum, a high school senior, witnesses the execution of a Black man for a crime he probably didn’t commit. It’s Laurel, Miss., 1951, and local residents who didn’t gather outside the courthouse to cheer his death could follow the execution live on radio.
By his own account, Landrum was sickened and vowed to never participate in something like that again. Ten years later he made a dangerous decision. He joined the Ku Klux Klan—as an informer for the FBI.
The backdrop has been told in detail elsewhere. Northern activists were registering Black voters in Southern states, school desegregation had begun, the Klan responded with arson and murder and the FBI intervened. Director J. Edgar Hoover was no friend of civil rights but was opposed the far right and pressure was mounting in Washington for him to act.
The Boston Globe’s Curtis Wilkie covered civil rights in the South as a young reporter and assembles When Evil Lived in Laurel by interviewing Landrum, reading his journals and declassified FBI files and his own reporting. The book leaves an unpleasant aftertaste from its hateful, ignorant subjects as it reconstructs the conversations Landrum heard around him. Justice was often delayed for the perpetrators of Klan violence in Laurel, Miss. yet for many of the guilty parties, justice finally arrived.
