Description
In June 1870, two African American women kidnapped a toddler from in front of her New Orleans home. It was the height of Radical Reconstruction, and the old racial order had been turned upside down. Nervous white residents pointed to the Digby abduction as proof that no white child was safe. Louisiana’s twenty-eight-year old Reconstruction governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, hoping to use the investigation of the kidnapping to validate his newly integrated police force, saw to it that the city’s best Afro-Creole detective, John Baptiste Jourdain, was put on the case. Join University of Maryland History Professor Michael Ross as he recreates the investigation and trial that electrified the South at one of the most critical moments in the history of American race relations.