Her meticulous documentation of an egregious act brought tears to my eyes. , Karen Branan has succeeded stupendously in telling a story that needs to be told. What makes this 'past is not past' lesson so moving and admirable is the exacting reportorial clarity with which Branan approaches the confusion of race, sex, murder and myth in her southern bloodlines. The Family Tree is a story that needed to be told and to be shared., If you think Faulkner made it up, enlighten yourself by reading Karen Branan's nonfiction account of a lynching in the family. And the fruit her efforts bore is a bold, honest, and healing account of racial injustice, family, and personal growth. It will take her and many more of similar character to truly begin the healing of our country, which still believes it wears the white hat in the country's melodrama., Karen Branan didn't listen to the aunt who told her 'not to go shaking those family trees.' Shake them she did. I appreciate Karen Branan's courage and integrity. What emerges is a searing examination of the violence that occurred on that awful day in 1912-the echoes of which still resound today-and the knowledge that it is only through facing our ugliest truths that we can move forward to a place of understanding.
A gripping story of privilege and power, anger and atonement, The Family Tree transports readers to a small Southern town steeped in racial tension and bound by powerful family ties. Her research revealed surprising new insights into the day-to-day reality of race relations in the Jim Crow-era South, but what she ultimately discovered was far more personal. Branan spent nearly twenty years combing through diaries and letters, hunting for clues in libraries and archives throughout the United States and interviewing community elders to piece together the events and motives that led a group of people to murder four of their fellow citizens in such a brutal public display. For Karen Branan, the great-granddaughter of that sheriff, this isn't just history-this is family history.
Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men, all of them innocent. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman.
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