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Underwood, James Lowell. Deadly Censorship: Murder, Honor & Freedom of the Press. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013. xiii + 308 pages. Hardcover, $39.95.
Speaking of the infamous killing of progressive journalist Narciso Gener Gonzalez in 1903, legal scholar James Lowell Underwood opens his history of the crime with a calibrated statement: "This killing initially gained notoriety because it took place in broad daylight in the shadow of the State House, on the busiest comer of the capital city, and the victim was an unarmed journalist of national reputation" (p. ix). He notes also that the shooter was none other than James Hammond Tillman, Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina who had only moments before closed the day's sessions of the State Senate over which he presided. Yet even the sensational aspects of the murder trial are secondary to the question that frames this painstakingly developed study: "[H]ow did freedom of the press, not James H. Tillman, become the real, though not the legal, defendant in the case?" (p. x).
Working both as a jurist thoroughly familiar with the law and as a South Carolinian well versed in the state's unique history, Underwood examines newspaper reports of the trial and the transcript records and other accounts of things that "made their way over the transom"...