‘There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas’: A Q&A with writer Scott W. Stern

‘There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas’: A Q&A with writer Scott W. Stern

Oakland, California-based scholar and attorney Scott W. Stern’s book, “There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou,” was published in January by Yale University Press. The book intertwines, in thematic rather than chronological fashion, two rape trials that occurred in Mississippi County alongside a recounting of the life of Maya Angelou, who …