"Beyond the Green Widow" Author Juanita Green Hollinghead on the Sunbury Press Books Show Artwork

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"Beyond the Green Widow" Author Juanita Green Hollinghead on the Sunbury Press Books Show

April 01, 2025

Prohibition was referred to as, "the great social and economic experiment," by former President Herbert Hoover, but the 20th-century temperance movement did not stop people from consuming alcohol or manufacturing it. In much of the US, the making of home-brewed "moonshine" was an industry, and often was the difference between putting food on families' tables, or going hungry.

One such place was Mississippi, where an April 1, 1921 shootout saw two law enforcement officers ambushed and killed while they worked to shut down a still. The murders of Richton Town Marshall Lawrence Dunnam and US Treasury Special Agent Jacob "Jake" Green of Leakesville, and what happened fell to Green's granddaughter, Juanita Green Hollinghead.

Spanning four decades of research, interviews with family and those in the know, plus old family documents, Hollinghead tells of her grandmother's unwillingness to speak of the incident, and what happened to the killers of her grandfather and Dunnam. Hollinghead also examines family dynamics through her own experiences and paints an intimate, detailed portrait of that time and its place in history.

A longtime educator, Juanita Green Hollinghead has teamed with author Sherye S. Green to bring "Beyond the Green Widow" to Sunbury Press Books. She lives in Leakesville, Mississippi.