In April 1912 in Hampton, Virginia, white eighteen-year-old reporter Charles Mears covers his first murder case, a trial that roiled racial tensions. An uneducated African American girl, Virginia Christian, was tried for killing her white employer. «Virgie» died in the electric chair one day after her seventeenth birthday, the only female juvenile executed in Virginia history. Charlie tells the story of the trial and its aftermath. Woven into his narrative are actual court records, letters,...
