A former reporter for The Detroit News and Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a syndicated columnist for fourteen years, Mitch Margo is a native New Yorker and St. Louis trial lawyer. He’s witnessed the clash of cultures which are woven into his first novel, Black Hearts White Minds. Much of the story is drawn from his personal experiences, interviews, and hundreds of hours of research. He credits his eclectic law practice for a new storyline every few days.
One of Mitch’s defining moments came when a Herald Examiner editor assigned him to drive to San Fernando Valley so the paper could be the first to report a brushfire, should one start. Aware that San Fernando Valley spans 260 square miles, he interpreted the request as one to start a brushfire, so he drove to the Lakers game instead and applied to law school the next morning.
As general counsel to the Missouri Valley Conference, and a former youth coach, Mitch has an insider’s view of basketball that enables him to write about it authentically. He’s also a member of the Washington University Sports Hall of Fame, at one time holding the school record in just about every baseball statistic. He’s proud of his days as a student/athlete, but hasn’t lost sight of the fact that you can’t get too much farther from Cooperstown and still be in a hall of fame.
“A Carl Gordon Legal Thriller”
The year is 1964 and Carl Gordon is an ill-prepared New York Assistant U.S. Attorney who has lied his way into a transfer to Stockville, Alabama, where he is supposed to monitor and enforce the Civil Rights Act.
In a matter of days, the Ku Klux Klan takes aim at him, the outside agitator. Carl has agreed to represent Oleatha Geary, a black family matriarch who has inherited a mansion in an all-white, race-restricted neighborhood. Carl and Oleatha are engulfed in litigation that turns deadly. It’s anyone’s guess who will survive multiple assassination attempts, let alone whose integrity will remain intact.
AVAILABLE NOW!
Black Hearts White Minds
Press & Media
“The early sixties are often thought of as a time of lost innocence. Margo reminds us that the era was anything but innocent in the American south. His novel rings with authenticity and his characters’ struggles in the fictional town of Stockville, Alabama foretell the problems we still face today. Stockville is not really so far from Ferguson.”
– Bill McClellan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“As I read Black Hearts White Minds, I was reminded by turns of Harper Lee, Willie Morris, and John Grisham. Like Grisham, Mitch Margo is an attorney; like Morris, he’s a former journalist, and like Lee, his writing is evocative with a moral center straight and true. With our new president publicly insulting Civil Rights icon John Lewis and the new administration looking to reverse 50 years of progress, this Civil Rights era page-turner is a must read.”
-Richard H. Weiss,
Former Daily Features Editor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Black Hearts White Minds dives deep into the Civil Rights movement in the American South at a crucial time: 1964. But Mitch Margo sets his first novel in one Alabama town, allowing him to explore the era on a distinctly human scale through ordinary people and not so ordinary events. The result is a book that feels personal, rather than monumental. Margo, a seasoned lawyer who makes the law and lawyering an important but not overriding element of his story, has a knack for dramatic structure and a sharp eye for contrasting, engaging personalities. And his plot twists manage to be simultaneously startling and entirely credible, no mean feat.”
-Eric Mink, Writer, The Huffington Post
“While a work of fiction, Black Hearts White Minds transports readers to a time and place in American history, 1964 small-town Alabama, when the Civil Rights movement was slowly gaining traction, and segregationists, including the Ku Klux Klan, would stop at nothing to trounce the efforts of blacks and whites fighting for justice. Margo has crafted a narrative that is equal parts engrossing, heartbreaking and hopeful, populated with richly drawn, compelling characters, and an overarching essence that captures the enduring nature of the human spirit, no matter the obstacles.”
-Ellen Futterman, Editor, St. Louis Jewish Light
Photos of Mitch:
Endorsements
Blog
Seeing Issues in Black & White
Everyone is talking about the recent incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks that started with two black men asking to use the restroom and ended with the unwarranted arrest of those same men. Press play to…
In case you missed the live show, here is a playback of my interview on the Laura Coates Show. Click HERE
Journalist A.J. Liebling said in 1960, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Those words rang true then, and certainly today, as two recent events show how news organizations can…
There is a reason that companies have customer service phone numbers and complaint departments. Allowing consumers to vent their anger is instructive for the company and cathartic for the customer. I will admit right here…
The truly frightening aspect of the recently released Republican staff memo about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act subpoena is not whether it compromised the FBI or whether it exonerated President Trump or further ensnarled him…
“Finding another agent wasn’t as easy. Eventually, at a St. Louis Publishers Association event, he [Mitch] met Jo Lena Johnson, publisher of Mission Possible Press, a St. Louis-based publishing house. He approached her, and she…
