On July 9, 1883, twenty men stormed the jail in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, kidnapped Henderson Lee, a black man charged with larceny, and hanged him. Events like this occurred thousands of times across the American South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet we know scarcely more about any of these other victims than we do about Henderson Lee. Drawing on new sources to provide the most comprehensive portrait of the men and women lynched in the American South, Amy Bailey and Stewart Tolnay's revealing profiles and careful analysis begin to restore the identities of--and lend dignity to--hundreds of lynching victims about whom we have known little more than their names and alleged offenses. Comparing victims' characteristics to those of African American men who were not lynched, Bailey and Tolnay identify the factors that made them more vulnerable to being targeted by mobs, including how old they were; what work they did; their marital status, place of birth, and literacy; and whether they lived in the margins of their communities or possessed higher social status. Assessing these factors in the context of current scholarship on mob violence and reports on the little-studied women and white men who were murdered in similar circumstances, this monumental work brings unprecedented clarity to our understanding of lynching and its victims.

Lynched chronicles the history and aftermath of lynching in America. By rooting her work in oral histories, Angela D. Sims gives voice to the memories of African American elders who remember lynching not only as individual acts but as a culture of violence, domination, and fear. Lynched preserves memory even while it provides an analysis of the meaning of those memories. Sims examines the relationship between lynching and the interconnected realities of race, gender, class, and other social fragmentations that ultimately shape a person's--and a community's--religious self-understanding. Through this understanding, she explores how the narrators reconcile their personal and communal memory of lynching with their lived Christian experience. Moreover, Sims unearths the community's truth that this is sometimes a story of words and at other times a story of silence. Revealing the bond between memory and moral formation, Sims discovers the courage and hope inherent in the power of recall. By tending to the words of these witnesses, Lynched exposes not only a culture of fear and violence but the practice of story and memory, as well as the narrative of hope within a renewed possibility for justice.

Gruesome photographs document the victims of lynchings and the society that allowed mob violence.

This visual and textual study of lynchings that took place in California between 1850 and 1935 shows that race-based lynching in the United States reached far beyond the South.

The Penalty For Success: My Father Was Lynched In Lowndes County Alabama tells the story of the murder of a black man in 1940s Lowndes County, Alabama. It is a story that changes the traditional definition of "lynching" in America. Until recent years, a lynching was associated with murder by hanging, usually in the presence of a mob of people. Sometimes it also included severe mutilation and burning of the body. Josephine Bolling McCall's story of her father's murder presents convincing evidence that he was lynched, although he was not hanged, mutilated, or burned before a crowd of people. Elmore Bolling was shot six times in the front of his body with a pistol and once in the back with a shotgun. The presumption is that two shooters were involved. In exploring the events in her father's life, Jo McCall demonstrates that, not only was he lynched, but he was murdered simply because he was too prosperous to be a black man in rural Lowndes County, Alabama.In recounting her father's story, Mrs. McCall explores her ancestral roots, dating back to the pre-civil war era, and the evolution of her family to a status of entrepreneurs during the 1940s in the heart of the Alabama Black Belt. She places her narrative in the historical context of the Lowndes County she knew as a child and had to, in her words, "escape from" with her mother and siblings in order to save their lives. Through years of research, including interviews with relatives and elderly Lowndes County residents, Mrs. Bolling sought and found answers to many troubling questions that she had about her family, especially about events in her father's life. Her journey of discovery presents a revealing narrative of a time, a place, and a people that challenges us to rethink the reality of life for both blacks and whites in a rural, southern community.

This book deals with the quest for a preventive to lynching which can be undertaken only after one has an understanding of what it is that is to be prevented. This necessary analysis of lynching--its background, circumstances, and meaning--introduces many baffling elements. The author has made a detailed study of the lynchings of 1930 in an effort to find an answer to the complexities of the problem. Originally published in 1933. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The hidden past of racial violence is illuminated in this skillfully selected compendium of articles from a wide range of papers large and small, radical and conservative, black and white. Through these pieces, readers witness a history of racial atrocities and are provided with a sobering view of American history.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens. The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00. An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel.

Winner of the 2020 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award While victims of antebellum lynchings were typically white men, postbellum lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more often black. After Reconstruction, lynchings exhibited and embodied links between violent collective action, American civic identity, and the making of the nation. Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community. Grounded in Ida B. Wells’s summation of lynching as a social contract among whites to maintain a racial order, at its core, Ore’s book speaks to racialized violence as a mode of civic engagement. Since violence enacts an argument about citizenship, Ore construes lynching and its expressions as part and parcel of America’s rhetorical tradition and political legacy. Drawing upon newspapers, official records, and memoirs, as well as critical race theory, Ore outlines the connections between what was said and written, the material practices of lynching in the past, and the forms these rhetorics and practices assume now. In doing so, she demonstrates how lynching functioned as a strategy interwoven with the formation of America’s national identity and with the nation’s need to continually restrict and redefine that identity. In addition, Ore ties black resistance to lynching, the acclaimed exhibit Without Sanctuary, recent police brutality, effigies of Barack Obama, and the killing of Trayvon Martin.

In the tradition of Melissa Faye Greene and her award-winning Praying for Sheetrock, extraordinarily talented debut author Laura Wexler tells the story of the Moore's Ford Lynching in Walton County, Georgia in 1946—the last mass lynching in America, fully explored here for the first time. July 25, 1946. In Walton County, Georgia, a mob of white men commit one of the most heinous racial crimes in America's history: the shotgun murder of four black sharecroppers—two men and two women—at Moore's Ford Bridge. Fire in a Canebrake, the term locals used to describe the sound of the fatal gunshots, is the story of our nation's last mass lynching on record. More than a half century later, the lynchers' identities still remain unknown. Drawing from interviews, archival sources, and uncensored FBI reports, acclaimed journalist and author Laura Wexler takes readers deep into the heart of Walton County, bringing to life the characters who inhabited that infamous landscape—from sheriffs to white supremacists to the victims themselves—including a white man who claims to have been a secret witness to the crime. By turns a powerful historical document, a murder mystery, and a cautionary tale, Fire in a Canebrake ignites a powerful contemplation on race, humanity, history, and the epic struggle for truth.