George Crowder's Reviews > At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

If American history classes used texts such as this to address our country's tortured past, not only would there be fewer bored students, but we might not be living in a national state of denial. I've read many outstanding contributions to the literature lately: Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told; Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name; Isabelle Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns; Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow; Chris Hayes's A Colony in a Nation; David Oshinsky's Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice; Jason Morgan Ward's Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century. All outstanding, but this book was the most affecting of all.

Like most people, I arrived at a self-definition of "lynching" as "hanging," probably from watching horse thieves get strung up in western movies. While that occurred, the ghoulish executions, primarily of African Americans, were more horrific by many orders of magnitude. Featuring extensive mutilation, slow-roasting to death over bonfires, and the taking of souvenir body parts and photographs, these lynchings were attended by crowds that could number into the thousands, and occurred frequently over a lengthy historical period. Mr. Dray describes a number of these atrocities in nightmarish detail, along with the newspaper coverage which deliberately aroused the bloodlust of mobs predisposed to believe the worst of black men. The self-congratulatory statements upon conclusion of the execution, particularly regarding exemplary displays of "lynchcraft," are equally chilling.

The rhetoric and actions of our current administration make this topic far too relevant. While the methods of most modern lynchers are more sophisticated and subtle, the ability of politicians to play upon voters' fears and prejudices by scapegoating racial, religious, and ethnic groups is alive and well in the United States.