At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
By:
Philip Dray
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Description:
It is easy to shrink from our country’s brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation’s closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep scars to this day. The cost of pushing lynching into the shadows, however—misremembering it as isolated acts perpetrated by bigots on society’s fringes—is insupportably high: Until we understand how pervasive and socially accepted the practice was—and, more important, why this was so—it will haunt all efforts at racial reconciliation.
“I could not suppress the thought,” James Baldwin once recalled of seeing the red clay hills of Georgia on his first trip to the South, “that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.” Throughout America, not just in the South, blacks accused of a crime—or merely of violating social or racial customs—were hunted by mobs, abducted from jails, and given summary “justice” in blatant defiance of all guarantees of due process under law. Men and women were shot, hanged, tortured, and burned, often in sadistic, picnic-like “spectacle lynchings” involving thousands of witnesses. “At the hands of persons unknown” was the official verdict rendered on most of these atrocities.
The celebrated historian Philip Dray shines a clear, bright light on this dark history—its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. He also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois. If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the love of justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual’s sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history—and makes the history of lynching belong to us all.
Description:
Lynching, the extrajudicial punishment inflicted by vigilantes and mobs on often innocent victims, was far from an unusual occurrence, though some historians have depicted it as such. Instead, writes Philip Dray, lynching was part of a "systematized reign of terror that was used to maintain the power whites had over blacks." Drawing on records held at the Tuskegee Institute, Dray argues that from 1882 until 1952, not a single year passed without a recorded lynching somewhere in the United States, most often in the Deep South and Mississippi Delta regions. This violent "justice," meted out "at the hands of persons unknown" (with, therefore, no possibility of attaching guilt to the perpetrators, though, as Dray points out, such seemingly spontaneous events required organization and planning) held African American communities in terror and was one force behind the exodus of black southerners to the north in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dray's extraordinary study reveals a pattern of crime against humanity, one that, he writes, diminished gradually for various reasons, not least of them the work of reformers and ordinary citizens "who knew we were too good to be a nation of lynchers." --Gregory McNamee
Publisher: Random House
Release Date: 2002-01-08
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Incredible Work - This is what history is all about. I have read few history books as good as this one. It's readable, it's complete, it's unbiased, it sheds light on a previously hidden topic, it moves you in ways you would never have imagined. It seems funny to say about a 500+-page book on such a horrible subject, but it was a real page-turner, a book you simply couldn't put down.
The real strength of this book is in simply uncovering what happened. The scope and the enormity of the crime is really overwhelming, and Dray gets this across in a masterful way. His accomplishment is in treating each lynching individually, in all its horror, but also in tying the individual lynchings together in a real narrative.
And that narrative can be surprisingly positive, provided primarily by the people and organizations - Ida Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, the NAACP, Clarence Darrow, et al - who brought light to the topic and shame to the nation that would tolerate something like this.
You will learn a lot reading this book. Did you know, for example, that lynchings were more likely to involve immolation, that descration of the corpse was the primary goal, that all of this took place in a picnic-like atmosphere, that they were advertised beforehand, that souvenirs and postcards were all part of the deal? Did you know that only 7 states did not have lynchings, that they occured in places like Minnesota and Pennsylvania, that plenty of whites and Latinos and Asians were lynched too?
It makes you really wonder about this country. As one of the victims of the Peekskill riots in NY said: "As the stones kept coming, all I could of think of was: This is not America. This is Nazi Germany. I don't want to live like this." It makes you understand why WEB DuBois simply gave up and emigrated to Ghana, where he died and is buried.
I had only two beefs with the book. One was the role the author accorded two white, Southern-based organizations - the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. I simply did not see them playing that big of a role. It reminded a little of the movies with a non-white cast but a white hero or "interpreter" (Dances with Wolves comes immediately to mind).
The other is that the book touches on, but doesn't really discuss, what's behind all this. The behavior seems so extreme (I liken it to a sadistic serial killer) that it begs some deep psychological explanation - i.e., how can human beings act like that? But I guess that's another book. I'd love to hear from anyone who's read something covering that topic.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Very good reading - This is a very informative book. It certainly shed light on a shameful slice of American history.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A Very Difficult Book To Read But Essential! - This is history book in the purest sense of what a history book should be yet this book is much more than a history of American Violence against African Americans, it's a history of how civilization can be repressive and savage despite it's seemingly enlightened ideology. Philip Dray doesn't hold back in painful details of lynching, the dynamics and psychology behind the mob mentality, and how people actively seek to uphold an illusion of law and order from the bigoted vigilantes to the unsympathetic courts. Collectively we have tried and still continue to try to supress the history of slavery and the bloody history subsequent racial violence. This book needs to be required reading in our schools as a counter to other so-called history texts admonishing certain fathers of the nation.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
One word - outstanding. - Quite possibly the best, most well-researched book I've ever read. A smooth read, impeccable use of historical sources, and a clear narrative account of the most tragic era in American history. For scholars who research or teach in the area of social control, legal, and extra-legal punishment, you *cannot* have a full grasp of the topic unless you read Dray's work. A fine work of history...the author is to be commended.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Very informative - This book was not only shipped within 2 days but in new condition. The book itself is very informative about other things than lynching. It talks about various people related to the anti-lynching movement tons of other things. I'm currently using this as a text book for a college class. This is a great teaching resource! Buy the book, you won't forget it!
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