At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library Paperbacks)

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 sufferers 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, then again—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 is going to haunt all efforts at racial reconciliation.

“I could not suppress the thought,” James 1st earl baldwin of bewdley once recalled of seeing the red clay hills of Georgia on his first commute to the South, “that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.” All through 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, steadily 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 sufferers. 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.

From the Hardcover edition.
Lynching, the extrajudicial punishment inflicted by vigilantes and mobs on steadily innocent sufferers, was far from an strange 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 steadily 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 in the back of the exodus of black southerners to the north in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dray’s ordinary study reveals a pattern of crime against humanity, one that, he writes, diminished gradually for quite a lot of reasons, not least of them the work of reformers and peculiar citizens “who knew we were too good to be a nation of lynchers.” –Gregory McNamee
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 sufferers 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, then again—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 is going to haunt all efforts at racial reconciliation.

“I could not suppress the thought,” James 1st earl baldwin of bewdley once recalled of seeing the red clay hills of Georgia on his first commute to the South, “that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees.” All through 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, steadily 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 sufferers. 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.

From the Hardcover edition.