Lynching in America A History in Documents

Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Hollidays haunting song “Strange Fruit,” lynching has immediate and graphic connotations for all who hear the word. Images of lynching are generally unambiguous: black victims hanging from trees, often surrounded by gawking white mobs. While this picture of lynching tells a distressingly familiar story about mob violence in America, it is not the full story. Lynching in America presents the most comprehensive portrait of lynching to date, demonstrating that while lynching has always been present in American society, it has been anything but one-dimensional.

Ranging from personal correspondence to courtroom transcripts to journalistic accounts, Christopher Waldrep has extensively mined an enormous quantity of documents about lynching, which he arranges chronologically with concise introductions. He reveals that lynching has been part of American history since the Revolution, but its victims, perpetrators, causes, and environments have changed over time. From the American Revolution to the expansion of the western frontier, Waldrep shows how communities defended lynching as a way to maintain law and order. Slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction marked the ascendancy of racialized lynching in the nineteenth century, which has continued to the present day, with the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomass contention that he was lynched by Congress at his confirmation hearings.

Since its founding, lynching has permeated American social, political, and cultural life, and no other book documents American lynching with historical texts offering firsthand accounts of lynchings, explanations, excuses, and criticism.

“Christopher Waldrep’s volume should quickly become one of a handful of standard reference works on the subject of lynching. His knowledge of the literature on lynching is masterful and far ranging. Lynching in America is an important book.”

“An exemplar documentary history....While lynching might seem to be a tarnished relic of an unfortunate earlier part of history, Waldreps sobering texts remind us of the timelessness of unrestrained power of community-based extra-legal violence.”

“A distinct work.”

“;Christopher Waldrep has examined in depth a history we prefer to ignore-a not so distant time when Americans descended into vigilante justice and public displays of ritualistic murder, often targeting people of color. The testimony gathered for this collection is a sobering reminder that terrorism has deep roots in our own soil, that it is part of our history, part of our heritage.”

“;Christopher Waldrep’s heart-wrenching but compelling documentary collection on American lynching traditions could not appear at a more fitting time. In Waldrep’s carefully selected documents, we are forced to confront the grim record of American racial violence. The testimony given by blacks themselves in public hearings and in African-American newspapers proves to be especially dramatic and horrifying. Lynching in America should be read not just by historians, who so long neglected the topic. Rather, all those concerned to promote our better natures could benefit from pondering these past atrocities so skillfully laid before us.”

Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Holliday's haunting song Strange Fruit, lynching has immediate and graphic connotations for all who hear the word. Images of lynching are generally unambiguous: black victims hanging from trees, often surrounded by gawking white mobs. While this picture of lynching tells a distressingly familiar story about mob violence in America, it is not the full story. Lynching in America presents the most comprehensive portrait of lynching to date, demonstrating that while lynching has always been present in American society, it has been anything but one-dimensional.

Ranging from personal correspondence to courtroom transcripts to journalistic accounts, Christopher Waldrep has extensively mined an enormous quantity of documents about lynching, which he arranges chronologically with concise introductions. He reveals that lynching has been part of American history since the Revolution, but its victims, perpetrators, causes, and environments have changed over time. From the American Revolution to the expansion of the western frontier, Waldrep shows how communities defended lynching as a way to maintain law and order. Slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction marked the ascendancy of racialized lynching in the nineteenth century, which has continued to the present day, with the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's contention that he was lynched by Congress at his confirmation hearings.

Since its founding, lynching has permeated American social, political, and cultural life, and no other book documents American lynching with historical texts offering firsthand accounts of lynchings, explanations, excuses, and criticism.

“Past Imperfect is a forthright and uncommonly damning study of those intellectually volatile years [1944-1956]. Mr. Judt...does more than simply describe the ideological acrobats of his subjects; he is a sharp, even a vindictive moralist who indicts these intellectuals for their inhumanity in failing to test their political thought against political reality.”

-John Sturrock, New York Times Book Review

Christopher Waldrep is Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History, San Francisco State University. He is the author of Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch: 1890-1915, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-1880, and The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America.