At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America

by Philip Dray

Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

This extraordinary account of lynching in America, by acclaimed civil rights historian Philip Dray, shines a clear, bright light on American history’s darkest stain—illuminating its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. Philip Dray 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 commitment to 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 lynching’s legacy belong to us all.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, American History, African American, Politics, True Crime

560 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2003

About the author

Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award.

Lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes

1. What a book! Absolutely traumatizing. I have found myself periodically gasping and sighing as I read. There's a long passage about the work of Ida B. Wells, the journalist primarily responsible for revealing the truth of lynching to the world. We follow her from her early years as a journalist to her British speaking tours where she brilliantly turned British sentiment against southern US industry and business, which tolerated lynching. This incited a number of governors of southern states to lie through their teeth. To wit:

"Missouri governor W. J. Stone publicly denounced Wells for stirring up trouble abroad and trying 'to keep capital and emigration [sic] from this section of our Republic.' He also insisted that 'Memphis is too high in the scale of civilization to be guilty of the crimes alleged by Miss Wells.' [Lord!] The governor of Georgia, W. J. Northen, accused Wells in a letter to The London Chronicle of being allied with a group of Northern investors who wished to steer immigrants away from the Deep South, and of lying about the extent of lynchings there. But Northen's protest was undermined three days later when a cable brought news to Britain of a lynching in the governor's own state in which the victim had been skinned alive. South Carolina's governor, 'Pitchfork' Ben Tillman, meanwhile, defended lynching itself, reminding his constituents that he 'would lead a mob to lynch any man, white or black, who had ravished any woman, white or black.'

"When the Anti-Lynching Committee sent an open letter to American journalists about the need for greater U.S. press inquiry into lynching, a heated response was forthcoming from J. W. Jacks, head of the Missouri Press Association: 'The Negroes in this country are wholly devoid of morality. . . They consider it no disgrace but rather an honor to be sent to prison and to wear striped clothes. The women are prostitutes and all are natural liars and thieves. ... Out of 200 in this vicinity it is doubtful if there are a dozen virtuous women of that number who are not daily thieving from the white people.'" (p. 104)

Sound familiar?

2. I had a mini epiphany on reading the first half of the book. The writer draws a line from vigilantism during the Revolutionary War to the Ku Klux Klan and lynching generally.

I was thinking about the recent penchant for US conservatives to paint Democrats as pedophiles. This is exactly what the southern lynchers sought to do with black men of the time by calling them rapists, and thus justifying their violence. (Meanwhile the white masters were too often found in the cabins of "their" black women.)

It's the same tactic now only the affected group is much larger, i.e. Democrats. Like the blacks who were accused of raping white women in lynching times — in the rare case where a sexual relationship did exist it was usually consensual — so the idea of grooming and pedophilia is now being applied to the current "enemy": liberals, Democrats, etc.

Now, why do I equate the two cultures so separated in time? Because they are both based in hatred and irrational claims. That is, accusation unfettered by evidence or logic, utter baselessness.

3. I am discovering a theme running through the book; that of the disenfranchisement of black and brown people in every walk of life: professional, social, and civil, especially when it came to voting. Check out this quotation from p. 122.

"As one letter to the editor in a Wilmington paper vowed in the run-up to the November 1898 gubernatorial election, 'North Carolina is a white man's state and white men will rule it, and they will crush the party of negro domination beneath a majority so overwhelming that no other party will ever again dare attempt to establish negro rule here.' The ensuing campaign would become one of the low points in the history of American electoral politics — a coup, for all intents and purposes, in which anti-democratic forces used violence and intimidation to influence an election and to remove legitimate officeholders."

Sound familiar?

There's a voting rights website called Democracy Docket. There you can read up on how black and brown people are today being disenfranchised of their vote by conservative Republicans. This as a result of the Supreme Court's recent finding that aspects of the Voting Rights Act—especially federal oversight of elections—are in our apparently enlightened times no longer necessary.

4. Lynching had always ostensibly been an act of preserving the white woman's virtue from "black monsters." Then after decades of lynching — starting during Reconstruction and lasting into the 1930s — an important alliance was made. It's a wonder it didn't happen sooner. That is, the alliance between black and white women. This is a wonderful and moving development to read about. It empowered white women with the guidance of their black peers to create the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

"'The [white] women,' as Southern author Lillian Smith later remembered appreciatively, 'went forth to commit treason against a Southern tradition set up by men which had betrayed their mothers, sometimes themselves, and many of the South's children, white and mixed, for three long centuries. It was truly a subversive affair. . . The lady insurrectionists... said calmly that they were not afraid of being raped, as for their sacredness, they could take care of it themselves; they did not need the chivalry of a lynching to protect them and did not want it.'

"'They had more power than they knew,' Smith wrote. 'They had the power of spiritual blackmail over a large part of the white South.'

"Within months of its founding it was evident the group's program had hit a nerve. When Senator Cole Blease of South Carolina roared to his followers, 'Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution,' the ASWPL's Kate Davis fired back: 'Hundreds of thousands of white women in the South feel that the law... is their honorable protection and avenger. The women of the South are not afraid to stand by the Constitution.' A newspaper in Georgia averred that the coming of the ASWPL meant that 'rope-and-faggot courtesy' from men was no longer welcome, while a reporter for a Mississippi journal, taking note of the ASWPL's chastisement of Cole Blease, observed that the day had come when white women would not allow lynchers to 'hide behind their skirts.'" (p. 330)

5. Here, a little simplified, I admit, is the upshot of much of the book. It seems white women could not keep their hands off the south's black men. This was not always the case. There were genuine rapes and assaults, and other crimes like disputes over wages in which the rape charge was simply tacked on. In any case it was the anti-lynching activists desire to get the accused into court where he could receive due process, instead of immolated or shot or hung on fallacious pretenses. There are numerous stories here of consensual sex between black men and white women. So this is at least in part why the white mobs lynched nearly 4,000 black men over seventy years or so. The whites were so caught up with this idea of the virtue of "their" women. Well, human beings will desire other human beings regardless of race. We see that fact borne out every day ourselves and know its inherent truth.

"One of [Willie] McGee's best advocates proved to be his wife, Rosalee. She believed that Willie had tried to break off with Mrs. Hawkins, but that the white woman had blackmailed him by threatening to report him, knowing full well what consequences would result. According to Rosalee, McGee had met Mrs. Hawkins when he and her husband had worked together at the Masonite Corporation in Laurel in the 1930s. Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins had hired him to do odd jobs around the house and in their yard. The clandestine relationship had begun in 1942, as he explained:

"'I became well acquainted with Mrs. Troy Hawkins and one day after I worked there on and off for about a year I was waxing floors with her in the house and she showed a willingness to be familiar and let me have intercourse with her in the back room. After that she frequently sent for me to do work which gave opportunities for intercourse which she accepted, and on occasions after dark she took me in her automobile out to a place near the graveyard where we had intercourse.'

"After their first sexual encounter, Mrs. Hawkins would visit McGee at a gas station where he worked and once left him a note stuck into the nozzle of a gas hose. She would also come to the McGees' house and inquire for him. Rosalee became suspicious after an incident in which Mrs Hawkins drove up when they were walking home from a movie theater and attempted to coax him to go off with her in the car.

"'So all of a sudden Mrs. Hawkins come out of an alley and she says to Willie, "I got my car over here. Come on into my car with me." I got so mad I said, "What's that!" And I started to pull him away. And Willie himself he told her, "Go away. This is my wife. I'm with my wife." So she says to Willie out loud, "Don't fool with no Negro whores."'" (p. 399)

6. "Although black Americans constitute 12 percent of the overall population, they make up half the country's prison population; and for every one black American who graduates from college, one hundred are arrested. A comprehensive review conducted in 2000 of the federal death penalty since its 1988 reinstatement found that 50 percent of those slated for execution were black, and that another 25 percent represented other racial or ethnic minorities." (p. 459)

And this isn't the half of it. The book is an astounding document. Read it, please.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere near the end of Koba the Dread, his account of readerly adventures in the Stalin demonology, Martin Amis weighs Hitler and Stalin. He concludes that because racism is the purest product of our unreflecting reptilian brain, a racist ideology must represent the worst brand of the political violence our species finds so instrumental (Baudelaire was not overstating things when he equated cosmopolitanism with a “divine grace”). Along with Nazi Germany, we should look to the American South (although Dray's scope is not limited the south) for an instructive picture of a society whose moral awareness was put to sleep, and its potential for savagery licensed, by the division of humans into superior and inferior racial castes, the inferior one being a group whose members could be killed with impunity.

This is very much a book about slavery, specifically the drawn out volatile decadence of the society slavery made, of the racial caste hierarchy that chattel slavery wove into the psyche of southerners. If Nazism was a burst of gangrenous, putrescent gas from the German nationalism mortally wounded in 1918, then lynching shows southern white supremacy—-the ethos of slavery—-in its weakened, desperate, rearguard lashing-out at the once enslaved but now liberated and theoretically dangerous blacks. Dray quotes James Weldon Johnson, the writer, NAACP chair and a near lynching victim himself (on a Jacksonville, Florida streetcar in 1901, Johnson’s light-skinned black female companion was mistaken for a white woman by the conductor, whose alarms instantly formed a mob that almost hanged Johnson in a nearby park) to the effect that lynching was an expression of the same “evil” that fed slavery. And the widespread rape of black females by white men during slavery is no more apparent, Dray writes, than in the nightmares white men entertained of vengeful black men eager to rape white women, a specter always raised in justification of lynching. Such a justification is bullshit but that doesn’t mean it isn’t revealing: white male awareness of their sexual exploitation of black women during slavery and after made it quite natural they would fear payback in kind. Brutal people project their brutality on to others.

Dray classifies the various species of “lynchcraft.” 1.) The targeted, assassination-like killing of blacks by night-riding Klansmen careful to remain anonymous and secretive during Reconstruction, while Federal forces still occupied the south. 2.) The brazen, broad-daylight immolation, the so-called “spectacle lynching,” its heyday between 1890 and the early 1930s, that drew hundreds, even thousands of festive picnic-goers, from all corners of a state and even from out of state, to watch a black man be ritually mutilated and burned at the stake. Lucky spectators could come away from the barbeque with a bodily souvenir (toes, fingers, ears, knuckles, though the victim’s penis was the great prize, and drunk white men often brawled in the dirt for possession of it), or at the very least with a picture post-card of charred remains. 3.) The community lynching, a pogrom really, wherein rioting whites in northern and southern cities ran amok in black districts, burning and looting shops, shooting and beating any blacks of any age--toddlers, the elderly--they happened to encounter. Many such instances were the result of economic competition; others, because lynch mobs that couldn’t get a hold of a fugitive or securely jailed suspect had to make do with terrorizing the nearby black community. 4.) The “legal lynching” in which a court would conduct a speedy and sloppy “trial” with an armed mob gathered inside and outside the county courthouse, threatening judge and jury with harm if they found the defendant not guilty. 5.) The “underground lynching” of the 1940s-1960s, in which southern terrorists, mindful of mainstream America’s abhorrence and the federal government’s increasing activism, resorted to a Reconstruction-era style of nocturnal abduction after which the perpetrators strove to conceal the body and remain themselves anonymous. In many incidences of lynching, the styles of lynchcraft overlapped, and the cause of death of all lynching victims was recorded by coroners with the phrase “Death at the hands of persons unknown.”

The system’s coarsening of southern whites extended beyond their brutality to blacks, it numbed the sense of their own interests as well. The lurid Manichean mythology of an embattled common whiteness held poor whites hostage, made them reluctant to see that their interests were not always interchangeable with those of wealthy whites. I’ve always been fascinated by this overriding solidarity of whiteness, its power to obscure seeemingly unmissable social facts, and the spectacle of poor whites who didn’t own slaves fighting in the Civil War to maintain an economic order that reduced many of them to subsistence farming (this was obvious to even the dullest northern prole by 1861). Dray makes me want to read more about labor relations in the postwar South. Many of the urban race riots Dray discusses, like the St. Louis pogrom of 1917, have their roots in white anger over the influx of cheap and therefore competitive black labor and the use of blacks as strikebreakers; and lynchings of individuals often had the (intended?) result of scaring north most of a county’s black population and thus depleting the local pool of cheap agricultural labor, much to the annoyance of landowners, many of whom deplored lynching when it hurt their pocketbooks. I’m curious to find out to what degree violence against blacks was tinged by white wage grievance, blacks being an easy scapegoat, just as a certain kind of American nativist today would rather bash Mexicans than question the capitalism under which employers maximize profit by welcoming desperate immigrant laborers willing do dirty or dangerous work for a low wage.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I type this, the President of the United States Donald J. Trump has attacked Rep. Elijah Cummings. It was a racist attack. This attack comes on the heels of countless attacks on four women of color who are also representatives, including a false claim that one of the women was married to her brother. One of his opening attacks was telling the women to go back to their countries – all four are American citizens, three were born in American, and the one who is naturalized has been a citizen longer than the First Lady and her Be Best campaign. Then there was the time he said Congresswoman Wilson was a stripper. Trump also believes that Obama is not an American and that the Obama family book deals should be investigated.

People are wary to say the following – Trump is a racist - because of reasons. I’m not entirely sure what those reasons are. I know that some of them have to do with press rules, but considering that the above is only a fraction of what the Trump presidency has done in terms of attacking people of color, including the targeting of reporter April Ryan, and considering Trump’s record in NYC, it should be a matter of record that Trump is in fact a racist.

Tie that to the Federal Government going back to executions (under a President who wanted the Central Park Five executed after their innocence was acknowledged/proven), and we are entering an even scary time than most people (dare I say most white people) are aware.

Dray’s history of lynching in America makes it abundantly clear that same circumstances that existed to allow lynching exist today. In spades. It wouldn’t be too hard to draw a connection between the violence that has been threatened towards AOC and Omar, and lynching’s.

It is not surprising that Trump targets people of color who call him out on his behavior or are critical of his policies. (And what is the difference between MAGA and the change that Omar and the squad say is needed? Outside of how the policies are different, both are saying the country needs to be improved). It is the same reason why lynching was done – it is a way to keep the power in the relationship, to enforce a racist hierarchy.
But you know this.
In his book, Dray details not only famous and lesser known cases of lynching (including one at a university) but also the whys for the violence (he moves beyond the accurate if board racism) as well as those who fought against it (and sometimes those people will surprise you), he also details the society that allowed it. The comments in the news, by people and such. And many of those comments are pretty much the language that Trump and his supporters are using.

That is one reason why you should read this book

You should also read this book because this part of American history is something that we should not ignore or be ignorant about. In part, this is so we can avoid it, but also so we can understand and acknowledge the problems in the relationship between the justice system and minority communities: many of the lynching’s were done with approval or little intervention from the justice system, and we still see that impact today .In part, so that we can confront the ugly history the same way that countries such as Germany have confronted theirs.

That is another reason to read this book.

Dray’s writing is engaging. He doesn’t shy away from the graphic unpleasant details, but he does not use load language to try to heighten the reader’s emotional responses. The cases that he focuses on are either famous enough to warrant mention, or because the lack of or response to the attacks is important historically. While the book does have photos, and some of those are disturbing to look at (as they should be), the book is primary description, which as always makes the horrific even more so. (If you are worried about being triggered, the photos are in the photo section (just over mid-way in. The first photo in that section is not bad. So, if you need to skip the photos, you can).

The book is packed with information and you will discover other books to read in the narrative. The one strange thing was that he starts with W. E. B. DuBois, and I was hoping for Ida B. Wells. But I guess more people know DuBois as opposed to Wells. Though, hopefully this book helps to correct that.

[Mara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book about appalling history...As a history buff who has also read a lot about the death penalty in the United States, I was surprised by how many of the stories and names in this book were completely new to me. I was also surprised to learn how wrong I was in my prior assumptions about what a "typical" lynching looked like--I had no idea how often victims were killed by means other than hanging (especially being burned alive) or how often the body was further mistreated even after death.

Horrific though this history is, though, this is also the story of the people and organizations who courageously fought back through campaigns to raise public awareness and attempts to pass legislation to make lynching a federal crime. Though it is easy to become depressed while reading all the lynching stories depicting the worst of humanity, Dray consistently highlights the best of humanity as well through the contributions of those who risked everything to resist lynching culture and put an end to "the shame of America."

In short, I would definitely recommend this book to all those interested in American history or in having a better understanding of race relations in the United States.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I walked up to the 'Black History Month' table at Housing Works Bookstore & Café in Soho. I had passed it by a few times during my stroll and perusal of books in the store. It's one of those used bookstores I always end up leaving with something unexpected, something unsought. My first glance at the 'Black History Month' brought a smart remark somewhere in the front of my brain. It floated and tapped at the back of my eyeballs. "Why only a month?" Of course, I understand why and where these calendar celebrations emerge from, but sometimes it shocks and jolts me our of my contemporary peaceful stupor. Reading the introduction of this book brought an evenmore intense pressure to that jolt. Applied remorselessly my mind flew back through the family albums I've had the privilege to survey in the past years. Those frightened soldiers that were my relatives or whom served side by side with my relatives. Those women, who put on their Sunday best. What part did THEY have in all this madness. This evil expressing of power that reigned the reconstruction South and pokes it ugly head back up in various forms, to this day, in this 'free' country.

I knew then it was a darkness I must enter and understand, so that I won't forget it, nor will I let it's absence to my daily routine and expression fail to impress upon me the depth and potential darkness within us all.

Updated: 6/23/2020
Seven years it took me to finish reading this book. During this pandemic I’ve been working through a backlog of books I’d started years ago but never finished. I re-started this from the beginning this time.

I feel like I need to re-read it at least a few more times. Reading history is at once an exploration of one person perspectives on a time or subject matter. Early on I felt that Phillip Dray had done a phenomenal job in maintaining objectivity in conveying the history and finishing from his research and the work of thousands of others over the years. And for most part it is one of the most fair history books I’ve read in the last few years. But I often couldn’t help but think, this story would benefit from the perspective of a Black American.

And there are plenty of Black Americans throughout history that began to work and fight against Lynching and racism and this stand as a testimony to that and without Ida B. Well-Barnett, the Tuskegee Institute, Dray would have very little to work with, so it remains an important work and stands out as a phenomenal historical tracing of the terror and horrifying treatment of people of color, throughout our history.

For me it’s a compelling document that should bring heavy shame that human lives were treated with such disgrace, but also a calling to end our existing practices that stem from these horrific events, many of which are unknown and untold. If our system of justice arose by accepting and allowing such horrible events and terror to perpetuate our society for generations, why should we just accept reform of the system?

It strikes me as a calling out of the need to not just share these stories so that they are not lost and make adjustments to our justice systems, but that our entire framework should be reassessed and rebuilt from the ground up, for the good of all people and the success and reality of a true democracy.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sweeping, definitive, sickening. A companion to 'Buried in the Bitter Waters' that should be mandatory reading for those who utter the phrase 'post-racial age'.

[Eric Hollen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Probably one of the best books I've read in the last year and a half. On one hand a brutal yet clear examination of the history of lynching in U.S. history, the book also serves as a nice compendium of the history of race relations from Reconstruction to the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. It helps that Dray makes his examination concrete by focusing on individual larger-than-life characters, most notably Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Dubois, and that he also writes on a larger historical scale, zooming in on noticeable events in history and particular acts of domestic terrorism and lynchings and legal battles that help shape the book with a narrative flaw that makes for charged and energetic reading. I was also profoundly moved, and yet saddened towards the end, at the plights of blacks in this country, and at the levels and depths of human ignorance, folly, and travesty, that can manifest itself on such a large scale.

[SeaBeThree · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heavy, dense, jarring, violent read - that should be read by all in adulthood. Philip Dray carefully takes his time to weave through Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, World War I, the Progressive Era, Great Depression, World War II, and the infancy of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s - never forgetting his thesis of showing lynching as a barbaric, ugly, and unlawful American “tradition”, that was often performed on Black Americans.

Framing lynching as a means of grabbing some type of power grab and misguided “means of justice” of both affluent and poor whites to subjugate over Black life and Black bodies, the author never forgets to give the credit to two pioneers who started the work of tracking lynchings and demanding true justice for its victims - Ida B. Wells Barnett and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. In that vein, he explores the work of those two, countless others, and the genesis of over a dozen civil rights organizations.

Sometimes, having almost 60-page long chapters, Dray’s manuscript can feel like a chore to finish for the reader. However, the wordy manuscript comes with a great reward of what I believe is a core representation of Wells-Barnett and DuBois and countless others lifelong work. Well-sourced and cited, “At The Hands” can serve as a springboard into a deep dive into the subject of lynching and birthing of civil rights movements. The jarring, violent, blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute recounting of the lynching incidents can become a bit cumbersome to the reader; but is it anymore cumbersome than those who were victims and family/friends of the victims and lived though the harrowing experiences? The answer is simply no. And in no means is any recounting of America’s violent past, any excuse to never engage with the truth of that past.

I do believe toward the end of his manuscript, he may have felt a bit rushed by his editor. He gives no real reason as to why lynchings seemed to stop and didn’t seem pressed to deep-dive as to why. He also paints a picture of a flowery south in America now, where the racial discord is one of the past. It seems it was an editorial mandate to put a “pretty bow” on it, at the end. Nevertheless, those critiques don’t take away from the sheer power and necessary-“ness” (no, that is not a word. Lol) of the work.

A read I would definitely recommend to every single person now. It took me two years to finish it because I kept picking it up and putting it down. But I am most glad I finished it. 4.5/5 stars.

[Paisley Princess · Rating 5 out of 5]

At Hand of Persons Unknown is not for the faint-at-heart, or for the casual African American history buff. This book is grisly, ghastly, and tragic. Phillip Dray delves into a subject that many cannot comprehend, one where people were sadistically murdered for questioning the status quo or for something as innocent as an adolescent catcall. Such lynchings occurred for one purpose: to maintain a system of dominance for those considered second class citizens. Lynching allowed bigots and racists to partake in extreme violence, as ordinary citizens became judges, jurors, and executioners because they held power in their statuses.

Dray notes that Lynching was also meted out to whites, such as that of Leo Frank, the Jewish-American businessman falsely accused of rape. The Frank case illustrates that any minority group could be scapegoated and lynched if they threatened the "order of things" (Frank was more successful than many southern Protestants). This was a difficult read that gave me nightmares because it was real, and in most instances legal.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars because every American adult should read it. Unsurprisingly, it's not an easy or a pleasant read. But it is well written and compelling. The violence and terror experienced by blacks during the lynching era (1880-1940) was much worse than many of us have imagined. No aspect of black life was unaffected by that terror. It was deeply ingrained in black experience and nearly impossible to escape. It's essential for all Americans to understand how pervasive and profound the terror was that circumscribed black families and black communities at the hands of white people--not just those in white capes and hoods but the entire white establishment: state, community, media, churches. The violence was out in the open, shameless, even celebrated. Until we confront the reality of our past, we will not heal nor understand how that past informs the present.

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are times when you read a book and while you're reading you just feel the NEED to tell everyone about it. To just push it into their hands because it's IMPORTANT.

This is one of those books.

A well written overview of the history of lynching from reconstruction to the civil Rights era, it goes into the unique history of this American darkness. It is unflinching in details, but never lurid in descriptions. It is simply what happened, something that I find personally much more impactful. It is stark, unrelenting, but so is lynching.

Just. Everyone should read this.

[Jean louise Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, reads like a novel. I could see so many parallels with the present time. Read this after you read fluff like The Help for a more accurate reality and proof that black people were not "victims" but actively sought to change their circumstances. Also read "Without Sanctuary" the descriptions of these brutal and animalistic lynchings by racist America are almost hard to believe until you see the actual postcard photos that were collectors items!

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this book is anchored in the retelling of the stories of dozens of brutal lynchings that took place across America - predominantly, but far from exclusively, in the South - over the course of a hundred year or so span of American history, it is primarily a story of how activists and opposition movements worked to curtail and criminalize lynching. The sad personal stories of lynching’s many victims often provide some insight into how these murders reinforced the local caste system and sought to quell black agency, social advancement, or economic competition — but the focus and narrative arc is ultimately on the reformers, not the perpetrators or the communities who participated and supported them in their crimes. The history does make clear that at least until the mid-50s (when they became more covert affairs), lynchings were collective actions, abetted by and celebrated by members of the community, but the hands of the persons involved remain largely unknown.

The story here — and it is a heroic one — is of the actions of individuals like W.E.B. Dubois and Ida B. Wells, as well as organizations like the NAACP , the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the Association of South Women for the Prevention of Lynching, to hold communities, law enforcement, and the state and federal governments to account and institute a system of rule of law that would stand up against extrajudicial killings. While painfully incremental in their progress, these efforts were ultimately successful and helped set the stage for the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s. The factors that contributed to that success are varied, and include changes in the social patterns of Southern society driven by economic and post-war trends; the accompanying slow but continual struggle for empowerment by black communities and activists; the concerted efforts of anti-lynching advocates to expose the brutality of the crimes (and contrast them with the experience of the world wars); legal strategies and reform efforts aimed at holding sheriffs accountable for prisoners in their custody and institutionalizing due process; and the eventual intervention of federal and state authorities into local jurisdictions. It’s a complex multi-causal history, and while the public brutality of the mob remains fundamentally alien to me as a distant reader, this was a great education into our history as a nation.

[Andrew Tollemache · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the last few years I have started to realize that the Ken Burns classic documentary "The Civil War" did a huge disservice to the country. Though widely praised and loved, it really overly romanticized a conflict that was way more brutal and savage than we give it credit for. Away from the set piece battles of Lee and Grant was a very brutal, almost guerilla war, that truth be told, did not end until decades after the Appomattox treaty.
This book by Philip Dray on the history of lynching in US, particularly the South is largely a tale of the South trying to retain the same level of control and violence over its african-american residents that had been lost with the end of slavery. The South under slavery was already a paranoid, oppressive place, ever vigilant against an uprising. Its crushing defeat in the Civil War left it seething with repressed anger that boiled over into coups, massacres, etc. Starting in the midst of the South's looming defeat, picking up steam in the 1870s as the Klan and other groups fought what now would be seen as an insurgency/terrorist strategy and attaining a plateau of murder and violence in the 1880s that would last for decades wanton murder was endemic. The use of the mob/ Judge Lynch's law/lynching was a key method of spreading terror amongst it targets. Technically the last lynching, as properly defined, only happened in 1963, but was at appallingly high levels well into the 1930s.
Dray's brutal, but compelling book documents the scope and nature of these horrors, but also shows how the fight to end lynching lay at the heart of the civil rights movement for almost a century and was a key driver in the rise of the NAACP.

[Eric Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was hard on my soul. I always thought when a Black person was lynched, they died of a broken neck, which is a relatively quick death. I didn't know that being strung up on a rope was done after the person was tortured, mostly by first taking "souvenirs" of the still living person. The first to go was the victim's penis. then the fingers, toes, ears, etc. Then the person was roasted slowly over a fire, and then hung. After that pictures were taken of the body and sent all over the country with hundreds and even thousands of people standing around smiling. the audience actually fought over the remaining pieces of the victims. I also didn't know right after reconstruction up until the 1940's at least ten lynchings too place a month. Most of them with cooperation with the local authorities , including the railroad companies that added special trains to get hundreds of people from different states to a lynching in another state. The papers covered these lynchings as entertainment. At times this was a difficult book to read, but I'm glade I did. Reading Chekhov along side it was soothing for some reason.

[John Rymer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book; read it. The premise sounds negative -- I mean, a history of *lynching*?? And the opening of the book was gruesome enough to scare me away for a few months. Why would you read such a book? I'm glad I picked up the book again and finished it. "At the Hands of Persons Unknown" is really a history of the black experience in America, circa 1890 through 1964, told through the lens of lynching. It is a horrifying tale, unflinchingly told. The cruelty inflicted on our black fellows is hard to bear. The people of the Deep South + Texas are the most obvious villains in this history -- but only the most obvious. The author documents lynchings in the Northeast, in Illinois, and in California as well. Yet the Old Confederacy's behavior was most extreme, both in carrying out mob murders on mostly black people and in preventing legislation to deter lynching by holding individuals responsible. The phrase "at the hands of persons unknown" was the euphemism employed on the death certificates of unfortunate victims of lynching, and time after time these crimes were deemed blameless acts of the community's outrage over acts real and imagined. The author does a good job of showing how events -- WWI and WWII in particular -- slowly changed attitudes in our barbaric country toward lynching in any form. Note that through 1964, NO ANTI-LYNCHING NATIONAL LEGISLATION ever got past the filibuster of the Solid South. Lynching, in the end, faded away.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dray's powers as a writer are formidable; that and his humanity and command of the material combined to give me an experience that deepened my understanding of our history, wretched and noble, by leagues. I was immeasurably rewarded for overcoming my dread of approaching the horrific subject matter.

[Juliaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent book as a work of scholarship - is literally nightmarish - reading it gave me terrible dreams - but terrible is really the only word for lynching, so is quite appropriate.

[Nathan Box · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging, yet necessary read. America is not an old country, but I am still shocked by the parts of our shared history that remain unknown to me. This book opened my eyes to another chapter and shook me to my very core.

[John Bohnert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The graphic description of numerous lynchings made this an emotional book to read.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

an essential book for a vastly misunderstood and unimaginably awful phenomenon... Dray does his research and then some! one could argue the individual anecdotes bog down the book, but if that's your opinion you are likely unwilling to delve completely into the vast extent of lynching in America... this is not only a litany of uncontrolled violence and murder and racism, it is a theoretical and complex evaluation of the roots of lynching, which are not nearly as simple as "whites killing blacks"... the author makes no apology nor pulls any punches, he just tells you what happened, attempts to discern why, and catalogs the aftereffects in brutal but not overdramatic language (though i can say it is hard to accuse anyone writing about lynching to "overdramatize", as much of what occurred surrounding a lynching was unbelievably over the top extreme violence and hatred meted out on black bodies for the entertainment and valorization of white Americans)... a dreary, depressing, and sombre read, but it makes no claim to be a feel-good tale... yes, white America has an ugly and violent and murderous past (and present, and probably future) and reading about it makes black Americans fear, distrust, and hatred of the government and the police entirely justified and worthy of support...

[rndgmoat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating history of a forgotten past era. What happened to black people in post-reconstruction America is sadly left out of most history books. This book places lynching in context of racial developments and also details the origins of many civil rights reformers devoted to ending it. Must-read.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

The is a well researched and well written history of the lynching of black people in America. It should be on everyone's reading list. There are parts of the book that are hard to read, but they should be read. It will not make one "proud to be an American".

[Marisa Bowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential read for anyone interested in American history, let alone African-American history. It utterly changes your perspective.

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone in the U.S. should read this.

[Karen Ferguson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shocking history of lynching in America. I could barely believe what I was reading it was so horrific.

[Joe Baird · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 / 5 Stars | 100 / 100

Much like my reading of Clint Smith's How The Word Is Passed, I chose this work with the goal of gaining some semblance of understanding about the real history of subjugation and violence against African-Americans within the United States, especially within the Southeastern U.S.
As a born-and-raised South Carolinian (with ancestry in Mississippi as well), it is harrowing to grasp that many of the acts of violence discussed in this text transpired in areas not far from where I currently sit at the time of writing this review. Much like my previous review, I want to let the power of Dray's research speak for itself, so I'll be including excerpts from At The Hands of Persons Unknown below. I hope that the use of these excerpts will demonstrate why this text should be a staple of any American citizens' bookshelf, namely individuals residing in the Southeast.

Due to constraints on total allowable text on reviews, I've only included excerpts from about the the first 150 pages of At The Hands of Persons Unknown. This being said, the entire text is brimming with haunting insights of the legacy of lynching in the U.S; a period which has subsisted from the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War all the way up to the modern day.

It is incumbent upon all Americans to acknowledge that lynching is not a distant remnant of past history, but a grotesque act which is inherently intertwined with the evolution of the United States.

------------------------------------------------

Previously, [W.E.B] Du Bois has been inclined to believe that blacks were mistreated by a minority of coarser whites, and that if the majority of decent white people could be made aware of the injustice of black life in America they would - out of compassion, a sense of justice, even patriotism - act to alleviate the problem. But the manner and spectacle of [Sam] Hose's death - the eleven days of hysterical, incendiary newspaper articles, the almost complete lack of responsible intervention from high officials, the crowds running pell-mell from houses of God so as not to miss seeing a human being turned into a heap of ashes, and, ultimately, a set of knuckles on display in a grocery store - showed [Du Bois] that lynching was not some twisted aberration in Southern life, but a symptom of a much larger malady. Lynching was simply the most sensational manifestation of a animosity for black people that resided at a deeper level among whites than he had previously thought, and was ingrained in all of white society, its objective nothing less than the continued subordination of blacks at any cost.

- p. 15

Whipping, so long an essential element of slavery, was the Klan's preferred mode of punishment, as it most explicitly reminded blacks of their former status. "The habit is so inveterate with a great many persons," [Carl] Schurz noted, "as to render, on the least provocation, the impulse to whip a Negro almost irresistible." Everyone in a house, including women, children, and even toddlers, was routinely flogged along with the primary victim the Klan had been seeking. No one, regardless of age or gender, was spared at least a few licks from the switch. Asked by a congressional investigator how many colored people had been whipped in her neighborhood, Harriet Hernandes of Spartanburg, South Carolina, responded: "It is all of them, mighty near... Ben Phillips and his wife and daughter, Sam Foster; and Moses Eaves, they killed him - I could not begin to tell all - Ann Bonner and her daughter, Manza Surratt and his wife and whole family, even the least child in the family, they took it out of bed and whipped it. They told them if they did that they would remember it.

- p. 43

Harriet Simril of Columbia, South Carolina, reported being raped. She said that one night the Klan simply walked right into her house. They were looking for her husband, and not finding him at home, they "ate all my pies up and took two pieces of meat," then "dragged me out in the road and ravished me out there... Ches McCollum, Tom McCollum, an this big Jim Harper... after they got done with me I had no sense for a long time. I laid there, I don't know how long. The next morning I went to my house and it was in ashes.

- p. 44

Mass lynchings were not uncommon in the Reconstruction South. Ten blacks were taken from the local jail and shot and hanged in Union, South Carolina, in January 1871; that same year nine black prisoners were lynched together in Louisville, Georgia. In violence associated with the 1868 election in Louisiana, almost two hundred blacks were killed in a "skirmish" with a newly formed White League, and hundreds more perished at white hands in scattered incidents between April and November of that year. In Louisiana and Texas the anti-Republican forces were, for all intents and purposes, simply Confederate units reconstituted, fifty to two hundred men riding together. Under such circumstances there was no need for masks or disguises; these were small armies intimidating or killing anything that got in their way.

- p. 48

New understanding was extended to the Southern anxiety about black political domination. These fears were nowhere better crystallized than in an influential book, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government by James S. Pike, published in 1873. Pike had been an antislavery journalist and served as Lincoln's minister to The Netherlands, but was bothered by federal policies such as the declaring of martial law in parts of South Carolina. The book heaped scorn on the efforts at self-government engaged in by blacks, depicting South Carolina as a state where "300,000 white people... composing the intelligence and property-holders of the state, are put under the heel of 400,000 pauper blacks, fresh from a state of slavery and ignorance most dense." The white community, the author noted, "lies prostrate in the dust, ruled over by this strange conglomerate, gathered from the ranks of its own servile population." He termed the black efforts at rule "the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw." Pike's critique, which would become one of the touchstones of contemporary thinking on Reconstruction, was all the more damaging because it issued from the pen of a prominent Northerner.

- p. 50

Benjamin E. Mays, who later became president of Morehouse College, recalled the surge of lynching violence that visited rural South Carolina in 1898, when the violent white-rule gangs known as Red Shirts targeted and killed black Republicans in a wave of violence that prompted hundreds of local blacks to emigrate to other parts of the South: "[A] crowd of white men... rode up on horseback with rifles on their shoulders. I was with my father when they rode up, and I remember starting to cry. They cursed my father, drew their guns and made him salute and made him take off his hat and bow down to them several times. Then they rode away. I was not yet five years old, but I have never forgotten them."
As novelist Richard Wright recalls in Black Boy, the memoir of his childhood in Mississippi, "I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings."
There was good reason for the sense of constant vulnerability. A lynching could seem like some finely tuned spring-release trap, its jaws wired open, ready to clamp shut. It required only a victim to step into the mechanism. Once set in motion it functioned automatically, simply, heedless of any surrounding doubt or complexity. Black parents learned to fear more for some sons than for others: those who were surly, rebellious, careless, who had not learned the art of appearing to know one's place, were in far greater danger. And, tragically, parents had no choice but to actively suppress those very qualities in their children - self-confidence, curiosity, ambitiousness - that might be misconstrued as insolence or arrogance by whites. However, there was only so much that foresight could do, for any set of ill-starred circumstances could instantly put a black man at deadly risk.

- p. 83

Other devious obstacles to black voting were improvised, such as South Carolina's "Eight Box" law. Poll workers set up eight different boxes into which voters were to place their ballots, each labeled with the name of a corresponding office, such as "senator," "governor," or "representative." Any ballot placed in an incorrect box was discounted, ensuring that the ballots of blacks who couldn't read the signs would be disqualified. To thwart efforts to memorize their positions, the boxes were shuffled periodically.

- p. 111

The threat of black voting had consumed Southern politics since the 'Redemption' of the South by the Democrats in the late 1870s. It had animated some of its most vicious outrages and verbal belligerence, and helped to create the swaggering style of Southern demagoguery associated with the period. Most colorful of the Southern demagogues was undoubtedly "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, governor of South Carolina in the 1890s, and later a US Senator. (He had received his nickname after once threatening to "prod" President Grover Cleveland with the implement "in his old fat ribs.")
Tillman was also famously unapologetic for his leading role in the Red Shirt movement that attacked black Republicans and redeemed South Carolina away from Reconstruction: "We took the government away. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it." This kind of defiance and bluster, coupled with his sobriquet, made him into a somewhat cartoonish and one-dimensional national figure - loved by lower-class Southern whites, despised or barely tolerated by everyone else.

- p. 112

In fall 1897, when Frazier B. Baker, a forty-year-old schoolteacher and Republican from Florence, South Carolina, was made Postmaster of nearby Lake City, local whites immediately launched a vigorous campaign to dislodge him. At first, they boycotted Baker's post office by carting their mail to the village of Scranton, three miles away. Next, they circulated a petition which they sent to J.L. Bristow, fourth-assistant Postmaster General in Washington, pointing out that Baker was lazy, incompetent, and "impolite to ladies." In Washington, Senator Ben Tillman and other South Carolina officials called on U.S. Postmaster General James A. Gary, a recent McKinley appointee, for Baker's immediate removal. Things took a more sinister turn in December when shots were fired at Frazier and his assistant, James Braveboy, and again in January 1898, when the Lake City Post Office mysteriously burned to the ground. Refusing to abandon his assignment, Baker moved the post office into his own home on the outskirts of town, further infuriating and inconveniencing whites.
At shortly after one in the morning on February 22, a mob of three hundred or more people surrounded Baker's house, set it on fire, and shot at the occupants as they fled the blaze. Baker, the first to reach the door of the burning dwelling, was immediately hit and fell back into the house. His wife, Lavania, and three of his children were wounded as they attempted to flee, and an infant girl being carried by Mrs. Baker was struck in the head and killed instantly. Lavania, shot in the forearm, collapsed near the house and would have burned to death if neighbors hadn't pulled her clear of the flames. Investigators the next day discovered the partly burned bodies of Postmaster Baker and his baby daughter, and counted more than a hundred bullet holes in the walls of the home.

- pp. 116 - 117

And, in the aftermath of lynchings, black communities often did, through their civic and religious leaders, express regret over the crime that had sparked the mob's action, and even voiced appreciation that the fiend had been properly dealt with. This was particularly true in cases where the crime was horrific and the suspect could be readily ostracized and condemned. When, for instance, a South Carolina black man named Bob Davis was lynched in 1906 after assaulting a white shopgirl, and later, a black teenager, local blacks took part in the lynching and their community leaders issued a statement approving of the affair. The mother of the black girl who had been assaulted was given the privilege of firing the first shot at Davis, who had been bound to a tree. With a crowd of armed white men behind her offering advice and encouragement, the mother stood several paces from the prisoner, took aim at his midsection, and squeezed the trigger. The crowd then joined in, its fusillade blowing Davis into pieces.
Of course, in small, isolated towns, agreeing after the fact that a lynching had been good and proper was also a sound survival strategy - best to allow the lynch mob's fury to end with its original victim than spread to the whole black community, as too often happened.

- pp. 145 - 146

[Laura]

I’m going to share lines that stand out as I read, I think, because I can’t mark/highlight in library book.
CN for quotes: lynching, mobs, rape

“Lynch mobs rather pointedly do not keep accounts; in a sense they seem to negate history itself. The Tuskegee files, silently accumulating during lynchings worst years, ultimately frustrated this result - simply by keeping track.” - p viii

Page x lists several recorded lynchings for four-week starting June 14, 1897, and two had reason noted as “nothing” (Mrs Jake Cebrose of Plano, Texas and 8yo boy identified only as “Parks” in South Carolina). Also talks about “Southern argument that [B]lack men posed an inordinate sexual threat to white women…”

“To an extent I was guided by the trend in historiography dating from the 1960s that has imparted new significance to violence as a social force. No longer ignored or viewed as merely an unfortunate disruption, outbreaks or sustained periods of violence have come to be evaluated as one of the primary ways in which societies evolve or seek change. … Lynching proved overripe for just such an approach. Rather than viewing lynching as a frenzied abnormality, historians in recent years have sought to understand it as a tradition, a systematized reign of terror that was used to maintain the power whites had over blacks, a way to keep blacks fearful and to forestall black progress and miscegenation. … Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?” - p xi

“There is much killing in American history, a great deal of it no doubt senseless and unnecessary, but lynching celebrates killing and makes of it a ritual, turning grisly and inhuman acts of cruelty into theater with the explicit intent that they be viewed and remembered.” - p xii

“Turn-of-the-century news accounts of incidents such as the Hose-Cranford case constituted a kind of “folk pornography” that made for welcome, titillating reading. Stories of sexual assault, insatiable black rapists, tender white virgins, and manhunts led by “determined men” that culminated in lynchings were the bodice rippers is their day, vying in the South’s daily newspapers with exposés about black dives and gambling dens, drunkenness and cocaine addiction, and warnings about domestics who stole family heirlooms.” - p 4-5

“Under [William Gates Arkinson’s] administration an average of only fourteen lynchings a year occurred in the state [of Georgia], compared with twenty-eight per year under the prolynching Governor Candler, making Atkinson something of a progressive.” - p 10
(Imagine a time where “only” fourteen lynchings a year was “progressive”…)

“This was a ritualized aspect of a Southern lynching. The woman who had been outraged was, when possible, asked to confront and identify her assailant and could, if she chose, participate in killing him, although in the actual bloodletting she was usually represented by [male relative], whose honor was deemed also to have been besmirched. That she be made to face her attacker and identify him was a somewhat curious tradition, considering that one of the frequent rationales for lynchings was that summary execution of rapists soared humiliated women the distress of having to answer questions in open court about the outrage they’d suffered.” - p 11-12

“Previously, Du Bois has been inclined to believe that blacks were mistreated by a minority of coarser whites, and that if the majority of white people could be made aware of the injustice of black life in America, they would - out of compassion, a sense of justice, even patriotism - act to alleviate the problem. But the manner and spectacle of Hose’s death […] showed him that lynching was not some twisted aberration in Southern life, but a symptom of a much larger malady. Lynching was simply the most sensational manifestation of an animosity for black people that resided at a deeper level among whites than he had preciously thought, and was ingrained in all of society, its objective nothing less than the continued subordination of Blacks at any cost.” - p 15

“Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers. Men brought their wives and children along to the events, posed for commemorative photograph, and purchased souvenirs for the occasion as I’d they had been at a company picnic.” - p 17-18

“From 1835 forward to the Civil War the issue of slavery was never absent from the political dialogue in America, and because the South was so sensitive to the North’s intrusive interest in the matter, the region increasingly became a place insistent on and even proud of its own isolation. Strangers who ventured there, even business travers, did so at risk of having their purpose and destination questioned; nonconformity of any kind tended to be challenged or suspected; and new restrictions were placed on the mobility of free [Blacks] who, it was feared, might gossip and spread insurrectionary notions.” - p27

“In the North, the criminal was treated impersonally and answered to the state; in the South he answered directly to those he had abused.” - p 31

[Brendan Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whatever you thought you knew of lynching, it was far far far worse than you can imagine. The spectacles from Paris, Texas to rural Georgia to Illinois are haunting. I wanted to read it in light of the recent passage of anti-lynching legislation but clearly it was a failure of the American political process (that damn filibuster) to pass any federal action in the 20s and 30s where there was for the first time federal appetite but southern opposition stood in the way despite multiple lynchings a year.

I have a number of specific criticisms but only because I thought it was a tremendously good read and wanted more. I thought that the first part of the monograph could have been better organized as I thought there was little connecting the events and then the interruptions to discuss theories or explanations. The structure became clearer once the NAACP was founded but that also is when the numbers of lynching went from multiple murders a week to dozens a year, so the narratives could focus on specific lynchings in greater detail. I also thought the end was rather abrupt, even with the Epilogue. I also thought the author could have done a better job explaining why lynching declined or became underground lynching. Or at least a more forceful argument or thesis from him on the subject.

That being said, what a towering effort of research penetrating certain myths about lynchings and also put a damning light on American society both north and south. The media, the criminal Justice system, and most presidents sat idly by (or even encouraged it in the former two instances) while Americans were denied civil rights and killed in the most inhumane fashion.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is certainly one of the best crafted nonfiction books I have ever read. It's possible I wouldn't feel so strongly about that if I hadn't known so much, but by all mines not all, of what the book covers. On the other hand, it was knowing so much already that helped validate how extensive and accurate his overall reporting was. I will also point out that what the author uses as his own resources in writing the book, helps give what would arguably be labeled just "history" into a strong impression of more contemporary "investigative journalism," because, among other resources, he uses the investigative reporting by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and a few others, on the myriad of events documented in this book. In doing so with Wells-Barnett, he additionally provides an abbreviated biography of that extraordinary person. It was also quite disturbing, beyond the details of the book, to read the justifications given for those many despicable and horrendous acts, to hear very strong echoes of their justification in the many much more contemporary tweets and rally speeches by the former office holder of President of the United States. This book was written well before that person had taken office, while I was reading it just as that massive storm on American governance was receding. It was a bit like reading a scary novel while actually hearing someone breaking into my house.