A Quaker banned from religious meetings due to his foul tongue, Lynch set up makeshift courts that routinely sentenced suspected horse thieves to flogging during the war. He traces lynching to some of its earliest manifestations during the Revolutionary War and to Virginia justice of the peace Charles Lynch, for whom the practice was later named. We also see some of America's most celebrated institutions, along with the country's own mythologies about race and sex, conjuring a shadow of terror that would forever haunt black America.ĭray's book begins with America's beginning.
Through Dray's eyes we see thousands of victims dying in the most gruesome ways. A mob usually gathered and some previously anonymous black male was put to death in some excruciating way, thus restoring the honor of the befouled dame.Īs a narrative, the book draws its power from the sheer barbarity of lynching. The typical lynching started with a fabricated report of a white woman ravished by a black man. The book is a thorough history of mob violence directed against African-Americans over nearly a century after the end of slavery, starting in 1886 and not truly ending until 1964, when the last known mob-directed lynching occurred with explicit assistance and approval from local police officials.ĭray has created a complex portrait of an American-particularly Southern-tradition of publicly murdering African-Americans, drawing on documents collected at the Tuskegee Institute known as the Lynching Archives. Those parallels, and the feeling of dread, and their lingering influence on black Americans' attitudes towards police and other authorities, are dramatically evoked in a new book by Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown. IF YOU NOW FIND YOURSELF obsessed, in the wake of September 11, with the possibilities of other heinous acts, if you feel like a target for zealotry and extremism, if you are now doubting your government's ability to protect you, then you are getting an idea of what it has felt like to be African-American for a good part of this country's history. Retrieved from ĪT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN: The Lynching of Black America by Philip Dray Random House, $29.95 APA style: At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.
At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.
MLA style: "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.
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