United States History - African American History, African American History, United States History - Southern Region, Ethnic & Race Relations, United States Studies, Criminology, Discrimination & Prejudice

At the Hands of Persons Unknown

Name: At the Hands of Persons Unknown
Author: Philip Dray
ISBN: 9780375503245

by Philip Dray

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Overview

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 anddifficult 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.

About the Author, Philip Dray

Philip Dray is the co-author of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 1988. Born in Chicago and raised in Minnesota, Dray now lives in New York City. He has been a contributor to many publications, including Mother Jones, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Readers of Philip Dray's powerful book should prepare for disbelief at the barbarism of the lynchers, anguish over the lynched, and pride in the courage of those who fought "America's shame." Dray goes beyond recording crimes that were "justified" by distorted notions of "honor" and fear of "nigger risings"; he illustrates that lynching was a culture. As such, it was supported by manipulation of the law, collusion between local authorities and rabid segregationists, and by the failure of Congress and the federal courts to act positively to protect black citizens' basic rights.

Lynching (named after Charles Lynch, a justice in rural Virginia) began in the 1770s as a citizens' punish-them-yourself response to local criminals and political opponents. Institutionalized in the South in the late 1860s as a weapon against emancipation and Reconstruction, lynching became the means of killing any African American whose status, actions, or attitudes challenged white supremacy. Dray fully captures the depravity of lynching, which usually entailed torture and castration, followed by burning the victim alive before an applauding crowd.

In chronicling those who fought -- at great personal risk -- for effective laws against lynching (Ida Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and A. Philip Randolph, among others) and in detailing investigations, reporting, and provision of legal representation, Dray presents a compelling record. He gives valuable accounts of Theodore Roosevelt's, Woodrow Wilson's, and FDR's self-protective foot-dragging on proposed federal action. Only under Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson -- and the pressure of strong public support -- did the U.S. government take real action to end lynching and the criminal culture that fueled it.

This poignant book is necessary reading -- and a needed reminder that hatred and evil do not always come from beyond America's borders. (Peter Skinner)

Peter Skinner lives in New York City.

David Levering Lewis

Philip Dray's At the Hands of Persons Unknown is a powerfully written, admirably perceptive synthesis of the vast literature on lynching. It is the most comprehensive social history of this depressing subject in almost seventy years and should be recognized as a major addition to the bibliography of American race relations.

Publishers Weekly

Between 1882 and 1944 at least 3,417 African-Americans were lynched in the United States, an average of slightly more than one a week. It was not until 1952, as Dray notes, that a full year went by without a reported racial lynching. Covering the South's resistance to racial equality from Reconstruction and the 1875 Civil Rights Act (which gave rise to the widespread acceptance of public murders) through the mid-20th century, this prodigiously researched, tightly written and compelling history of the lynching of African-Americans examines the social background behind the horrific acts. Yet Dray (We Are Not Afraid) also covers the myriad attempts of popular and judicial resistance to lynching, in particular the campaigns led by Ida B. Wells and by the NAACP. He has pulled together a wealth of cultural material, including D.W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation, Reginald Marsh's famous 1934 antilynching cartoon in the New Yorker, among much else, to supplement his impressive survey of the breadth of lynching in Southern society. While there is much shocking material here the 1918 lynching and disembowelment of eight-month-pregnant Mary Turner; California governor James Rolph Jr.'s 1933 statement that lynching was "a fine lesson for the whole nation" Dray never lets it dictate the complex social and political story he is telling. He faces the underlying sexual impulse of most lynchings head-on and shows how, in the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, the fear of blacks was transferred to a Jewish victim. Whether he is explicating why the feminist-run Women's Christian Temperance Union refused to speak out against lynching, or why FDR refused to endorse antilynching legislation in the 1930s, Dray balances moral indignation with a sound understanding of history and politics. The result is vital, hard-hitting cultural history. (Jan. 22) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Though everyone knew the culprits, victims of lynching were always said to die "at the hands of persons unknown." New School scholar Dray has worked on this history for more than ten years. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The ghastly story of lynching, by the coauthor of We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi (not reviewed).