Lynching: Selected Resources: Race & Law

On a hot summer night in 1930, three black teenagers accused of murdering a young white man and raping his girlfriend waited for justice in an Indiana jail. A mob dragged them from the jail and lynched two of them. No one in Marion, Indiana was ever punished for the murders. In this gripping account, James H. Madison refutes the popular perception that lynching was confined to the South, and clarifies 20th century America's painful encounters with race, justice, and memory.

Uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, and attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of America, in particular the history of lynching. This book looks at how the death penalty gives meaning to race, as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.

A history of lynching in America describes its common use, especially in the southern United States, and discusses the crusade by a handful of black and white citizens to eliminate the shameful practice.

Between 1880 and 1930, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Beyond the horrific violence inflicted on these individuals, lynching terrorized whole communities and became a defining characteristic of Southern race relations in the Jim Crow era. As spectacle, lynching was intended to serve as a symbol of white supremacy. Yet, Jonathan Markovitz notes, the act's symbolic power has endured long after the practice of lynching has largely faded away. Legacies of Lynching examines the evolution of lynching as a symbol of racial hatred and a metaphor for race relations in popular culture, art, literature, and political speech.

COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF LYNCHING Published by the NAACP in 1919 to promote awareness of lynching in the United States, this seminal study provides information on the lynchings of 3,224 African-Americans between 1889 and 1918.

In 1916, a crowd of ten to fifteen thousand cheering spectators watched as seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington, a retarded black boy, was publicly tortured, lynched, and burned on the town square of Waco, Texas. He had been accused and convicted in a kangaroo court for the rape and murder of a white woman. The city's officials watched Washington's torture and murder and did nothing. Nearby, a professional photographer took pictures to sell as mementos of that day.