Lynching and Leisure
Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas

Terry Anne Scott (Author)

9781682262184

Paperback / softback, published 19 July 2022

400 pages, 44 photographs
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm, 0.28 kg

In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.