philip dray at the hands of persons unknown

Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919andW.E.B.

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.' -David Levering Lewis, Professor of History at Rutgers University and twice recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography forW.E.B. 'Philip Dray'sAt the Hands of Persons Unknownis a powerfully written, admirably perceptive synthesis of the vast literature on lynching. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history-and makes the history of lynching belong to us all.

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. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. He also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. The celebrated historian Philip Dray shines a clear, bright light on this dark history-its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. 'At the hands of persons unknown' was the official verdict rendered on most of these atrocities. Men and women were shot, hanged, tortured, and burned, often in sadistic, picnic-like 'spectacle lynchings' involving thousands of witnesses. '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. 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. 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. It is easy to shrink from our country's brutal history of lynching.

Philip dray at the hands of persons unknown