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

Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment "Best Book" Award from the East Texas Historical Association

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.

Author: Terry Anne Scott
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 07/19/2022
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 1.10d
ISBN13: 9781682262184
ISBN10: 1682262189
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Violence in Society
- History | United States | State & Local | Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX)
- History | African American & Black

About the Author
Terry Anne Scott is Director of the Institute for Common Power. She is a former associate professor of American history and Chair of the History Department at Hood College. Dr. Scott is the editor of Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City.