The End of Public Execution

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

Michael Ayers Trotti (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

266 Seiten

2022
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-7040-9 (ISBN)

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Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. In just the same era when a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

Michael A. Trotti is professor of history at Ithaca College. He is the author of The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South.

Erscheinungsdatum	01.11.2022
Verlagsort	Chapel Hill
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	363 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-4696-7040-2 / 1469670402
ISBN-13	978-1-4696-7040-9 / 9781469670409
Zustand	Neuware