Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947

"Rough Justice is the first national cross-regional study of the history of lynching and criminal justice in the United States. Working from extensive research in newspapers, court records, coroner's inquests, and personal correspondence, the book ties lynching to understandings of criminal justice, strongly influenced by notions of race and gender, that varied across social classes and regions. It is dedicated to the victims of lynching and legal execution." "Eventually the rural and working-class rough justice enthusiasts who endorsed mob murder in the Midwest, West, and South compromised with the bourgeois advocates of due process law. In the early twentieth century, states in those regions, aping the punitive innovations of northeastern states, revamped the death penalty into a comparatively efficient, technocratic, and highly racialized mechanism of retributive justice, and lynchings ceased. Yet today's death penalty, which is powerfully influenced by racial and gender prerogatives and which often fails to offer defendants meaningful due process, bears the legacy of the history of lunching and of the compromise that ended it."--