Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott has been reviewed in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.
“In her new and compelling study of racial violence in Texas, Terry Anne Scott presents a dramatic reinterpretation of the hundreds of lynchings that took place in the state between 1866 and 1950. … Her book will serve as one of the new standard texts on lynching in Texas alongside earlier scholarship by Karlos K. Hill, William Carrigan, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Benjamin Johnson, Brandon T. Jett, and others. This is crucial reading for anyone interested in the study of race, violence, and modern Texas.”
—Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, April 2023
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.
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.