Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott has been reviewed by Simon Balto in The Journal of Southern History.
“Terry Anne Scott’s Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas is a painful, important book. In it, Scott explores the lynching of Black Texans from the wake of Reconstruction to the 1940s, assembling a record of anti-Black racist atrocities in Texas—atrocities that remain undercounted to this day. … Scott’s detailed analysis of lynching as leisure, and all that that meant for white Texans, makes Lynching and Leisure a valuable addition to the literature on lynching specifically, and racist violence generally.”
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.