“Guy Lancaster has assembled in ten concise essays a sweeping examination of lynching in Arkansas from slavery to 1950. In doing so Bullets and Fire makes a major contribution to our understanding of the connection between repressive violence and the erection and maintenance of white supremacy.”
—Howard Smead, Journal of American History, December 2020
Bullets and Fire is the first collection on lynching in Arkansas, exploring all corners of the state from the time of slavery up to the mid-twentieth century and covering stories of the perpetrators, victims, and those who fought against vigilante violence.
Among the topics discussed are the lynching of slaves, the Arkansas Council of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the 1927 lynching of John Carter in Little Rock, and the state’s long opposition to a federal anti-lynching law.
Throughout, the work reveals how the phenomenon of lynching—as the means by which a system of white supremacy reified itself, with its perpetrators rarely punished and its defenders never condemned—served to construct authority in Arkansas. Bullets and Fire will add depth to the growing body of literature on American lynching and integrate a deeper understanding of this violence into Arkansas history.
Guy Lancaster is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, a project of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System, and the coauthor of the revised edition of Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919. His new book American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in fall 2021.