The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott.
Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas examines the transformation of lynching in the state from a largely clandestine practice of racial oppression and labor domination to a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement became integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Central to Terry Anne Scott’s findings is the way that white Texans who attended lynchings came to see them not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as opportunities for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and cementing community values.
The first book to give primary attention to the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings—including the popular culture they produced—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 associate professor of American history and director of African American Studies at Hood College. She is the editor of Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City.
Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas will be available in February 2022, and is now available for pre-order.