eBook - ePub

The End of Public Execution

Name: The End of Public Execution
ISBN: 9781469670423

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

Michael Ayers Trotti,

288 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

The End of Public Execution

Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

Michael Ayers Trotti,

About this book

Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

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Yes, you can access The End of Public Execution by Michael Ayers Trotti in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.