Philip Dray
New York: Random House, 2002
528 pp.
Reviewed by Dwight D. Murphey
One of the things most admirable about the film adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood a few years ago was that the film never allowed itself to focus entirely on the criminals and their hanging. Flashbacks showing their robbery and murder of a Kansas farm family constantly reminded the viewer that there was more to the story than the criminals' own personal travail.
The lack of such balance is a serious flaw in any history of lynching in the United States that presents the subject with an overemphasis on the lynching itself. The selection of the subject has built in the bias unless the author is careful. In Philip Dray's narrative, he will mention briefly that "a white woman named Anna Pelly, twenty‑four, was found raped and murdered in an alley, strangled to death," or that "a seventeen‑year‑old white girl, Eula Ausley, went missing and was found murdered in a forest clearing, her throat slashed from ear to ear." But all of the narrative from that point forward (often for two or three pages) centers on the search for and eventual lynching of the alleged perpetrator.
A book could just as validly be written entitled At the Hands of Persons Known: A Century of Outrages against White America, with emphasis on the innocents who were robbed or raped or murdered or kidnapped, followed by a mere sentence or two about what happened to the accused. Of course, the very suggestion of that, under such a title, will seem outlandish; but the fact that it is a mirror image of Dray's own subtitle, The Lynching of Black America, shows just how selective and distorted is Dray's approach.
Unfortunately, the bias does not come only from a naive framing of the subject. Dray is committed to the left's view of American history, which has long since become the conventional view. His lengthy narrative account of a century of lynchings, dwelling primarily on those in the South, tells the story in easily readable fashion, and it is apparent that he has done considerable research into those parts of the story that he chooses to emphasize. Most readers, not predisposed to question the conventional account, will find the book yet another demonstration of how cruel, rapacious, and hypocritical white society has been and how much blacks have been the victims of that viciousness. Dray's book will especially help round out the education of young readers who are assigned the book in school.
There is so much lacking in Dray’s book that it is difficult to end this review. Before we conclude, however, it is worth noting that at no point is there an effort to understand, with any empathy at all, the concerns of white Americans in those years. They were, it seems, just inexplicably vicious.