At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Lynching, the extrajudicial punishment inflicted by vigilantes and mobs  on often innocent victims, was far from an unusual occurrence, though some  historians have depicted it as such. Instead, writes Philip Dray, lynching was  part of a "systematized reign of terror that was used to maintain the power  whites had over blacks." Drawing on records held at the Tuskegee Institute, Dray  argues that from 1882 until 1952, not a single year passed without a recorded  lynching somewhere in the United States, most often in the Deep South and  Mississippi Delta regions. This violent "justice," meted out "at the hands of  persons unknown" (with, therefore, no possibility of attaching guilt to the  perpetrators, though, as Dray points out, such seemingly spontaneous events  required organization and planning) held African American communities in terror  and was one force behind the exodus of black southerners to the north in the  late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dray's extraordinary study reveals a pattern  of crime against humanity, one that, he writes, diminished gradually for various  reasons, not least of them the work of reformers and ordinary citizens "who knew  we were too good to be a nation of lynchers."--Gregory McNamee--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.