American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture
By Sonya Lea
A Review by Dr. Dwight A. Moody
This book landed on my front porch August 14, precisely 90 years after the event it describes: the last public hanging in the United States. Sonya Lea wrote this book, in part because her grandparents were present at that event, August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. I bought it because my dad also was at the event. He was 13 years old; others were there: some say 20,000 and others put it at 10,000.
Lea details the events of the day and all that led up to the hanging: the forced entry, the murder, the rape, the theft, and the arrest a few days later of Rainey Bethea. It is not the first book on the subject, but it may be the best book to expand that narrative into an investigation of the much larger question of what she and others call Lynch Culture.
Not everybody was convinced the young man was guilty, especially those in the black community there and elsewhere. And there is strong and sustained critique of the legal processes that were employed to secure a conviction 18 days after the June 7 crime. A jury of 12 white men took 270 seconds to pronounce a verdict of guilty of rape. Almost every detail of the legal process would be grounds for dismissal or retrial today.
Rape was the only charge brought because it was the only one that allowed a public hanging. Which pushes the investigator into the much wider question of lynching in Kentucky and across the nation (and even into Canada, Lea’s adopted country).
But this book is more about Lea than Bethea. It is the story, first, of her discovery of her family’s presence at the hanging, second, of her growing awareness of the broad cultural traditions that ungirded the hanging of black men, especially in the American South, and third, of her emotional and intellectual struggle to envision a better future for her family, her community of origin (Owensboro), her two countries of residence.
At her grandmother’s funeral in Owensboro in 2002, she was handed a packet of material about her grandmother, Frances Ralph. “Two of those twenty thousand who came to watch the public execution were my grandparents, teenage newlyweds, Sherrel and Frances Ralph…. He was eighteen years old and she was nineteen. There, typed on the page, were my grandmother’s words: We were so close to him we heard his neck pop” (page 29).
What followed for Lea were two decades of discovery: of the racist traditions of Kentucky people and policies, before, during, and after the Civil War and before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. She read all about it, how often black men were hung (by sheriffs and by mobs) for raping white women and how rarely (if ever) anybody black or white was hung for raping black women.
“Lynch culture,” she writes, “is any act that upholds a system to make it easier to punish Indigenous, Black, and people of color (IBPOP) and other marginalized groups rather than to create and sustain a culture of justice” (60).
Thus, lynching is understood as more than a mob of angry men dragging a person from a house or jail and killing them for some perceived violation of written or unwritten norms. Lynching, Lea asserts, has been and is the work of officers and officials acting with legal authority just as much as it is the work of unruly mobs acting without legal authority. She writes: “The mob isn’t required if the state can be mobilized to enact racial terror through its laws, customs, and procedures” (67). In this regard, she adopts an understanding of Lynch Culture broadly embraced by many in the justice and reconciliation communities.
There are many illustrations of this culture of legal lynching and had Lea delayed her publication by just one more year (from 2025) she could have cited the tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the current federal administration. Or this: “Today more Black people are killed by police officers every five years than ever were lynched in America” (81). She begins the chapter where that is quoted with notice of the lynching in 1947 of Willie Earle, just 11 miles from where I write this review, and of the lynching in 2020 of Ahmaud Arbery, just 10 miles from the radio studio where I then worked in Glenn County, Georgia. These two, plus my dad at the Owensboro hanging, brought it all too close; and this: from 1991 to 1997, I was pastor of a church in Owensboro, situated just four blocks from the site of the rape and four blocks in the opposite direction from the site of the hanging. Lynch Culture surrounded me, hounded me.
Lea’s personal history of growing up in or near Owensboro, moving to Canada, then settling in Seattle pushed her to pull into her reckoning not just the Black community of rural Kentucky, but also the Indigenous communities of Canada and Washington; and the names, places, and issues arising from these realities occupy an increasingly prominent place in this book. But her personal history also pulled her through a search for truth and a season of grief into a resolve to seek reconciliation. “The antithesis of lynch culture is kinship,” she writes to open chapter six, the last of the book and the best of the book (120ff). She uses “kinship” to describe what I, as a minister, might call Shalom or Peaceable Kingdom (to quote the framed art in my study) or Beloved Community (to invoke the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr.) Lea largely avoids religious categories and language but the reality for which she longs—kinship with all living things in “webs of mutuality” (121)—is a reality many people the world over envision as the idealized past or future of all creation, often bound up in religious and spiritual constructs. Lea quotes adrienne marie brown to describe the antithesis of Lynch Culture: “We need to flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harm of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others” (125). As a preacher and a theologian, I say Amen to this!
“I’ve spent much of my adult life resisting connection to my extended Kentucky family and ancestors” (126). Thus, Lea begins the final pages of this dense and demanding book and then lays out an appropriate rationale for that strategy. But the drama surrounding the murder of Brenna Taylor in Louisville, where her sisters live, pulled her into a different frame of mind; and pulled her to Kentucky for an extended period of search and research, especially into the lingering dramas of her own family, punctuated by “physical violence, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, mental illness, addiction, war, immigration, child loss and other generational traumas ….” (137).
There is no escape, as we all learn at some point, from the cultures around us and within us, and we all must find a way to forge a way forward, through all the sin and shame that buries the grace and glory of life. For Lea, it includes connecting with her family, becoming an advocate for reparations for slavery, and creating somewhere in Owensboro a memorial for Rainey Bethea. It ends at a place I like, a place I have envisioned, a place with the power to counter this lingering culture of lynching.
Please, Lord, let it happen, and let it begin with us.
