“American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture ” Author Visit

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Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Betheas hanging—the last documented public execution in the United States—into a brutal carnival. Betheas story came to author Sonya Lea through her family. At her grandmothers funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, discovered that two of the spectators at Betheas execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Leas research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Betheas hanging. American Bloodlines combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapplewith our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes.