P116 American Bloodlines

American Bloodlines, Reckoning with Lynch Culture 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.

Summer 1936, Owensboro Kentucky.
In just four and a half minutes, an all white, all male jury convicts Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, of the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. 
Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in the last documented public execution in America.
Bethea's story comes to author Sonya Lea, who was born in Owensboro, through her family. She reckons with its truths and the broader implications of systemic racism, not just in the past, but in today's culture, politics and justice systems.

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