Lynching in Virginia
Racial Terror and Its Legacy
Edited by Gianluca De Fazio. Afterword by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Series:
Uncovering the history and examining the legacy of lynching in the state of Virginia
Although not as associated with lynching as other southern states, Virginia has a tragically extensive history with these horrific crimes. This important volume examines the more than one hundred people who were lynched in Virginia between 1866 and 1932. Its diverse set of contributors—including scholars, journalists, activists, and students—recover this wider history of lynching in Virginia, interrogate its legacy, and spotlight contemporary efforts to commemorate the victims of racial terror across the commonwealth. Together, their essays represent a small part of the growing effort to come to terms with the role Virginia played in perpetuating America’s national shame.
An important contribution. The editor and authors have shed new light on mob violence and Virginia, most notably in their treatment of recent memorial efforts in the state, and the ways in which the criminal justice system interacted with lynch mobs and their goals.- Michael J. Pfeifer, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, author of Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947
Riveting and brilliantly detailed, Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and Its Legacy successfully pulls back the curtains on its manufactured reputation as a racially harmonious state to reveal the realities of life for Black Virginians from 1890 through the 1930s. Few photographs survive documenting the lives of those who were mercilessly murdered in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Yet, each of the contributors to this edited volume crafts a narrative that allows the reader to visualize those individuals, reclaiming their humanity and indicting a system that allowed racialized terror to exist unfettered for decades in Virginia. And although Virginia had a relatively small number of lynchings, especially compared to Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, the state created an informal police state where 'threatened and legal lynchings' abounded. This important work beautifully weaves the stories of those who lost their lives to lynching at a time when Virginia’s authorities were often complicit in their deaths. Readers beware because the stories are raw and full of human emotion. And at the center is the untold tragedy that continues to impact the lives of their descendants and the communities in which these experiences occurred.- Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Norfolk State University, author of Virginia Waterways and the Underground Railroad
A needed volume of community-oriented public history that draws Virginia into an important conversation about the South, complicating, extending, and enriching a dialog that is as essential for understanding the past as it is for charting a path forward.- Seth Kotch, University of North Carolina, author of Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina
- The Journal of Southern HistoryThis excellent collection is successful in its goals of memorializing the victims of past violence, showing how mob violence created a pervasive system of racial terror, and highlighting the efforts of many Virginians to make meaning of these events for current and future generations—this last goal is perhaps its most valuable contribution.
Gianluca De Fazio is Associate Professor of Justice Studies at James Madison University.
