Capital punishment is still a hot-button issue in society today, with a history that is long and complex. It’s also an issue that resonates differently in different parts of the country and has a racial skew. Understanding how all those aspects intersect provides a valuable view of the history of our country and how those things still influence our justice system today.
Michael Trotti’s latest book, The End of Public Execution, examines how and why capital punishment went from a public event to an occurrence carried out behind prison walls. Tracing the evolution of legal executions—particularly those of Black Americans—in the southern United States from the 1850s to the 1930s, the book considers the power dynamics at play during this time period. Approximately 85% of those executed in the South in this era were Black men.
“Public executions would happen in fields—sometimes called ‘amphitheaters’ in the press—in front of thousands of people,” said Trotti, who is a professor of history at Ithaca College. “There would be a minister—who would be Black when the condemned was Black—saying a prayer and leading the ‘congregation’ in a hymn, and the prisoner would make a speech. It tended to be a religious event celebrating a person who was a sinner and who had repented. In the era when whites and Blacks were increasingly segregated from each other in public transportation, cultural events, and more, at these executions, the African Americans on the scaffold had public authority in front of huge mixed-race crowds.”
Over time, southern states began to take back that authority. Because whites were in control of the governments and the laws, they were also able to control the executions, and they went from public to private over the late 19th and early 20th centuries while also moving away from being local events to ones being run by the states themselves.
Although Trotti’s book allows readers to gain a deeper understanding of a critical issue, he also hopes that readers take away a deeper understanding of the challenges that go into producing a thoroughly researched book about a time period when official records and accounts often did not paint a complete picture of the events. “This book is also about the research process,” he said. “I gathered a lot of my information from newspapers, as well as public court records and legislative journals. I spent time analyzing statistics and looking into the backgrounds of white supremacists.”
But even with that wide-ranging approach, Trotti recognizes the limitations of the research he was able to conduct. “I would have loved to have had more sources from African American publications,” he said. “But Black newspapers were published weekly not daily, and because of that, they rarely covered these executions.”
While this book covers a specific time period in a specific part of the country, Trotti believes that there are lessons that can be drawn from the history in its pages. “It’s an issue that matters now, and not just because of the headlines every year about executions, death row exonerations, the continuing racial skew in the population on death row, and more,” he said. “In some ways, the white supremacist concepts from the past still inform our debates about the legal system today.”