Author Michael Ayers Trotti in conversation with historians about his new book which focuses on the shift from public executions, situated in lynching and competing visions of justice and religion.
"Trotti demonstrates how African Americans subverted the didactic component of 'legal' executions and transformed an expression of white authority and terror into a potentially redemptive ceremony. A timely contribution to African American, southern, religious, and criminal justice history."
-- Jeffrey S. Adler, author of Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing
Speakers
Welcome
Claire Gleitman, Dean, School of Humanities and Sciences, Ithaca College
Salute to the Book
Amy Louise Wood, Illinois State University and fellow at the National Humanities Center
Presenter
Michael Ayers Trotti, author and Professor of History, Ithaca College
Interviewer
Carole Emberton, University at Buffalo
Join the Conversation!
Michael Trotti in conversation with Carole Emberton
Tuesday, April 4, 7 pm.
On Zoom
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://ithaca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYldOmpqzIoHNdsVHrQy9yboKVlbEz3UPDt
cosponsored by the Park Center for Independent Media and The Edge
ABOUT THE BOOK
Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936.
This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities.
Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion.
In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.
