Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture

American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture

Lea, Sonya

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralRegional: South

Publisher Price: $29.95

ISBN10: 1985902850
ISBN13: 9781985902855
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: Oct 7 2025
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.70 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

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 white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging--the last documented public execution in the United States--into a brutal carnival.

Bethea's story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's 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.

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