In the late nineteenth century, a black man was lynched in the American South approximately once a week. Since then, hundreds of books across several disciplines have sought to explain this bloodshed, and it sometimes seems that there is little more to add to our understanding of the lynching of black men in the South during the “nadir.” Indeed, the most recent trend in lynching scholarship has been to rethink the spatial, chronological, and racial boundaries of America's history of violence.Footnote ¹

However, in Lynched, Amy Bailey and Stewart Tolnay refocus our attention on the southern states between 1880 and 1930, and demonstrate that there are indeed new questions to be asked about this dark period in southern history. The book's emphasis is on the victims of racial violence, as Bailey and Tolnay seek to reclaim the humanity of those black men who were lynched by revealing their individual characteristics. Using a statistical methodology, the authors ask whether “certain ‘kinds’ of men [were] more likely to be targeted in specific ‘kinds’ of communities” (1). This is a project that is only feasible with modern technology, most importantly the searchable digital records made available through Ancestry.com and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) in the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Using these resources, Bailey and Tolnay were able to locate lynching victims in the US Census and some military records, and to compare their characteristics to samples of the general population in the relevant county. As a historian trained in archival rather than statistical methodologies, I am not qualified to comment on the data collection or analysis (although I find no reason to question the rigour of this work). Bailey and Tolnay were able to locate 42·3 percent of the 2,483 lynching victims in the Beck–Tolnay inventory (56), which is impressive (but also leaves one wondering about the lives and characteristics of the majority of lynching victims).

Though most of the book deals with (occasionally rather dry) statistical analysis, the authors are careful to include, where possible, detailed information about the lives of certain lynching victims. These are some of the most engaging passages, as Bailey and Tolnay achieve their goal of giving these men back their identities. For example, all we previously knew about James Clark, who was lynched in Florida in 1926, was that he was a black man accused of an unknown crime. Bailey and Tolnay reveal that he was thirty-seven years old, that he was married to a woman called Mary, and that they had three young children (Charlie, Elizabeth, and James Jr.). James and Mary could read and write, and he worked as a labourer in a foundry. These additional glimpses into the lives of lynching victims like James Clark lead Bailey and Tolnay to conclude that victims were not chosen at random from the black population, but nevertheless were a heterogeneous group.

Their painstaking data analysis enables Bailey and Tolnay to evaluate historians’ competing claims that those black men lynched were either lower-status, marginal men, with few ties to the community (who were therefore accused of criminal behaviour), or higher-status, successful individuals clearly embedded in their community (and who were therefore regarded as challenging the racial hierarchy). Bailey and Tolnay demonstrate that both marginality and success could lead to a greater vulnerability to lynching, depending on the local community context. That is, it was black men who in some way “stood out as an exception” (147) who were the most likely to be victimized by the mob.

This is a remarkable book that adds a great deal to our understanding of lynching in the South, and will be required reading for anyone interested in American racial violence, although it is not without its limitations. Bailey and Tolnay include a short chapter on “atypical victims” (women and white men), but there is much more research to be done on lynching victims who were not black men in the South, especially Mexicans, Native Americans, and immigrants, as well as beyond the tight time frame of 1880–1930. There are also records to be considered beyond those available digitally; these victims’ stories could likely be supplemented by in-depth archival research. It would be unfair to have expected Bailey and Tolnay to complete a book of such scope, however, and they openly acknowledge the narrow parameters of their project. As such, this book will mark the beginning, rather than the end, of new scholarship on lynching victims in the United States.