Kidada Williams's study is unusual in that it focusses not on the perpetrators of racial violence, nor on those who organized to oppose it, but upon its victims, and witnesses. Williams draws upon a wealth of fresh primary material to tell their stories, including Congressional testimonies, newspaper accounts, and an enormous number of letters to government officials, US Presidents and the NAACP. Two of her findings are particularly significant. In the first place she emphasizes the pervasiveness of unspectacular, daily violence. Political massacres and lynchings are well known to historians but Williams demonstrates that acts of spontaneous and nonfatal violence were more common than spectacle killings. Everyday violence often originated in minor economic disputes. While whites often claimed that attacks were motivated by lack of due deference or sexual transgression, in many cases land was the reason. Joe Brown (Georgia, 1871) was ostensibly attacked for a relationship with a white woman, though his decision to outbid a white for the land he lived on was much more obviously the cause. In Williams's account, therefore, the 1880s emerge as a period of unabated racial violence. Second, she argues that by testifying to violence, victims laid claims to full citizenship and offered discursive resistance. Blacks took real risks to testify and to make their oppression known. Cuff Camara, for example, determined to report the rape of his wife, reached the Freedmen's Bureau in Sparta in 1866, bleeding from a gunshot wound, having slain three of the four dogs which were hot on his heels, as were the rapist and his friends. The result was hardly worth it. The jury convened to try the rapist for assault on Camara believed that he had “committed the greater crime by killing the dogs” (25). When the attempted rape in 1914 of Marie Scott led to her lynching, her brother only managed to testify to the facts once Pullman porters had smuggled him into Mexico. Williams tells many similar stories which are compelling in their restoration of a vernacular history of racial violence. Whites regularly slaughtered blacks who complained to civil authorities, or testified before grand jury investigations, and drove their families off their land. It was an extremely intimate form of violence. William Coleman (driven off his land in Mississippi in 1870) testified before Congress, and when asked if he could recognize his assailants replied, “Of course I did. I ought to know them, they were my neighbors” (39). But he did not get his land or livestock back and could never return. The investigation of the Exoduster movement was one of the last moments when federal officials provided a public forum for black testimony. After that, state silence was the norm, though blacks continued to bear witness, particularly in letters to the authorities, the President and the NAACP. These make miserable reading, in their juxtaposition of candid descriptions of everyday violence with a dignified, deferential tone. (Some are signed “your faithful servant.”) Some of these letters were filed by the Department of Justice under “subversive activities”; the majority appear to have gone unanswered, their complaints ignored.

White newspapers (memorably described by Charles Chesnutt as “noosepapers”) tended to be complicit with lynchings and violence; the role of the black press thus became extremely significant in opposing it and getting the facts into the public sphere. Readers, however, who do not have an intimate knowledge of black print culture will flounder here; Williams tends to assume that her reader can identify a black newspaper and know what sort of paper it was. This may be the case with the activist-edited Washington Bee or Richmond Planet, but not, perhaps, for the Arkansas Weekly Mansion or the Omaha Afro-American Sentinel. More details about their history would have been helpful. Indeed, one problem with the book is that the long chronology, weltering detail and chapters truncated into short sections leave little space for scene-setting, historiography or contextualization. Williams is not assisted by her style, which might most charitably be described as inelegant. Semi-sociological jargon does nothing for the argument (e.g. “black intersubjectivity” “black counterpublic sphere,” “enclave public sphere”) and at points meaning was obscured. Nonetheless it is worth persisting, and the book makes a valuable contribution to African American history.