In this short book, Karlos Hill surveys the varied and complex ways African Americans responded to lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter tackles a particular form of engagement or response, often using case studies to do so. Although other scholars have addressed particular forms of black response in book- and article-length studies, Hill provides a compact synthesis that will be useful for nonspecialists. He draws upon interdisciplinary methods, from social history to literary criticism, to conclude that black attitudes toward lynching have been “fluid and contingent” (5), shifting in light of political, social, and cultural circumstances.

Before lynching became a racialized practice in the 1890s, black vigilantism was not uncommon. Hill examines black-on-black lynchings in the Mississippi–Arkansas delta regions in the 1880s, where African Americans used lynching to control violent crime in their communities in the face of a justice system that routinely ignored crimes committed against them. Black vigilantism declined, however, as lynching increasingly came to serve as a form of racial control, rather than social control. The primary black response to lynching at that point became resistance. That resistance took the form of both local actions to protect potential victims of lynching and national campaigns to push for federal antilynching legislation. Here, Hill uses two case studies. He first relates the story of Steve Green, who, with the help of friends and relatives, fled to Chicago after he was accused of murdering a local white planter in Arkansas in 1910. Activists launched a legal campaign to prevent his extradition from Illinois when he was apprehended, which not only saved his life, but also served as a springboard for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's antilynching campaign. Hill then delves into the story of Henry Lowery, whose lynching in 1921, also for the murder of a white planter in Arkansas, became a cause cèlèbre for the NAACP in their lobbying efforts for antilynching legislation. In both cases, Hill argues those who resisted lynching relied upon what he calls “victimization narratives” (5). These narratives, which emphasized the barbarism of white mobs and the suffering of their victims, effectively countered white prolynching narratives of black deviance and savagery.

As a counterpart to “victimization narratives,” many African American writers created what Hill calls “consoling narratives,” which emphasized black empowerment in the face of suffering (5). These narratives, apparent in the work of authors such as Ida B. Wells, Claude McKay, Sutton Griggs, and Richard Wright, placed attention on the lynching victim's courage and dignity, suggesting, as McKay does in his 1921 poem “If We Must Die,” that “suffering a violent death does not necessarily victimize; rather, how one responds to violence determines whether one was victimized or not” (71). Such narratives contributed to broader ideals of black masculine heroism in African American culture. Consoling narratives also celebrated acts of black resistance, from nonviolent political agitation to armed resistance. These cultural forms, Hill argues, provided African Americans solace, while also inspiring civil rights activism. Hill finds similar tropes in African American memories of lynching, as evidenced in oral-history interviews of black southerners who lived through the lynching era, conducted in the 1990s as part of Duke University's Behind the Veil project. In their remembrances of lynching, black southerners often transformed a traumatic history into stories of black innocence and agency.

Hill's conclusions, while straightforward, are often incisive. One only wishes that he had expounded more on the many implications and ramifications of these various literary, political, and personal responses to lynching. His concluding remarks on the Black Lives Matter movement and its relation to these histories of resistances were especially, and frustratingly, brief.