At the Hands of Persons Unknown

"It is easy to shrink from our country's brutal history of lynching. Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation's closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but deep scars to this day.

The cost of pushing lynching into the shadows, however - misremembering it as isolated acts perpetrated by bigots on society's fringes - is insupportably high: Until we understand how pervasive and socially accepted the practice was - and, more important, why this was so - it will haunt all efforts at racial reconciliation.".

"The celebrated historian Philip Dray shines a clear, bright light on this dark history - its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. He also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the love of justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual's sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history - and makes the history of lynching belong to us all."--BOOK JACKET.