"A BENEDICTION TO THE SKIES": NEW WORKS ON AMERICAN LYNCHING

[...]they raised a Sabbath song, The echo sounded wild and strong, A benediction to the skies That crowned the human sacrifice" -Walter Everette Hawkins, "A Festival of Christendom" (1920) Midway through his powerful and poetic book on lynching and the African American religious experience, black liberation theologian James H. Cone offers an eloquent reflection on Walter Everette Hawkins' poem "A Festival of Christendom." Pfeifer identifies the tension between due process and the formal administration of justice, on the one hand, and, on the other, popular justice beyond the purview of the courts as one of the most important aspects of nineteenth-century legal culture. [...]the practice [of lynching]... can best be understood as a specific cultural response to the ambiguities of legal change, especially concerns over the efficacy of formal criminal justice, in particular times and places" (p. 4). Like recent studies of lynching photography, or of spectacle lynchings as a form of performance theater, Mitchell's exploration of black lynching dramas, the social issues they raised, and the community conversations they inspired serve to challenge scholars to draw wider and deeper connections between African American culture and efforts to challenge lynching and mob violence at the dawn of the American century.