philip dray at the hands of persons unknown

Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events-making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century. In his later work, Crane would confront an essential question: “How should a conscientious white person respond to the most egregious forms of racial prejudice?”Īn important historical study of a topic that remains sadly relevant. Wells and other activists as well as the fiction of Port Jervis–born Stephen Crane, whose brother had tried to intervene in the mob that lynched Lewis. In the second part of the book, Dray examines the shameful legal ramifications and the crusading anti-lynching work of journalist Ida B. After his death, the town’s citizens unfurled a host of justifications, but the author is diligent and rigorous in his depiction of the racial animosity undergirding the entire ordeal. Lewis, who had worked in town as a respected laborer, was accused of sexually assaulting a local young White woman, and Dray chronicles how Lewis would suffer the consequences of the toxic stew of rumors, gossip, and deeply ingrained racism that existed in Port Jervis. As the author shows throughout his riveting text, while the heinous crime “lacked the ritualistic staging typical of many Southern lynchings…it was grounded in the same white insecurities that characterized the practice in warmer climes.” Although only White (mainly newspaper) accounts of the lynching and aftermath remain in the record, the actual story, as the author unravels, was yet another example of a horrible mishandling of justice regarding a Black citizen.

In his latest, Dray-the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America and other works of American history-offers a cleareyed, powerful account of the lynching of Robert Lewis, a Black man, in the railroad town of Port Jervis, New York, amid a riot on June 2, 1892.

An award-winning historian investigates a shocking incident of “spontaneous vigilantism” that “was seen as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward.”

Philip dray at the hands of persons unknown