The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South by Michael Ayers Trotti (review)

Reviewed by: The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South by Michael Ayers Trotti Seth Kotch (bio) The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South. By Michael Ayers Trotti. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 266. Cloth, 99. 00; paper, 32. 95. ) At a time when the white gaze of the academy bores into the bodies left behind by the struggle and slaughter of Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow, it takes a particularly keen and sensitive eye to see the humanity at the center of an overwhelming vision of grief. This book, which examines 1, 200 southern counties to understand the experience of public hangings—and then the transition of those hangings from public to private—is keen and sensitive, in its regard both for the scholarship around capital punishment and lynching and for the people of the region. As Trotti attends to this history, he more broadly explores southern religion, white supremacy, and racism in the southern criminal justice system. Crucially, he thinks on the page about the tools historians use to understand these histories. End Page 279 Trotti dug into a huge number of national, regional, state, and local newspapers; government documents; manuscript collections; the scholarly literature on race, violence, and religion in the South; and contemporaneously published books, such as the work of Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Thomas Nelson Page, whose vicious racism condemned Blackness on and off the gallows. The balance of primary and secondary sources, and Trotti's nuanced engagement with the national and regional conversation—or, more accurately, racist harangues and under-read rebuttals—will make this book particularly useful in the undergraduate and graduate classroom. Evangelical Christianity, "filled with blood and sacrifice" (9), offered an object model for the dramatic public hangings that endured well into the Gilded Age in the South. The Black observers in the mixed-race crowds would often see the condemned person (most often a Black man) as a martyr, and they attended his hanging not to condemn his crime but to celebrate his ascension to a heavenly roost. That condemned man often understood his central role in the process as a Christ figure reminding his community not only of their inevitable sin but also of their inevitable salvation. That salvation came to those condemned for murder as well as for rape and burglary, both capital crimes in the South long after they were abandoned as such elsewhere. The riotous, even jubilant crowds at what Trotti calls "uncivil executions" rankled white elites (103), who preferred a cowed Black populace to one that co-opted their solemn rituals. Those elites used their soapboxes and political power to begin to push executions indoors, where they could be tamped down and segregated. Trotti follows the method he used in an earlier article on counting lynchings1 and applies it to legal execution, revealing wide differences in the number of legal executions recorded across different data sets. Recent studies continue to add executions to the South's count, where the executions of African Americans represent both the largest data set and the largest incomplete data set. The new counts Trotti brings together here as much as double the execution rate, especially in the years immediately after the Civil War. Trotti draws attention to the chilling fact that while executions were racially discriminatory across the United States, "the simple fact is that almost all African Americans to die legally from the noose did so in the South" (93). These executions were a "steady, constant exercise of state power" (102). Trotti also grapples with the long effort to explain the relationship between capital punishment and lynching, or to even find the right language to describe it. He looks to the audiences to find key differences between the two related practices: that the crowds at lynchings were all or End Page 280 mostly white (this was true also of later private executions) and occasionally as enraged as a mob, whereas the crowds at public executions were mixed and often looked more like a congregation. The transition to private, state-run executions that took place in the early twentieth century. . .