Terry Anne Scott is Director of the Institute for Common Power. She is a former associate professor of American history and Chair of the History Department at Hood College. Dr. Scott is the editor of Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City.

"This original and revealing examination of the puzzling practices and discourses that framed lynching as a leisure activity reveals a fundamental shift in the character of racial violence in the early twentieth century. A must-read for understanding how ordinary people could perpetrate the most barbaric racial atrocities."
--Thomas C. Holt, author of The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights

"Terry Anne Scott speaks directly to our current moment by insisting that white supremacy infects every aspect of American life. Through painstaking archival data and vivid, gruesome storytelling, Scott explodes misconceptions about recreation and pleasure in modern times. Lynching and Leisure is a spectacular revelation, showing how violence, justice, technology, fun, and profit bleed together to serve those in power. In the tradition of Ida B. Wells and legions of Black journalists, Scott documents these atrocities with courage and candor."
--Ellen D. Wu, author of The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority

"Lynching and Leisure is a deeply researched and superbly crafted study of the extralegal, and illegal, execution of African Americans--an American mortal sin. This book is a must-read for anyone immersed in the evolving historical literature concerning race relations in America."
--Kenneth M. Hamilton, author of Booker T. Washington in American Memory

"Terry Anne Scott's Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas is a painful, important book. In it, Scott explores the lynching of Black Texans from the wake of Reconstruction to the 1940s, assembling a record of anti-Black racist atrocities in Texas--atrocities that remain undercounted to this day. ... Scott's detailed analysis of lynching as leisure, and all that that meant for white Texans, makes Lynching and Leisure a valuable addition to the literature on lynching specifically, and racist violence generally."
--Simon Balto, The Journal of Southern History, May 2023

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Pub date: 2022-07-19

Length: 400 pages