The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South

Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. In just the same era when a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

About the Author :
Michael A. Trotti is professor of history at Ithaca College. He is the author of The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South.

Review :
"The End of Public Execution significantly contributes to understanding the history of capital punishment and the South. . . . Histories like this one make it impossible to deny that capital punishment in the United States has been inseparable from a legacy of white supremacy and provide compelling arguments for ending the practice."-Reading Religion "[Trotti's] triangular focus on race, religion, and public spectacles of violence is thought-provoking, intuitively written, and striking."--Journal of Church and State "[Trotti] weaves a wholly unexpected story for how the New South ended up at the electric chair. His narrative, backed by extensive evidence and data drawn from 1,300 executions carried out in the former Confederate states between the end of the Civil War and 1936, is less a story of the consolidation of state power through technological and political means than a history driven by the agency of Southern African Americans resisting a paranoid and reactive state."--The Civil War Monitor "Impressive . . . . Trotti's work not only fills a gap in the literature but also upends long-held assumptions that have guided the scholarship of those studying extralegal punishment."--Journal of American History "Recommended . . . . Trotti employs both quantitative and qualitative evidence to support his conclusions, and his detailed analyses of various datasets and statistics are particularly impressive."--CHOICE "There is no doubt that Trotti's study is a seminal and highly readable intervention in a scholarly conversation that is very much in need of fresh methodological, theoretical and quantitative exploration."-Journal of Social History "This excellent book will be useful to scholars in a variety of fields, particularly those in southern history, religious history, African American history, and the history of crime and punishment."-Journal of Southern History "This focused study opens up vital questions about religion, public space, and punishment in American life and brings an ignored archive into view for American religion."--American Religion "Trotti's book is a fascinating study of the subversive power of communal faith."--The Christian Century "With this book, Trotti has set the stage for a new kind of history (and history of the present) of the death penalty in the United States. The book is detailed in its depiction of executions and yet broad in its theoretical as well as historical implications . . . . an important book in more ways than one."--Church History