Troubled ground : a tale of murder, lynching, and reckoning in the New South / Claude A. Clegg III.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Clegg, Claude A., III (Claude Andrew)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lynching--North Carolina--Salisbury--History--20th century.

Lynching.

African Americans--Violence against--North Carolina--Salisbury--History--20th century.

African Americans.

Murder--North Carolina--Salisbury--History--20th century.

Murder.

Rowan County (N.C.)--Race relations--History--20th century.

Rowan County (N.C.).

Physical Description:

xviii, 224 p. : ill., maps.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Troubled Ground, Claude A. Clegg III revisits a violent episode in his hometown's history that made national headlines in the early twentieth century but disappeared from public consciousness over the decades. Moving swiftly between memory and history, between the personal and the political, Clegg offers insights into southern history, mob violence, and the formation of American race ideology while coming to terms on a personal level with the violence of the past. Three black men were killed in front of a crowd of thousands in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1906, following the ax murder of a local white family for whom the men had worked. One of the lynchers was prosecuted for his role in the execution, the first conviction of its kind in North Carolina and one of the earliest in the country. Yet Clegg, an academic historian who grew up in Salisbury, had never heard of the case until 2002 and could not find anyone else familiar with the case. In this book, Clegg mines newspaper accounts and government records and links the victims of the 1906 case to a double-lynching in 1902, suggesting a complex history of lynching in the area while revealing the determination of the city to rid its history of a shameful and shocking chapter. The result is a multi-layered, deeply personal exploration of lynching and lynching prosecutions in the United States.

Contents:

Prologue : searching for a troubled past

Bygones

Old demons of the New South

The reaping

Presumed guilt

A blot upon the state

A reckoning

Epilogue : New South, Old South.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-283-60902-9

9786613921475

0-252-09009-8

OCLC:

768084141