Beyond The Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory

FEATURING KARLOS K. HILL – The Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative has just announced that it plans to erect a national memorial in Montgomery to mark the country’s ugly legacy of lynchings of African Americans. The memorial will be built alongside a brand new museum of American racial history.

The history of lynchings as most of us know it is a simplified version – one that centers racist white mobs brutally enacting violence and murder on black victims, often in view of large white crowds. But our narratives often do not include black resistance to lynchings, and indeed how the practice of lynchings became racialized in the first place.

Karlos K. Hill, Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University, specializing in the history of lynching and the anti-lynching movement in the US, author of Beyond The Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory.