Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott has won the 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment Best Book Award.
The Ottis Lock Endowment Awards are awarded by the East Texas Historical Association annually in the Fall for excellence in teaching and publishing.
In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.
“This original and revealing examination,” writes Thomas C. Holt, “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.”
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.