At The Hands Of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.

• Author: Coates, Ta-Nehisi
• Position: Strange Fruit

AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN: The Lynching of Black America by Philip Dray Random House, $29.95

IF YOU NOW FIND YOURSELF obsessed, in the wake of September 11, with the possibilities of other heinous acts, if you feel like a target for zealotry and extremism, if you are now doubting your government's ability to protect you, then you are getting an idea of what it has felt like to be African-American for a good part of this country's history.

Those parallels, and the feeling of dread, and their lingering influence on black Americans' attitudes towards police and other authorities, are dramatically evoked in a new book by Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown. The book is a thorough history of mob violence directed against African-Americans over nearly a century after the end of slavery, starting in 1886 and not truly ending until 1964, when the last known mob-directed lynching occurred with explicit assistance and approval from local police officials.

Dray has created a complex portrait of an American--particularly Southern--tradition of publicly murdering African-Americans, drawing on documents collected at the Tuskegee Institute known as the Lynching Archives. The typical lynching started with a fabricated report of a white woman ravished by a black man. A mob usually gathered and some previously anonymous black male was put to death in some excruciating way, thus restoring the honor of the befouled dame.

As a narrative, the book draws its power from the sheer barbarity of lynching. Through Dray's eyes we see thousands of victims dying in the most gruesome ways. We also see some of America's most celebrated institutions, along with the country's own mythologies about race and sex, conjuring a shadow of terror that would forever haunt black America.

Dray's book begins with America's beginning. He traces lynching to some of its earliest manifestations during the Revolutionary War and to Virginia justice of the peace Charles Lynch, for whom the practice was later named. A Quaker banned from religious meetings due to his foul tongue, Lynch set up makeshift courts that routinely sentenced suspected horse thieves to flogging during the war. Suspected British sympathizers were often jailed or tied to trees, whipped, and made to yell "Liberty Forever." In a shadow of things to come, Lynch was sued after the war ended by some who had been subjected to his brand of justice and were later acquitted at trial. Lynching not only has its roots...