Dine & Dialogue – American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture

Register

Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea’s hanging—the last documented public execution in the United States—into a brutal carnival.

Bethea’s story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. American Bloodlines combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes.

Sonya Lea is the author of the memoir Wondering Who You Are, which garnered praise from Oprah Magazine, People, and the BBC. She teaches at workshops and creates writing retreats in the US and Canada. Her essays have appeared in Salon, Southern Review, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Ms. magazine, among others.

The Filson is pleased to welcome Nikki Lanier, JD, founder and CEO of Harper Slade Advisors and former senior vice president, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, as our special guest interviewer.