American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture

By Sonya Lea

"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 hangingthe last documented public execution in the United Statesinto 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. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's hanging."--Provided by publisher.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1985902850
• ISBN13: 9781985902855
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 9.1"