Troubled Ground
A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
In Troubled Ground, Claude A. Clegg III revisits a violent episode in his hometown’s history that made national headlines in the early twentieth century but disappeared from public consciousness over the decades. Moving swiftly between memory and history, between the personal and the political, Clegg offers insights into southern history, mob violence, and the formation of American race ideology while coming to terms on a personal level with the violence of the past.
Three black men were killed in front of a crowd of thousands in Salisbury, North Carolina, in 1906, following the ax murder of a local white family for whom the men had worked. One of the lynchers was prosecuted for his role in the execution, the first conviction of its kind in North Carolina and one of the earliest in the country. Yet Clegg, an academic historian who grew up in Salisbury, had never heard of the case until 2002 and could not find anyone else familiar with the case.
In this book, Clegg mines newspaper accounts and government records and links the victims of the 1906 case to a double-lynching in 1902, suggesting a complex history of lynching in the area while revealing the determination of the city to rid its history of a shameful and shocking chapter. The result is a multi-layered, deeply personal exploration of lynching and lynching prosecutions in the United States.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clegg, an Indiana University Professor of History, spies a century-old photograph of a lynching that occurred in his hometown, Salisbury, N.C., and is driven to write a book about it, seemingly solely for the academic reader. In his epilogue, Clegg notes without irony that North Carolina finally co-sponsored a symbolic U.S. Senate resolution apologizing to victims of lynching nearly a century later. Although Clegg explains that lynchings were designed to cower and harm blacks, North Carolina's lynchings still sound excessively harsh. Clegg spares no detail and the faint of heart or stomach should beware. Eventually he turns to the lynchings in the photograph, where six black men were charged with the murder of a local white family; three of them were immediately lynched. The book is crammed with historical information (the Appendix, Chapter notes, and Bibliography occupy 37 pages), but unlike masterful historians, Clegg eschews the vivid descriptions that would have brought his book to larger life. Instead there is detail, perhaps too much.
