Борьба с линчеванием. Судебные процессы в расовой бинарной системе судов США, 1942–1958 гг.Fighting Lynching. Lawsuits in the United States Courts' Racial Binary System, 1942-1958

Lynching scholarship in the last decade has displayed a meaningful cultural turn, with much recent attention given to the relationship between mob violence and different patterns of cruel behavior. However, the most significant contribution of the recent scholarship on postbellum southern lynching has been to provide a much fuller sense of African American responses to lynching, which ranged from testimony to armed self-defense, institutional activism, and artistic representation. Much lynching scholarship has, in fact, tended to focus more on the structure and context of racial violence than on its impact on African American communities. More recent works have instead highlighted the complexity of African American responses to white violence, which concerned deference to defiance and included self-improvement, exodus, and armed self-defense. This dissertation intends to fit into this more recent literature to deepen our understanding of Black responses to lynching. Through the analysis of the Black activist's appeals to Federal Courts, African American print culture, and letters and testimony of "ordinary people" - members of the African American community who had experienced or been otherwise affected by white violence - the aim is to reveal a consistent African American legal counter-narrative that exposed the ways white people infringed Black people's rights. On the other hand, in order to understand the brutal violence African Americans faced, the research will also ask how white people could justify racial lynching.