How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children: Stacey Patton on Strung Up

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Couple of days ago, we did a show with, a very provocative professor of literature, Joseph Kelly, who teaches at the College of Charleston. Kelly has a new book out. It's quite a hit, very controversial. The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818 to 1915, in which he defines American history in terms of race and racism, white racism, and the, the victimhood, if that's the right word, of black Americans. And we're going one step further today. If Kelly's book is controversial, the book that we're discussing today is even more controversial. It's called Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children. I'm not sure who came up with that subtitle, but it's authored by my guest today, Stacey Patton, very popular journalist, university professor. She has over 50,000 followers on Substack. I'm rather envious, Stacey. Congratulations if that's the right word on the new book. Did you come up with that subtitle, how white America learned to lynch black children?

00:01:46 Stacey Patton: Yes. I did. The full title, subtitle, as well. The point was to demonstrate how lynching, is a social, process. I emerged from a fundamental shift that I had in my research where I started out investigating what white America did to black children. But as I examined things like photographs, and other documents, I began to ask a, you know, a different question. What happened to the people who participated in lynching? So I realized that racial violence wasn't just an expression of hatred. It was something that was a learned cultural practice inherited from centuries of European traditions of violence against children and got transformed through slavery and transmitted across generations.

00:02:42 Andrew Keen: Centuries of European violence against children. Could you be a little more specific? What kinds of European violence? Are there particular countries or cultures or religions that are particularly guilty of this?

00:02:57 Stacey Patton: So I would say that when I say white America learned to lynch black children, I'm making a historical argument about the transmission of violence across centuries. So Americans did not invent the public spectacle of killing children. Europeans had centuries of experiment, of experience with public executions, judicial torture, religious persecution, and the public punishment of children. So in parts of medieval and early modern Europe, children could be prosecuted, imprisoned, whipped [unclear], and even executed. So public punishment was theater. So communities gathered to witness suffering, and children themselves were often among the spectators. So when Europeans crossed the Atlantic, they didn't leave those cultural practices behind. They brought their understandings of punishment, spectacle, religious authority, and the public display of power, with them.

00:04:03 Andrew Keen: Stacey, we've done lots of shows on the idea of childhood historically, philosophically. And one of the themes that often come up, and you're much more, I'm sure, familiar with this than I am, is the idea of the notion of childhood or at least the innocence of childhood as a modern phenomenon, maybe as a consequence of the Enlightenment, the idea that we're born as empty slates. Would it be fair to say that the cultural practices that you describe were born in a world where children were seen as, were seen as not empty slates, but somehow reflecting either good or evil. In other words, that the cultural practices that you talk about in Strung Up don't reflect how we think about childhood in the early twenty-first century. I'm not suggesting there's any excuse for it, but I wonder whether, childhood or our notions of childhood and indeed punishment and innocence have changed, over the last few centuries.

00:05:19 Stacey Patton: So childhood is not a modern invention. What developed more fully during, let's say, the Enlightenment was a particular ideal of childhood as a protected period of innocence and vulnerability and moral development. So in medieval and early modern Christian Europe, children were often understood through this doctrine of original sin, were born in sin. They were not necessarily regarded as innocent blank slates. They were believed to inherit a fallen human nature, and so they required moral discipline, religious instruction, physical correction, and that worldview helped to make harsh punishments of children something that was culturally intelligible. So a child could be understood not simply as immature, but, morally culpable, capable of wickedness, deserving of punishment. So the Enlightenment complicated that understanding. So you take, say John Locke, who emphasized like the formative power of experience and education while, you know, Rousseau argues that children possess this natural goodness that society could corrupt. But those newer ideals of innocence and protection were never distributed equally. And, and that's where my book makes it's what I think an important intervention. So even as white Americans increasingly celebrated this thing we call childhood innocence, they were also constructing a racial system that denied black children the protections associated with that innocence. So a white child could be imagined as this precious being to be nurtured while black childhood— Like a black child could be enslaved or sold, beaten, or killed. So I think the question isn't simply when Americans discover childhood innocence, it's how they learn to make innocence racially, conditional. There is one thing I would caution, though. So Philippe, the famous, Philippe Ariès, famously argued that childhood was essentially a modern construction, but subsequent historians have come behind him and have challenged that sweeping claim. So medieval people also loved, protected, and grieved over their— I think the stronger argument is that the meanings of childhood changed historically and were distributed unequally and also racialized.

00:08:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Recently, we also did a show with the historian Andrew Curran, who has an interesting new book out, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, in which he roots the idea of race and, therefore, of course, of racism in the Enlightenment, very much part of a European tradition. I guess, in a way, you're sharing Curran's genealogy of race.

00:08:31 Stacey Patton: And in what way do you think?

00:08:34 Andrew Keen: Well, you're suggesting that, it was a direct descendant of Europe, maybe even the Enlightenment, not an aberration. Is that fair?

00:08:46 Stacey Patton: I think so.

00:08:48 Andrew Keen: Which is obviously quite controversial.

00:08:51 Stacey Patton: Yes. So— Yes. I would say yes. So I am tracing a genealogy of race itself, not simply a genealogy of racial violence. Right? So the Enlightenment, I think, is central to that argument because it helps to give older European hierarchies a kind of new intellectual and maybe supposedly scientific legitimacy. So what I'm arguing is that American racism didn't emerge out of nowhere. It has a European genealogy. Europeans arrived in the Americas carrying centuries of religious beliefs about human difference, about what civilization is, savagery, purity, moral worth, childhood. So the Enlightenment didn't invent those hierarchies, but it helped reorganize them. So thinkers who, let's say, celebrated things like reason or liberty or natural rights and universal humanity, we're also participating in an intellectual world that increasingly classified human beings into these racial categories and rank populations according to those so-called natural differences. And here, I think is the extraordinary contradiction, the, the, the same intellectual world that helped elevate childhood innocence also helped construct racial hierarchies that determine which children were entitled to that innocence. And that con— That contradiction is fundamental, absolutely fundamental to how white Americans could revere their own children while enslaving, brutalizing, and lynching black children. And I think that distinction is really worth emphasizing because race was not simply invented during the Enlightenment. European colonialism and slavery had already helped construct racial categories.

00:10:55 Andrew Keen: Right. And Jefferson, of course, a lot of this sort of climaxes, if that's the right word—

00:10:56 Stacey Patton: Yes.

00:11:01 Andrew Keen: With Thomas Jefferson, of course, a man of many different contradictions. So are you saying, Stacey, this is obviously very controversial and also extremely interesting and provocative, that nineteenth-century America or pre-twentieth-century America was marked by two completely different conceptions of childhood. On the one hand, the kind of Lockean idea of childhood innocence, which the whites got, and then the medieval European idea of the sin of the child and the punishment of children, which tended to get heaped on children of color. Is that what you're saying?

00:11:48 Stacey Patton: So let's see. How do I start this? Yes. So I agree that it's a very provocative argument, but it is historically defensible. If you frame it as two competing traditions of childhood rather than two completely separate conceptions. So you take nineteenth-century America, who inherited this— These two intellectual traditions. So one, was the older Christian conception of the child as being fallen or born in sin, marked by original sin, requiring discipline, correction, moral restraint, all of that stuff. The other emerges from Enlightenment thought and developed through the nineteenth century, through this kind of sentimental culture. So the idea that the child is impressionable, that it's developing, it's vulnerable, and it's increasingly deserving of nurture and protection. But I think the— There's an important distinction here. So Locke's child was not necessarily innocent. Locke's emphasis was on the child's formation through experience and education. Rousseau is more closely associated with the ideal of natural childhood innocence. So these traditions coexisted and overlapped. So white children too were subjected to corporal punishment and religious discipline. So the double isn't absolute. What I am showing is how race shaped the application of these competing ideas. So you take— I don't know if you're familiar with Robin Bernstein, who's a historian, I believe she's at Harvard. She writes about a book called Racial Innocence. So, Bernstein makes this argument, that nineteenth-century American culture increasingly associated innocence with white childhood while excluding black children from that ideal. So I guess you could formulate it this way. So nineteenth-century America was caught between these two traditions of childhood. One that saw children as morally fallen beings who need all this punishment and correction, and the other that is see— Imagining them as innocent beings needing protection. But race, it is race that determines which understandings could be mobilized and against who. And white Americans could sentimentalize their own child's— Children's innocence while treating black children's bodies as punishable.

00:14:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I wonder whether that adds to the complexity and, controversy associated with biracial children, not that there were so many in the nineteenth century as there are today. The idea of mixing two kinds of childhoods was particularly interesting. So, Stacey, this is obviously incredibly controversial. You know this better than I do when you come up with a book, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children. Could you give me some numbers? I mean, I've been to the very moving National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Bryan Stevenson's memorial in, or the one that I think he inspired in Montgomery, Alabama. It's very troubling, the many different cases of lynching. I don't remember, although maybe I have a bad memory, of that many examples of child lynching. Could you give me some numbers in terms of, how white America learned to lynch black children? Was this a daily, weekly, monthly, annual kind of occasion?

00:15:30 Stacey Patton: So we do know in terms of numbers on the whole, and, of course, there are many thousands gone who are probably not even— Whose names have been lost to history, but we know that there's at least 6,000 documented lynchings, between 1887 and 1950 [ed.: the Equal Justice Initiative documents more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950, and roughly 6,500 counting Reconstruction].

00:15:52 Andrew Keen: Of children.

00:15:54 Stacey Patton: No. No. No. That— [unclear]. I'm setting the scene with all—

00:15:56 Andrew Keen: Okay.

00:15:58 Stacey Patton: —victims. Okay? The— There's no solid number in terms of raw numbers of how many children were actually lynched. I've seen one study, that estimates around 20% of those lynchings were of young people. Many times when these names were documented, age was not always taken into account. And so we don't— We'll never know, the exact raw numbers of child victims, that were lynched. As for your other question, you know, lynching was a recurring feature of American life, but not a uniformly daily or weekly or monthly event in every community. We do know that the NAACP often, put up this flag that would say, a man was lynched today [ed.: the NAACP flag read "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday"]. So it happens so frequently that this was considered ordinary. And you could look at the daily news reportings where, you know, the lynching of some black person could appear next to a weather report or buried between a soap ad or something like that. What makes lynching especially disturbing is that it could become a community occasion. Some of these killings attracted thousands of spectators, Businesses closed. Families gathered. Schools were closed down. Photographs were taken. So these crowds treated this kind of communal homicide, you know, as public, you know, as public entertainment.

00:17:45 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, it's very much back in the news given how the current American administration wanted initially, at least, a public execution, of, Nidal Hussein [as spoken: Nidal Hasan], somebody who, now is not gonna be publicly executed. I mean, I'm not sure if we wanna create any moral equivalence here because, I mean, all— Any kind of lynching, Stacey, is obviously a terrible, terrible crime. But why are we— Why would we— And I am I'm guessing everybody shares my sense on this. Why would we be so much more troubled by the lynching of black children versus black adults, given that they're all equally innocent?

00:18:36 Stacey Patton: Well, because of their—

00:18:41 Andrew Keen: I'm obviously not defending this in any way. I'm just suggesting, what is it about the idea, this image of lynching black children, which you have on the cover of the book. Why does it bring out, in my— I'm guessing for most of our viewers and listeners, just complete and utter horror?

00:19:02 Stacey Patton: So I actually wanna challenge the premise of that question. Why should we be more troubled by the lynching of a black child versus the lynching of a black adult? So does the— I would ask, does adulthood somehow make a person more deserving of torture? Does growing older diminish one's humanity? But for me, what interests me as a historian is precisely why we organize our moral outrage around innocence. So we tend to regard children as especially innocent, especially vulnerable, you know, and def— Defenseless. But that framework, I think, can inadvertently suggest that adults must somehow earn the right not to be brutalized. So my book isn't arguing that lynching black children was worse than lynching black adults. The argument I'm making is that lynching— That the lynching of black children reveals something particularly disturbing about the society that perpetuated it. Because he— Here was a society that claimed to cherish childhood, that celebrated innocence, that placed white children on a pedestal and yet could torture and murder black children in public, oftentimes in front of other children. And that raises a different historical question for me. So not simply how could they do this to children, but what kind of society teaches its children to do this to other human beings? And so that's where my book shifts the gaze from the victim to the perpetrator. So the significance, I think, of studying child lynching isn't that black children were more human than black adults. It's that their murders expose how white supremacy was taught, reproduced, and made ordinary across generations.

00:21:05 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I guess the follow-up question is— And is— You're thinking exactly on the lines that, that I'm so stumped on this one. How would a white family who took their kids— And as you say, these were public spectacles, the pre—pre—you know, pre-cinema. There were no cinemas back then. Or television, these were forms of entertainment. How would a white family explain the lynching of a black child to their own kids, let alone to themselves? I mean, do you have— I mean, in terms of the book, have you— In terms of your research, have you found any letters or conversations within people who showed up for these things to explain it?

00:21:58 Stacey Patton: So I'm thinking— And I— There's two anecdotes from the book that I'll draw on. There was, I can't remember the exact town and state, but there's this little vignette about a girl, a young girl, who is being punished by her parents for being naughty. So there was this planned lynching that was coming to town.

00:22:23 Andrew Keen: Oh my god. Yeah.

00:22:25 Stacey Patton: So the family— This was supposed to be a family event. So they punished her by letting her stay home. So there's that. Then there is the famous lynching of the teenager, Jesse Washington, in Waco, Texas 1916. Waco was a progressive town, very modern town. It was not some rural backwards. So all these people, the thousands of people come for this lynching. The first to arrive on the scene were children running, skipping, like, they're going to some parade. And small children were paid to gather kindling and other trash to set the fire where this teenage black boy would be, tortured. If you look at the photos from that day, you see adolescent and teenage boys hanging out in the trees so that they could get a better look. A reporter who attended that lynching sees a white father with a toddler on his shoulders hoisted up so this baby basically could see. And the reporter asked the father, don't you think this is a bit much for your child to be here witnessing this? And he responds by saying, my child can't learn too young the proper way [unclear]. So what's fascinating is that white parents probably didn't have to explain lynching to their children the way we imagine. The lynching itself was the explanation. It was a form of public, you know, education, as you see [unclear], cinema became a mass entertainment medium. Public spectacles were important spaces where communities gathered, where they perform their values and reinforce social hierarchies. So white parent might have explained that the black child had committed some offense, that they violated the racial order, that they deserve punishment. They might have invoked the language of criminality or danger or community protection, or they might not have said anything at all because children learn as much from what adults celebrate and tolerate and participate in as from what adults explicitly teach them. So imagine being a white child standing beside your father, as he watches another child be tortured. You look at your father, he's not horrified. He's laughing. He's cheering, or he's simply watching. The sheriff is not intervene. The minister is condemning it [as spoken]. Your neighbors are there. Nobody is acting as though a terrible crime is unfolding. So what does that teach you? It teaches you that the suffering of that black child is permissible, that racial violence is socially sanctioned and that your own whiteness affords you a position of safety and power and community and familial bonding. So the lesson doesn't require a textbook. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.

00:25:38 Andrew Keen: In, Kelly's The Biggest Lie, he ends— And, actually, he begins the book with a discussion of Birth of a Nation, the first big hit, Hollywood's first big hit, which, of course, is also a Klan film. We also did a show recently with the great, movie reviewer David Thomson, who also talks about this tradition of violence in Hollywood. I mean, it's not always, of course, a racist violence. But in your view, Stacey, had— Given the nature of this kind of nineteenth-century entertainment, has it been inherited by mainstream media in the twentieth and twenty-first century? I'm not suggesting it's always racialized. But given that, movies like Birth of a Nation founded Hollywood, is there a connection between the two worlds?

00:26:32 Stacey Patton: Absolutely. I would definitely argue that, you know, Hollywood didn't invent America's appetite for racial violence. It inherited an audience that had already been trained to consume black suffering as entertainment. So long before cinema, as I just said, you know, lynchings were public spectacles. You know, people traveled to attend them. Vendors sold food. Photographers captured images and sold them. Postcards circulated. White families brought their children. And then the cinema emerged. D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. And I believe it was 1915.

00:27:11 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's '15. So it comes out.

00:27:13 Stacey Patton: Right? Yep. So it helped translate the older racial imagination into a new mass medium. So the film glorifies the KKK. It portrays black men as these, you know, beasts, rapists, threats from whom, you know, white society, especially white womanhood, needs protection. So the technology changed, but the racial storytelling was, you know, remarkably familiar. So blackness was constructed as a danger, whiteness was cast as innocence, and white violence was, you know, presented as necessary, heroic, patriotic, a racial duty. And that inheritance didn't end with silent film. It continued through Hollywood stereotypes, through, crime narratives, TV news, and now viral videos and social media. So today, we can watch black people being brutalized on our phones. Their final moments cast, their final moments think George Floyd, for example, dying and calling out for his mother, you know. So those final moments are viral content. They're circulated, replayed, debated, monetized via the algorithm. So of course, re— Recording violence can also expose injustice and produce accountability, but we have to ask whether, you know, this repeated exposure can normalize suffering rather than awaken our conscience. So what interests me is the continuity in spectatorship. So we've moved from the lynching tree to the movie screen to the smartphone screen. Platforms have changed, technologies have changed, but the historical question still remains. What are Americans being taught to feel when they watch black people suffer? And more importantly, what are they being taught not to feel? So the historical connection between the Birth of a Nation is especially powerful because the film didn't just reflect race to popularize it.

00:29:25 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I take your point, of course, but not everybody who saw the, I don't know, the George Floyd, white or black, who saw the George Floyd, murder on YouTube or on their smartphones was celebrating. One of my favorite songs is Dylan's Desolation Row back from 1965 when he begins, they're selling postcards of the hanging. They're painting the passports brown. The beauty parlor is filled with sailors. The circus is in town, a devastating critic of the world you're describing. And now I take your point, of course. I mean, you know a million times more about this, Stacey, than I do about white America learning to lynch black children. But would it be also fair to say that this world also inspired a great deal of resistance and horror on the part of white America, or is this not something that you are either particularly interested in or would acknowledge?

00:30:29 Stacey Patton: When you say this world, you mean the Jim Crow era

00:30:33 Andrew Keen: Well, the whole thing of, violence, the Klan, the— What you write about in Strung Up, the, you know, this utterly horrifying idea of lynching black children. Mhmm.

00:30:51 Stacey Patton: Yeah. [unclear] So, absolutely.

00:30:53 Andrew Keen: So go on. Sorry.

00:30:55 Stacey Patton: Yeah. I said absolutely. But I would distinguish between, say, white resistance to lynching and white resistance to the racial order that produced it. Those weren't always the same, you know, thing. So, one of the complexities of this history is that white America was never entirely, like, entirely, you know, united around lynching. This is true. So they were white journalists. They were clergy, reformers, ordinary folk who condemned mob violence. Some were genuinely committed to racial justice. Others were embarrassed by lynchings. There were businessmen who thought this was bad, you know, for their bottom line to allow this to go on in their communities. You know, so there were people who were embarrassed by lynching because they believed it made America look uncivilized and look like savages before the rest of the world. So, but you can oppose the spectacle of lynching without opposing white supremacy itself. You could object to a mob burning a black person alive while still supporting segregation, still supporting disenfranchisement and racial inequality. There were also white Americans who took enormous personal and political risks to challenge racial terror, sometimes working alongside black activists. But we have to remember that the most sustained and courageous resistance came from black communities themselves, from black journalists like Ida B. Wells, Walter White, who looked like a white man, but he was actually black, who would embed himself in these communities to investigate lynchings. There were black women's organizations and generations of anti-lynching, you know, activists. So white America, yes, produced both the lynch mobs and some of their opponents, but opposing lynching did not automatically mean rejecting racial hierarchy. Again, that sustained it. That's the contradiction we gotta sit with. Some white Americans wanted to end the violence, but far fewer were prepared to dismantle the system of power that made the violence even possible. And here in America, we just passed a federal law a few years ago making lynching illegal.

00:33:23 Andrew Keen: So where are we today? I mean, obviously, this stuff is enormously controversial. Stacey, again, you don't need me to tell you this. Kelly's book, The Biggest Lie, sees the reappearance of what he calls American fascism in the MAGA movement. I mean, I don't think even Donald Trump would call for the— I mean, he's a pretty shocking guy. I'm not sure he— Even he would have the audacity to call for the lynching of black children. But do you see the world that you write about in Strung Up reappearing in the America of the late twenties?

00:33:58 Stacey Patton: So I wanna remind you that Donald Trump called for the execution of black teenagers. He took out a full page.

00:34:08 Andrew Keen: Right. That's a good point, actually.

00:34:10 Stacey Patton: Yeah. They were falsely accused. And when it— They were found innocent, he refused to apologize, to retract that. His own father—

00:34:18 Andrew Keen: Central— What were they? The Central Park Five or Six?

00:34:22 Stacey Patton: Five. Central Park Five. And his own father was caught attending Klan meeting. So I would resist the hypothetical about Trump personally calling for the lynchings of black children. So I don't think we need to speculate about what he might do when his own, you know, documented history already raises serious questions. I don't think history repeats in precisely this form. I think it adapts. And what concerns me about the present moment isn't simply whether Donald Trump would stand before a crowd and explicitly call for the lynching of, you know, young black people again. It's whether the political and cultural conditions that once made racial terror acceptable are being reproduced in this country. Think about January, the January insurrection. There were hordes of dysregulated white people who descended onto the Capitol. They brought a guillotine [ed.: rioters erected a gallows] that was erected on the cap— Cap— Capitol grounds, a noose, you know, a hanging apparatus. They wanted to hang the vice president. Right? And the pundits on the tube here was saying, this isn't America. And I was watching that saying, oh, the hell it is. K? So because— I think because lynching was— It was never just about a tree. Right? It required a much larger, you know, ecosystem. So the construction of black people as dangerous, which we're still seeing, along with other groups like immigrants, Muslims, and so forth, the circulation of racialized fear, the justification of extraordinary violence, and the institutions that refuse to hold perpetrators accountable. We're still living with that. You don't need to resurrect the lynching tree to resurrect the logic that made, you know, lynching possible. K? So I'm not saying that Donald Trump, called explicitly for the lynching of the Central Park Five. He had, he didn't do that. I'm saying that as a historian, I recognize, and we all need to recognize these older patterns of racialized accusations, demands for punishment, presumption of guilt, the refusal to recognize innocence. This week, we are arguing in this country over a Mississippi attorney general's decision to justify a police officer shooting a one-year-old baby.

00:37:03 Andrew Keen: Okay. About this on your Substack. And the title is, of course, America justified the police killing of a black baby. Can you explain what this case is?

00:37:15 Stacey Patton: So, this is in Mississippi. A black mom and, I believe this was a friend of hers, went to a local Walmart. They were accused of stealing diapers. Now that alone should tell you something about the state of America where things are so economically bad that parents, you know, desperate parents have to steal diapers. But I should let you know that there's no confirmation whatsoever, no evidence that this mother actually stole diapers. The police were called. This mother had her one-year-old baby boy in her arms, and she got in the passenger side of, the car. The driver, was, you know, on the other side, and these police officers run at this car with their guns drawn. And so, the passenger [as spoken] took off, to get away from these officers. And as they were fleeing, one of the officers shot into the car, killing, this child. And so, the attorney general, decided that this officer feared for his life, even though the autopsy, evidence suggests that, the place where the child was shot in the rib cage does not line up with the officer's accounts of the story. Now the mother and grandmother were not even interviewed. There was no investigation about what they saw. And when this news was released that there would be no charges, indictment, whatever for this cop, the, family members, the grieving mom and grandmother found out about it on Facebook. They weren't even, given the courtesy of a phone call in advance, of this decision.

00:39:24 Andrew Keen: But is that— I mean, I'm the last person in the world to defend that, but that's not lynching, is it? I mean, that's just police violence. I mean, not just, but it's different. Or do you see it as in the same tradition?

00:39:38 Stacey Patton: It's definitely in the, in the same tradition. There, as— So many scholars would argue that, well, first of all, we know there's a long history of law enforcement officers who were involved in lynchings. They often aided them, aided the mob, you know, handed over the keys and such. We also know that there were police officers who were embedded in the Klan. So the killing of one-year-old, Kohen Wiley in Mississippi was not a lynching in the traditional sense, but I would argue that it definitely belongs to the same genealogy of racial violence. So, you know, lynching was never just about the method of killing, it was also about the social and political conditions that permitted black people to be killed, including babies. I have a whole chapter in Strung Up about, you know, this type of killing of black infants who were shot out of their parents' arms or their laps, even unborn children who were, were lynched. We gave examples of pregnant black women who were shot to death, by police officers. So, again, it's not just about the method of lynching. And it was also about who gets protected, from the responsibility of being held accountable when these killings occur. So what connects these histories is a question of whose lives are presumed innocent, whose are, you know, treated as expendable, and also whose death society is willing to explain away. So we live in a country that keeps on debating whether unarmed children deserve to die. In this case, Kohen Wiley wasn't some teenage boy who somebody could imagine him as a threat, as some kind of beast, you know, you know, threat of the cop's life. This is a baby.

00:41:55 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you, I know in some of your work, you show images, and I guess they're cartoons, although I don't particularly care for that world, of a man killing— A white man killing a black baby. Finally, Stacey, I mean, this is hard to— I mean, for anyone, this stuff is hard to listen to. I'm sure the book, will— As I said, it's very controversial. It got an excellent review already on, Publishers Weekly. They gave it a starred review. America's just celebrated its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. What does America then mean to you? I mean, well, how would you end on this? I know you touch on this in some of your work. What does it suggest?

00:42:47 Stacey Patton: So I think America is a country that has never fully reconciled what it says about itself with what it's actually done. Yeah. We just celebrated two hundred fifty years of American independence. But independence for who? Liberty for who? Whose children were included in the promise of life, liberty, and the so-called pursuit of happiness? So as a historian, I don't have the luxury of confusing patriotism with nostalgia. I've spent more than a decade in the archives examining some of the most horrific things Americans have done to its children. No country, no nation should need a record of how it killed its children to prove that it lies about itself. And what troubles me isn't simply the brutality. It's how ordinary it was, how respectable people participated, how communities celebrated and institutions looked away. And yet America is also the people who resisted. Yes. The enslaved people who escaped, the black mothers who fought to protect their children, the journalists who explode— who exposed, you know, lynching atrocities, the people who refuse to surrender their humanity, even when this country refused to recognize it. So to me— So America to me is not an uncomplicated object of love or hatred. I think it's an unfinished moral record. And I think that's why this book is so difficult for a lot of people, because I'm not asking Americans to feel guilty about something their ancestors did. I'm asking them to take responsibility for what they've inherited. And we spend an extraordinary amount of time asking whether America is a great nation. And I think that's the wrong question. I think the question is whether America can even become a nation mature enough to confront the truth about itself. And at two fifty years old, America should be old enough to stop demanding innocence and start accepting some responsibility. Start telling the truth.

00:45:13 Andrew Keen: In other words, America is no longer a child in spite of the fact that, it's guilty, at least according to our guest today, Stacey Patton, of lynching black children and many other crimes against humanity. I think one thing we can say for sure, Stacey, about you, I'm often critical of people who are nostalgic about America. There's one thing we can say about Stacey Patton is that she is certainly not nostalgic. Real, I wouldn't say fun, Stacey, but a very interesting conversation. The book is out. It will divide opinion. It's controversial, but it's getting great reviews. Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children. Stacey Patton, that was a very, very interesting conversation. We'll have to get you back on the show again. I'm sure, there's much more to discuss on this front. Thank you so much.

00:46:07 Stacey Patton: Thank you for having me.