Lynching Research Articles

Of sacred animals: the limits of animal rights activism and political veganism in India

ABSTRACT In India, the rise of right-wing politics in the form of what Sahana Udupa terms 'enterprise Hindutva' has triggered conflicting reactions to everyday incidents, highlighting the need for a new language to address unique problems faced by vegans and animal rights activists whose politics clash with Hindutva's anti-secular discourse. 'Sacred animals' as a conceptual framework provides an important entry point into the culturally specific socio-political tensions behind complexities that limit the possibilities of viable intersectional standpoints that engage animal rights activism and political veganism. From a postsecular perspective, the relevance and unique challenges of these movements in India are evaluated, noting that existing posthumanist theories fail to address these new issues adequately. Incidents of mob lynching and violence by the cow vigilantes are recontextualized as structural symptoms instead of sporadic occurrences. The backlash against rightist tendencies has given a critical validation to irrational disregard for political veganism and animal rights activism, based on their perceived alignment with right-wing ideology. Examining food politics around beef, mockery of vegetarianism, and everyday situations where 'veg' becomes a tag of inferior quality, this study challenges unfounded associations and assumptions that undermine the disruptive potential of animal rights activism.

Mob Lynching and Vigilantism in India: Analyzing Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023

Lynching in the US, especially after Reconstruction, symbolises racial injustice and white domination. Lynching was not limited to African Americans, although they were disproportionately targeted. Lynching began as frontier justice during the Revolutionary War but became a tool of racial terror and social manipulation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In lynching analysis, the "frustration-aggression" hypothesis suggests that economic hardship, demographic shifts, and political discontent may exacerbate mob violence. When people or organisations are irritated by perceived threats to their social or economic status, they may behave aggressively, including lynching. The term "lynching" comes from Revolutionary War Virginia colonel Charles Lynch. Lynch and other local landowners created an informal court system to combat governmental power breakdown and protect their communities from theft and other crimes. Under "Lynch's law," criminals were captured, prosecuted, and punished without due process. Lynch's law expanded to include other forms of extrajudicial vengeance in the US. Vigilance committees, popular in areas without strong law enforcement, sought to quickly impose extralegal vengeance.

Random forest based robust human activity detection system using hybrid feature

Human Activity Recognition is analyzing surveillance videos of a person’s activity. Tracking and identifying activities is essential in various applications like fight detection, mob lynching, etc. Human activity recognition may be the primary or secondary goal of a significant problem target. Surveillance for fight detection, crowd violence, public attacks, mob lynching, public robbery, etc, are few to list. The researchers are getting done in this direction, and algorithms are being proposed for automatic activity recognition. These are typically restricted to the recordings made by stationary cameras, though. For automated Human Activity Recognition, a novel skeleton-based feature called ‘Orientation Invariant Skeleton Feature (OISF)’ was introduced in the earlier work. This work uses a hybrid feature, which is a combination of ‘OISF’ features (proposed by Neelam Dwivedi et al) and ‘FV1’ features (proposed by S Kumar et al) for human activity detection systems. The hybrid features used in this paper have a low dependence on changes in camera orientation, according to experimental results. The accuracy obtained is higher than that of earlier studies using existing features and is roughly 99.50% with the ViHASi dataset and 97.25% with the KTH dataset. This demonstrates that the proposed study is suitable for commercial use.

Mob Lynching in India: An Exploratory Study with Special Reference to India

Mob Lynching in India: An Exploratory Study with Special Reference to India

The "Dark Side" of Community Ties: Collective Action and Lynching in Mexico.

Lynching remains a common form of collective punishment for alleged wrongdoers in Latin America, Africa, and Asia today. Unlike other kinds of collective violence, lynching is usually not carried out by standing organizations. How do lynch mobs overcome the high barriers to violent collective action? I argue that they draw on local community ties to compensate for a lack of centralized organization. Lynch mobs benefit from solidarity and peer pressure, which facilitate collective action. The study focuses on Mexico, where lynching is prevalent and often amounts to the collective beating of thieves. Based on original survey data from Mexico City and a novel lynching event dataset covering the whole of Mexico, I find that individuals with more ties in their communities participate more often in lynching, and municipalities with more highly integrated communities have higher lynching rates. As community ties and lynching may be endogenously related, I also examine the posited mechanisms and the causal direction. Findings reveal that municipalities exposed to a recent major earthquake-an event that tends to increase community ties-subsequently experienced increased levels of lynching. Importantly, I find that interpersonal trust is unrelated to lynching, thus showing that different aspects of social capital have diverging consequences for collective violence, with community ties revealing a "dark side."

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN THE 21st CENTURY: CHALLENGES AND POSSIBILITIES

A pedagogical approach known as "critical pedagogy" encourages instructors to support students as they analyse systems of authority and opportunities that are based on "critical theory," which involves becoming conscious of and challenging the status quo in society. Through critical pedagogy, instructors motivate pupils to explore and confront social and familial injustices by drawing on their own enlightenment. The current social structure is still battling against social evil, injustice, and equality. Worker exploitation, disdain for those from other sociocultural backgrounds, mob lynching, and a decline in values all serve as stark examples of how the educational system has failed to instil civilization in society. Although we may have advanced materialistically, a progressive mentality has not yet been attained. As a result, critical pedagogy practise in the twenty-first century becomes pertinent. Critical pedagogical strategies are challenging to put into practise in regular classroom settings. Developing measures to ensure these obstacles begins with an understanding of some of these barriers and how they appear in higher education institutions. Thus, this paper discusses the challenges that could occur while attempting to employ critical pedagogy. This paper also discusses the possibilities of using critical pedagogy in the classroom for the benefit of the students.

Exposure of fake news to the Indian social media users

In the modern world, people are too techno-friendly and dependent on technology using the Internet for every work. The same goes for the news. People are shifting from traditional mass media to digital news platforms and getting news through websites, news portals, social media, etc. If you are dependent on the Internet for every kind of information, then you will face false information on the Internet. False or fake news is defined as any information that does not have any credible and reliable source behind it or any misleading information that is likely to mislead the public. The aim behind fake news transmission is to damage a person's or entity's reputation or advertising revenue. If you want not to fall into the fake news you should know about fake news detection and media literacy. The main purpose of the study is to check the exposure of fake news awareness and fake news detection methods among social media users. In the current scenario, this is much necessary to know that social media users have the advisable knowledge of fake news detection and media literacy because people easily fall into the rumors. Mob lynching is one of the biggest rumors on the Indian Internet. In this research, the survey method and questionnaire for data collection were used. The questionnaire was distributed randomly over different social media platforms and emails to the intended respondents. The findings obtained reveal that most fake or false news in India is transmitted through WhatsApp, but social media users have adequate knowledge of fake news and media literacy.

Understanding and Addressing Mob Lynching: Historical Perspectives, Legal Challenges, and Pathways for Reform in India

Understanding and Addressing Mob Lynching: Historical Perspectives, Legal Challenges, and Pathways for Reform in India

The Migration of Lynch Victims' Families, 1880-1930.

We examine the relationship between the lynching of African Americans in the southern United States and subsequent county out-migration of the victims' surviving family members. Using U.S. census records and machine learning methods, we identify the place of residence for family members of Black individuals who were killed by lynch mobs between 1882 and 1929 in the U.S. South. Over the entire period, our analysis finds that lynch victims' family members experienced a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability of migrating to a different county by the next decennial census relative to their same-race neighbors. We also find that surviving family members had a 12-percentage-point increase in the probability of county out-migration compared with their neighbors when the household head was a lynch victim. The out-migration response of the families of lynch victims was most pronounced between 1910 and 1930, suggesting that lynch victims' family members may have been disproportionately represented in the first Great Migration.

Knowledge, attitude, and perception towards mob lynching among the general population of India: A cross-sectional study

Abstract Background: Mob lynching is violence by a crowd that results in the killing or maiming of a person or persons charged with or suspected of a crime. Lynching is an extrajudicial punishment to the accused or suspected person by a crowd or informal group without having any legal authority. In India, lynching and mob violence generally replicate internal tensions between several racial communities. Objectives: The objectives of the study are to check the attitude and gender differences and to see the predictors of mob lynching among the general population of India The study assessed the knowledge, attitude and perception of mob lynching among the general population of India. Materials and Methods: A web-based cross-sectional survey was carried out among 150 adults from March 3, 2022, to September 28, 2022. The survey was conducted online using a Google Form distributed through social media platform (E-mails, Whatsapp, or Messenger application). Participants aged 18 years and above, both male and female, consenting to participate in the study and able to understand English were included in the study. The survey took approximately 5–10 min to complete. Results: The findings of this study shows that gender, age, family income, religion, ethnicity, and education as variables that contributed significantly to the prediction of mob lynching among the general population of India [F (6,143) = 4.766; P < 0.01] at 16.7% (R 2 = 0.167) variance. The remaining 83.3% was attributed to the variables not included in the study. Conclusion: The study also indicates that most of the cases of mob lynching are committed due to fake news, rumors, and hate speeches that are circulated on social media.

Mob Lynching: A New Form of Collective Violence

Mob violence has become a grave concern in the socio-political landscape of India. Lynching is a planned extra-legal killing by a gathering. It is most frequently used to describe an informal public a supposed offender, or to threaten a gathering. Mob lynching is the point at which an uncivilized crowd endeavors to assume control over equity, as opposed to following legitimate fair treatment. India has observed a strange expansion in wrongdoing connected with crowd viciousness, for the sake of religion, capturing, and so on however, the plague spread as careful against cow butcher, later spread to hijacking and different kinds of wrongdoing. This article suggests that judicial intervention is most effectively understood through the lens of mob violence and hate crimes. In recent times, India has seen a surge in incidents of mob lynching, with minority groups, notably Muslims and Dalits, being the primary targets. This research article examines the consistent trends in such group-led aggression and emphasizes the urgent need for a clear law that classifies mob lynching and prescribes its consequences.

POLITICS OF EXCLUSION IN INDIA: A THREAT TO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND REGIONAL INTEGRATION

This paper explores the politics of exclusion in India and the threats it poses to the country's liberal democracy and regional integration. Using a qualitative research methodology, the paper uncovers how exclusionary policies in India have created serious threats for democracy and regional integration under Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The paper argues that politics of exclusion is increasingly becoming a threat to liberal democracy in India, citing instances like the Citizenship Amendment Bill (2019), erasure of certain chapters on Mughal history from textbooks, National Register of Citizens in Assam, increasing mob lynching, and revocation of Article 370 and 35A related to Kashmir. Furthermore, paper argues that such events are a threat to regional integration by impacting cross-border migration, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic relations with neighboring countries. Overall, the paper suggests that India must address the challenges posed by the politics of exclusion and promote inclusivity and diversity in all aspects of society to foster a more harmonious relationship between India and its neighbors in South Asia. Keywords: Politics of exclusion, Liberal democracy, Regional integration.

Stateless and Vulnerable: Race, Policing, and Citizenship in Pakistan

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology ReviewEarly View DIRECTIONS PIECE Stateless and Vulnerable: Race, Policing, and Citizenship in Pakistan Zoha Waseem, Corresponding Author Zoha Waseem [email protected] University of Warwick Correspondence Zoha Waseem Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Zoha Waseem, Corresponding Author Zoha Waseem [email protected] University of Warwick Correspondence Zoha Waseem Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12514Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL REFERENCES Ahmad, Mahvish, and Rabia Mehmood. 2017. “Surveillance, Authoritarianism and ‘Imperial Effects’ in Pakistan.” Surveillance & Society 15 (3–4): 506– 13. Akhtar, Aasim Sajjad. 2021. “The War of Terror in Praetorian Pakistan: The Emergence and Struggle of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 51 (3): 516– 29. Ali, Imtiaz. 2022. “Two Suspects Held after Two Mobile Company Workers Lynched in Karachi's Machhar Colony.” Dawn, October 28, 2022. https://www.dawn.com/news/1717349. Alimia, Sanaa. 2022. Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Aliverti, Ana. 2020. “Introduction: Special Issue on ‘Policing, Migration and National Identity.’” Theoretical Criminology 24 (1): 3– 7. Alves, Jaime Amparo. 2018. The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Anwar, Nausheen. 2013. “Negotiating New Conjunctures of Citizenship: Experiences of ‘Illegality’ in Burmese-Rohingya and Bangladeshi Migrant Enclaves in Karachi.” Citizenship Studies 17 (3): 414– 28. Baber, Zaheer. 2022. “Race might be a unicorn, but its horn could draw blood”: Racialization, Class and Racism in a Non-Western Context. Critical Sociology 48 (1): 151– 169. Cavalcanti, Roxana. 2020. A Southern Criminology of Violence, Youth and Policing: Governing Insecurity in Urban Brazil. London: Routledge. Roxana Cavalcanti, Peter Squires, and Zoha Waseem, eds. 2023. Southern and Postcolonial Perspectives on Policing, Security and Social Order. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. De Genova, Nicholas, and Ananya Roy. 2020. “Practices of Illegalisation.” Antipode 52 (2): 352– 64. Express Tribune. 2022. “ JSM Calls Machar Colony Lynch Mob ‘Illegal Immigrants.’” November 5, 2022. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2384666/jsm-calls-machar-colony-lynch-mob-illegal-immigrants. Helmke, Gretchen, and Steven Levitsky. 2004. “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda.” Perspectives on Politics 2 (4): 725– 40. Jaffe, Rivke, and Martijn Koster. 2019. “The Myth of Formality in the Global North.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43 (3): 563– 68. Loong, Shona. 2018. “‘This Country, Law Very Strong’: Securitization beyond the Border in the Everyday Lives of Bangladeshi Migrant Workers in Singapore.” Geoforum 90: 11– 19. Mookherjee, Nayanika. 2012. “The Absent Piece of Skin: Gendered, Racialized and Territorial Inscriptions of Sexual Violence during the Bangladesh War.” Modern Asian Studies 46 (6): 1572– 601. Parmar, Alpa. 2020. “Arresting (Non)Citizenship: The Policing Migration Nexus of Nationality, Race and Criminalization.” Theoretical Criminology 24 (1): 28– 49. Ananya Roy, and Nezar AlSayyad, eds. 2004. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sikka, Sonia. 2022. “Indian Islamophobia as Racism.” The Political Quarterly 93 (3): 469– 77. Stuurman, Ziyanda. 2020. “Policing Inequality and the Inequality of Policing: A Look at the Militarisation of Policing Around the World, Focusing on Brazil and South Africa.” South African Journal of International Affairs 27 (1): 43– 66. Waseem, Zoha. 2022. “‘It's Like Crossing a Border Everyday’: Police-Migrant Encounters in a Postcolonial City.” Journal of Urban Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2022.2091448. Yonucu, Deniz. 2022. Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Yousafzai, Arshad. 2022. “ General Frustration in Impoverished Machhar Colony Termed Major Factor in Tragic Lynching.” The News, November 22, 2022. https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/1012393-general-frustration-in-impoverished-machhar-colony-termed-major-factor-in-tragic-lynching. Zaman, Muhammad Hamid, Tahera Hasan, and Janki Bhatt. 2022. “Invisible People, Visible Barriers: Healthcare Access for and among Ethnic Bengalis in Pakistan.” Statelessness and Citizenship Review 4 (2): 286– 92. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott

Reviewed by: Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott Jeffrey L. Littlejohn Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas. By Terry Anne Scott. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022. Pp. 400. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In her new and compelling study of racial violence in Texas, Terry Anne Scott presents a dramatic reinterpretation of the hundreds of lynchings that took place in the state between 1866 and 1950. Drawing on insights presented by Michel Foucault in his landmark work on the French penal system, Scott argues that the "spectacle and theatricality of lynchings in Texas" mirrored the "'excesses' of torture" that were used in France to "reveal and enhance the omnipotence of the state" (15). In the Texas case, however, Scott argues that Whites choreographed elaborate exhibitions of torture, murder, and death to celebrate and reinforce their own racial supremacy, which often came at the expense of state power. Beginning with acts of mob violence that occurred immediately after the Civil War, Scott argues that early lynchings in Texas targeted horse thieves, cattle rustlers, and murderers who were often White. The victims were generally hanged in isolated places, and the perpetrators of the crimes often wore masks to conceal their identities. By the 1880s, however, White Texans had transformed lynching from an "earlier, strictly punitive and largely clandestine form of corporeal punishment into wholly racialized, publicly viewed, well-attended, frequently commercialized exhibitions of violence in which the vast majority of victims were Black, and the concept of crime included any action that challenged the racial hierarchy" (33–34). As Scott describes this new culture of lynching, she makes several fascinating interventions in the literature. First, she rejects the idea that lynch mobs were "an archaic expression of backwoods, southern white people" (121). On the contrary, she argues that Black migration, urban growth, industrial development, labor competition, and residential conflict upset well-established racial norms at the end of the nineteenth century and spurred White rage and violence. Rather than simply acting as vigilantes, [End Page 588] however, Whites created a "new system of judicial norms" that melded together the "ethos of frontier-style justice with anxieties over Black freedom and progress" to produce a new "pseudojudicial system" that criminalized the Black body and supplanted the state's judicial system (21). Scott's most fascinating argument is that lynching functioned as a form of racialized entertainment that often included spectators' time off from work, car or train travel, elaborate ceremonies, and even grotesque souvenirs and photographic postcards. In a detailed discussion of the ceremonial burning of African American men, including the horrific lynching of Henry Smith in 1893, Scott shows how White Texans used the extended ceremony, conspicuous torture, and hunt for bodily souvenirs to authenticate their new pseudojudicial process. Indeed, she argues that the photographs, recordings, and other artifacts picked up at lynching sites helped Whites reframe lynching within a narrative of recreation. As a result, lynching sites literally became tourist spots of "identity reinforcement for whites," as they struggled to control Black migration and labor competition (203). In response to lynching, Black journalists and activists highlighted the frivolous way in which Whites approached the torture and death of African Americans. It was not uncommon, for example, for White Texans to refer to a lynching as a "barbeque, neck-tie party, [or] carnival," and many Whites even considered it a "pastime" like sports or hunting (217–219). Indeed, Scott writes, by presenting "white Texans as an ostensibly uncivilized ensemble of recreational murderers, journalists could at once bolster the refined image their readers had of themselves while establishing Texas as a space where racialized violence was woven into the very performance of an everyday life that they claimed was civilized" (224). Although Scott does not cover the lynching of Hispanic men and women in Texas, she has added considerable new perspective and data to our understanding of racial violence in the Lone Star State. Her book will serve as one of the new standard texts on lynching in Texas alongside earlier scholarship by Karlos K. Hill, William Carrigan, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Benjamin Johnson, Brandon T. Jett...

Conceptualizing the Issues Related to the Mob Lynching of Women in India: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Media Corpus and Discourse

Conceptualizing the Issues Related to the Mob Lynching of Women in India: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Media Corpus and Discourse

Autonomous Anomaly Detection System for Crime Monitoring and Alert Generation

Nowadays violence in society impacts more than any weapon used by people. Over the last few years, autonomous vehicles have been used to observe and recognize the abnormality in the behavior of people and classifying them as a crime or not. Detecting crime on live stream is a classification of any event in a crime or not a crime and generating alerts to designated authorities which in turn can take required actions and ensure the security assessment of the city. Such kind of effective techniques for live video stream processing in computer vision is the need of the hour. There are many techniques that can be used, while Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and OpenCV provide the most accurate prediction for this task. OpenCV is used for the task of object detection in computer vision which will take the input from either drone or any autonomous vehicle. LSTM is used to classify any event or behavior in crime or not. This live stream is also encrypted for more security. To make this system more secure with the use of a security algorithm. This system uses the Elliptic curve algorithm to protect data from any kind of manipulation.
 Through its ability to sense its surroundings, an autonomous vehicle is able to operate itself and execute critical activities without the need for human interaction. Video surveillance of computer vision technology can be used to take care of the security of the city by observing the crowd as well as individual activities. Much crowd-based crimes like mob lynching and individual crimes like murder, burglary, terrorism can be protected with advanced deep learning-based Anamoly detection techniques. Machine learning model use dataset for learning is taken from different sources specific for crime detection with the 90% accuracy.
 

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

Media Literacy: Building Critical Media Awareness

The effect of media on society and the world at large is always under constant scrutiny. Researchers across the globe persistently studying the effect of media on the social, political, economic, and cultural discourse of our society. Due to rapid development of Communication Technologies and enhanced access to internet, the challenges posed by media have grown manifolds. To overcome those challenges researchers have been arguing since long about the importance of media literacy. Recent incidents of mob lynching, political turmoil, religion led clashes, etc. are testimonies to the lack of media awareness among the people. It has become crucial than ever for the audience/ consumers of media to understand the media content, its source and know how to utilize the received information. This study aims to discuss the meaning of media literacy in the present context and explore the significance of media literacy. An attempt has been made to highlight the contemporary challenges arising because of the upgradation in communication technologies and demonstrate how media literacy can play an instrumental role in overcoming these challenges.

Review Essay: Am I Blue?: Black Music & White Male Self-Construction

Review Essay: <i>Am I Blue?: Black Music &amp; White Male Self-Construction</i>

Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality by Benjamin R. Justesen

Reviewed by: Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality by Benjamin R. Justesen Robert J. Norrell (bio) Forgotten Legacy: William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality. By Benjamin R. Justesen. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 368. $55.00 cloth; $17.75 ebook) This work is a hagiography of a president, William McKinley, and a Black congressman, George White, who the author pairs on the basis of a common commitment to Black political rights. Justesen insists that the historical record has given each man short shrift, and he sets out to correct that wrong. In so doing he exaggerates the accomplishments of each, especially McKinley, and he fails to develop the full picture of White's career. In a 2001 biography of White, Justesen rationalized a five-hundred-page book on the insistence that White was one of the most important African American political leaders during the last decade of the nineteenth century but one of the least remembered. The latter claim is true no doubt, the former is certainly not. From modest beginnings in North Carolina, in 1896 he became the only remaining Black member of the U.S. House of [End Page 438] Representatives. He served until 1901, the last African American in Congress during the post-Reconstruction period. His departure left a void that would go unfilled for nearly thirty years. He was outspoken in his challenge to racial injustice, but, as Justesen shows, he was no extremist as white Democrats charged. After Congress, he remained active in politics and civil rights and enjoyed a career as a banker. Sometimes historians get more than one chance at the biography of a great historical figure, but it rarely happens in the case of an obscure provincial congressman. Forgotten Legacy is really a re-do of White, notwithstanding Justesen's occasional focus on McKinley's presidency, lauding his dedication to the advancement of African Americans, including their appointment to the federal bureaucracy. McKinley also acted to stiffen federal penalties for lynch mobs. Indeed, Justesen claims that McKinley was the first "civil rights president," especially when compared to his five successors in office. He maintains that historians have long minimized or overlooked McKinley's cooperative relationships with prominent African American leaders like White. In fact, civil rights leaders in McKinley's own day believed he and his political guru Mark Hanna had sold out Black Republican voters to white southern Republicans who were determined to have a "lily-white" party. The author's bibliography is thin and out of date. He has ignored David Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. Justesen casts Booker Washington as a malign influence on politics and civil rights, relying on Louis Harlan's malevolent half-century-old interpretations and ignoring the revisionist works that have since significantly rehabilitated Booker. The writing is sometimes clumsy, e.g. a "fictional novel" (p. 1). Another instance of this is the following sentence: "Jeter Pritchard, the only Republican southerner in the Senate and a powerful ally, probably provided the White House with status reports, but strained relationships between state and national party leaders were plagued by infighting, and the state party's [End Page 439] gradual split into quarrelsome factions, further clouded by collapse of Populist fusion" (p. 103). Readers deserve better. Robert J. Norrell ROBERT J. NORRELL is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee. Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society