Announcing: American Bloodlines

Reckoning With Lynch Culture

In the summer of 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, was jailed for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman, and then tried by an all-white, all-male jury that took four and a half minutes to find him guilty. He was hanged near the banks of the Ohio River. According to most news reports and historical photographs, the w…