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 whites in attendance made a brutal carnival of the observation of his death. This “legal” lynching so alarmed the nation that it ended up becoming the last public execution in America.

This is how I learned about the last public execution in America. Twenty-two years ago, at my grandmother’s funeral near Owensboro, I was handed an interview she had done with her neighbors, where I became aware of her attendance, along with 20,000 other Americans, at the hanging of Bethea. This information, as well as with the racist ways that she spoke of that moment led me to examine lynch culture in the country in which I was born, as well as in Canada, where I was raised. For eight years, I researched the story of the injustices against Bethea and began to reckon with the lynch culture that could not just be seen in our familial and communal histories, but was evident everywhere, in the present moment in police murders, racial violence and unjust systems. In 2018, the Tin House Summer Workshop invited me to work with Dr. Lacy M. Johnson and a group of women writers of narrative nonfiction, and their workshop feedback and friendship was powerful, and also changed the trajectory of the work, including how I confronted my upbringing and choices. The Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts funded this project with two subsistence grants so I might complete the book.

In 2022, I sent a book proposal for American Bloodlines: Reckoning With Lynch Culture to the University Press of Kentucky, and editor Abby Freeland. UPK’s Appalachian Futures series, and their ongoing publishing work sought to dispel, as Abby said, "the prejudice, bias, and preconceived notions, the ignorance, and the laws and policies that harm underserved and underrepresented people." With this publisher, it felt like the work could find its place toward an undertaking of truth and rebuilding. In the past nineteen months, I’ve been in a peer review process that has provided rigor, support, and encouragement. American Bloodlines will be published in the early autumn of 2025.

In the meantime, I’ll be writing more in a newsletter about the research and discovery of unclaimed histories, including how we might meet kin and others who differ from us in regard to perceptions of justice. If lynch culture is created to legitimize violence toward marginalized people, then it is in making kin in community and its accompanying coalitional work that it is possible to build democracy, end systemic racism, combat hate and extremism, and enhance bonds.

The writer and activist Emily Bingham, (My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song,) has said of the book, “In tracing her own and a nation’s lines of blood, Sonya Lea takes readers on an intellectual and moral odyssey. With compelling prose, American Bloodlines clears a path homeward that is lit with loyalty and belonging.”

I'm a queer, nonbinary writer, mentor, activist, mother, partner, sister, cousin, aunt, friend, and a sixth-generation Kentuckian. You can find out more about this work by signing up for my Substack newsletter, (there’s a new version dedicated to this work, coming soon,) or at my website.

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