Strung Up
How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children
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Strung Up
Narrated by:
Stacey Patton
Pre-order Now for £13.48
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Narrated by:
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Stacey Patton
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By:
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Stacey Patton
Strung Up examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence. Drawing on meticulous archival research and vivid narrative storytelling, Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn.
Nationally recognized child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton locates the roots of this violence not solely in the United States, but in Europe’s long history of anti-child brutality. She reveals how centuries of public executions, corporal punishment, religious spectacle, and sanctioned cruelty exposed white children to extreme violence early and often. This violence, she argues, conditioned them to associate pain, domination, and death with moral order.
Patton traces this desensitization across the Atlantic where white children raised within these traditions became adults primed to reproduce racial terror, transforming inherited practices of child cruelty into instruments of white supremacy in the post-emancipation United States.
Blending history with developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and research on adverse childhood experiences, Strung Up shows how violence is not only taught, but biologically and psychologically embedded across generations. Patton demonstrates how racial terror functioned as a system of socialization that shaped perception, behavior, and moral reasoning long before it produced the mob, the rope, or the fire.
The image on the front cover is a World War I era photograph depicting a mock lynching of a Black child, reportedly at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. The author purchased it from the Philip J. Merrill, Nanny Jack & Co Archives.
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Critic reviews
“A gripping and original study...A clear-eyed, tour de force deconstruction of America’s damaged psyche.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Strung Up is an argumentative masterpiece.”
—David Levering Lewis, author of the two-volume Pulitzer Prize–winning W. E. B. Du Bois
“Strung Up is an unflinching and visionary work that recovers the central role of children in the making of racial violence.”
—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
“Strung Up is one of the boldest, most searingly honest examinations of racial terror and trauma ever put to paper.”
—Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
“Penned by one of America’s most important and necessary scholars, this is not just a book about history, lynching, or even Black children.”
—Michael Harriot, New York Times best-selling author of Black AF History
“Strung Up is a marvel of a book. Stacey Patton succeeds in blending history, psychology, and sociology into a brilliant excavation of systemic violence.”
—Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director, African American Policy Forum, and professor of law at Columbia University and UCLA
“Strung Up is a monumental text. . . . This book is beautifully written, persuasively argued, and desperately needed.”
—Marc Lamont Hill, Presidential Professor of Urban Education and Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies, City University of New York Graduate Center
“Stacey Patton lays bare—with searing text and haunting images—the unspoken script behind ‘the talk’ Black parents give their children about surviving a world where driving or walking while Black still carries danger. . . . This book is essential reading—an unflinching examination of the roots of racialized harm and the urgent need to confront it.”
—Mary Frances Berry, author of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times
“A heart-wrenching but necessary examination of how children have been and are used as vehicles for indoctrination into this country’s long-standing tradition of white supremacy.”
—Alicia Garza, cofounder, Black Lives Matter Global Network
“Strung Up forces a reckoning with one of the most devastating truths in American history: Racial violence has never been about punishment but rather it was and is a weapon of domination, an object lesson on power and submission, especially for the young.”
—Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of African American studies and public affairs, Princeton University
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Strung Up is an argumentative masterpiece.”
—David Levering Lewis, author of the two-volume Pulitzer Prize–winning W. E. B. Du Bois
“Strung Up is an unflinching and visionary work that recovers the central role of children in the making of racial violence.”
—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
“Strung Up is one of the boldest, most searingly honest examinations of racial terror and trauma ever put to paper.”
—Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son
“Penned by one of America’s most important and necessary scholars, this is not just a book about history, lynching, or even Black children.”
—Michael Harriot, New York Times best-selling author of Black AF History
“Strung Up is a marvel of a book. Stacey Patton succeeds in blending history, psychology, and sociology into a brilliant excavation of systemic violence.”
—Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director, African American Policy Forum, and professor of law at Columbia University and UCLA
“Strung Up is a monumental text. . . . This book is beautifully written, persuasively argued, and desperately needed.”
—Marc Lamont Hill, Presidential Professor of Urban Education and Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies, City University of New York Graduate Center
“Stacey Patton lays bare—with searing text and haunting images—the unspoken script behind ‘the talk’ Black parents give their children about surviving a world where driving or walking while Black still carries danger. . . . This book is essential reading—an unflinching examination of the roots of racialized harm and the urgent need to confront it.”
—Mary Frances Berry, author of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times
“A heart-wrenching but necessary examination of how children have been and are used as vehicles for indoctrination into this country’s long-standing tradition of white supremacy.”
—Alicia Garza, cofounder, Black Lives Matter Global Network
“Strung Up forces a reckoning with one of the most devastating truths in American history: Racial violence has never been about punishment but rather it was and is a weapon of domination, an object lesson on power and submission, especially for the young.”
—Khalil Gibran Muhammad, professor of African American studies and public affairs, Princeton University
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