Título: Lynching at Port Jervis
Autor: Philip Dray
Sinopse: An account of a lynching that took place in New York in 1892, forcing the North to reckon with its own racism.
On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town’s well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils north. What factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively prosperous, industrious upstate New York town, attracting the scrutiny of the Black journalist Ida B. Wells, just then beginning her courageous anti-lynching crusade? What meaning did the country assign to it? And of what did the incident forewarn?
Today, it’s a terrible truth that the assault on the lives of Black Americans is neither a regional nor a temporary issue, but a national crisis. Black people are regularly killed by police, and the term “Jim Crow” has found new purpose in describing the harsh conditions of life for the formerly incarcerated, as well as the large-scale efforts to make voting inaccessible to Black people and other minority citizens. That what drove the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a “mobocratic spirit”―a phrase Abraham Lincoln used as early as 1838 to describe vigilantism’s corrosive effect on America―frightfully insinuates that mob violence is a viable means of effecting political change. These issues remain as deserving of our concern now as they did 130 years ago, when America turned its gaze to Port Jervis.
An alleged crime, a lynching, a misbegotten attempt at an official inquiry, and a past unresolved―in A Lynching at Port Jervis, the acclaimed historian Philip Dray revisits this time and place to consider its significance in our communal history and to show how justice cannot be achieved without an honest reckoning.
Contexto da obra
Como livro em inglês, esta obra costuma ganhar também uma camada própria de interesse editorial e linguístico. “Lynching at Port Jervis”, de Philip Dray, publicado pela editora Picador Paper, em 2023 e com 272 páginas, integra a categoria Livros em Inglês. Por isso, o interesse da obra tende a se ampliar quando o leitor considera também a relação com a língua em que ela circula.
Editora: Picador Paper
Páginas: 272
Ano: 2023-06-06
Edição:
Linguagem: en
ISBN: 1250867134
ISBN13: 9781250867131
Sobre a editora
Os livros da editora Picador Paper trazem narrativas que exploram profundamente a complexidade humana, muitas vezes atravessando temas históricos, sociais e pessoais com densidade e sensibilidade. A experiência de leitura costuma envolver personagens que enfrentam dilemas morais e transformações internas, em cenários que vão desde conflitos bélicos até pequenas comunidades marcadas por segredos e tensões. O ritmo varia entre a tensão crescente e momentos de reflexão, com uma linguagem que pode ser tanto lírica quanto direta, dependendo da obra. O catálogo apresenta tanto relatos ficcionais quanto biografias e ensaios, sugerindo uma preferência por textos que dialogam com questões contemporâneas e históricas, sem abrir mão da profundidade emocional.
