Lynched chronicles the history and aftermath of lynching in
America. By rooting her work in oral histories, Angela D. Sims gives
voice to the memories of African American elders who remember
lynching not only as individual acts but as a culture of violence,
domination, and fear.
Lynched
preserves memory even while it provides an analysis of the meaning of
those memories. Sims examines the relationship between lynching and
the interconnected realities of race, gender, class, and other social
fragmentations that ultimately shape a person’s—and a
community’s—religious self-understanding. Through this
understanding, she explores how the narrators reconcile their
personal and communal memory of lynching with their lived Christian
experience. Moreover, Sims unearths the community’s truth that this
is sometimes a story of words and at other times a story of silence.
Revealing the bond
between memory and moral formation, Sims discovers the courage and
hope inherent in the power of recall. By tending to the words of
these witnesses, Lynched exposes not only a culture of fear
and violence but the practice of story and memory, as well as the
narrative of hope within a renewed possibility for justice.
