
Strung Up
How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children
Stacey Patton(Author)
Beacon Press
Will be published approx. on 6. October 2026
Book
Hardback
408 pages
978-0-8070-1620-6 (ISBN)
Description
A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with the corrupting force of a system that trained children to become its willing executioners
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.
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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Boston, MA
United States
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
567 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8070-1620-6 (9780807016206)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Stacey Patton
Content
Introduction: “Ought Children Be Born to Us?”
Chapter 1: “The Fun We Had Burning the Niggers”: How Love and Trauma Primed White Children to Normalize Collective Homicide
Chapter 2: From the Nursery to the Gallows: How Europe Rehearsed Racial Violence on Its Own Children
Chapter 3: “My Son Can’t Learn Too Young the Proper Way to Treat a Nigger”: The Trans-Atlantic Legacy of Public Execution and the Lynching of Jesse Washington
Chapter 4: “The Time for You to Die Is Come”: White Christianity, Profit, and the Ritualized Killing of Children in Colonial America
Chapter 5: Birthing Racism: White Women as Biological Gatekeepers of Intergenerational Violence
Chapter 6: “My Lord, We Plead Our Bellies”: Lynching Black Pregnancy and the Scientific Racialization of the Black Unborn
Chapter 7: “If Dat Chile Doan Soon Turn Colour There’ll Be Trouble in Dis Family”: The Fear of Changeling Babies and the Lynching of Black Infants and Toddlers
Chapter 8: “Don’t You Know a Negro Child’s Scrotum Is Always Black?”: Pediatric Experiments, Birth Records, and the War on Southern Black Midwives
Chapter 9: “Go ‘Long, White Man, I Ain’t No ‘SEPTEMBER MORN’!”: Pedophilic Murder from Picture Postcards to the Lynching of Freddie Moore
Chapter 10: “We Want to Kill Them All if We Can”: White Guardians, Wealthy Black Children, Race Robbery, and Murder in Muskogee County, Oklahoma
Epilogue: The Cold Case of Justice
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Chapter 1: “The Fun We Had Burning the Niggers”: How Love and Trauma Primed White Children to Normalize Collective Homicide
Chapter 2: From the Nursery to the Gallows: How Europe Rehearsed Racial Violence on Its Own Children
Chapter 3: “My Son Can’t Learn Too Young the Proper Way to Treat a Nigger”: The Trans-Atlantic Legacy of Public Execution and the Lynching of Jesse Washington
Chapter 4: “The Time for You to Die Is Come”: White Christianity, Profit, and the Ritualized Killing of Children in Colonial America
Chapter 5: Birthing Racism: White Women as Biological Gatekeepers of Intergenerational Violence
Chapter 6: “My Lord, We Plead Our Bellies”: Lynching Black Pregnancy and the Scientific Racialization of the Black Unborn
Chapter 7: “If Dat Chile Doan Soon Turn Colour There’ll Be Trouble in Dis Family”: The Fear of Changeling Babies and the Lynching of Black Infants and Toddlers
Chapter 8: “Don’t You Know a Negro Child’s Scrotum Is Always Black?”: Pediatric Experiments, Birth Records, and the War on Southern Black Midwives
Chapter 9: “Go ‘Long, White Man, I Ain’t No ‘SEPTEMBER MORN’!”: Pedophilic Murder from Picture Postcards to the Lynching of Freddie Moore
Chapter 10: “We Want to Kill Them All if We Can”: White Guardians, Wealthy Black Children, Race Robbery, and Murder in Muskogee County, Oklahoma
Epilogue: The Cold Case of Justice
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index