![]() ![]() ![]() Lewis, who had worked in town as a respected laborer, was accused of sexually assaulting a local young White woman, and Dray chronicles how Lewis would suffer the consequences of the toxic stew of rumors, gossip, and deeply ingrained racism that existed in Port Jervis. As the author shows throughout his riveting text, while the heinous crime “lacked the ritualistic staging typical of many Southern lynchings…it was grounded in the same white insecurities that characterized the practice in warmer climes.” Although only White (mainly newspaper) accounts of the lynching and aftermath remain in the record, the actual story, as the author unravels, was yet another example of a horrible mishandling of justice regarding a Black citizen. In his latest, Dray-the author of At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America and other works of American history-offers a cleareyed, powerful account of the lynching of Robert Lewis, a Black man, in the railroad town of Port Jervis, New York, amid a riot on June 2, 1892. An award-winning historian investigates a shocking incident of “spontaneous vigilantism” that “was seen as a portent that lynching, then surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward.” ![]()
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