Why did some offenses in the South end in mob lynchings while similar crimes led to legal executions? Why did still other cases have nonlethal outcomes? In this well-researched and timely book, Margaret Vandiver explores the complex relationship between these two forms of lethal punishment, challenging the assumption that executions consistently grew out of-and replaced-lynchings.

Vandiver begins by examining the incidence of these practices in three culturally and geographically distinct southern regions. In rural northwest Tennessee, lynchings outnumbered legal executions by eleven to one and many African Americans were lynched for racial caste offenses rather than for actual crimes. In contrast, in Shelby County, which included the growing city of Memphis, more men were legally executed than lynched. Marion County, Florida, demonstrated a firmly entrenched tradition of lynching for sexual assault that ended in the early 1930s with three legal death sentences in quick succession.

With a critical eye to issues of location, circumstance, history, and race, Vandiver considers the ways that legal and extralegal processes imitated, influenced, and differed from each other. A series of case studies demonstrates a parallel between mock trials that were held by lynch mobs and legal trials that were rushed through the courts and followed by quick executions.

Tying her research to contemporary debates over the death penalty, Vandiver argues that modern death sentences, like lynchings of the past, continue to be influenced by factors of race and place, and sentencing is comparably erratic.

Packed with villains, victims, and heroes, Stained with Blood and Tears recounts the story of what has been called the “equal opportunity” lynchings of Will “Froggie” James, who was black, and Henry Salzner, a white man, in the rowdy river town of Cairo, Illinois, on November 11, 1909. This book is the first to focus on one of the most infamous nights of lynching in the history of the United States, when about one thousand men and women were transformed into a murderous mob. The book also details a lesser-known attempted lynching of a suspected purse snatcher by another mob about ninety days later. That mob was beaten back by about a dozen mostly African American deputies and a white sheriff. Stained with Blood and Tears ends with the saga of the killing of a Cairo policeman in the police station by the sheriff from a neighboring county over an incident that began in a Cairo brothel. The book thoroughly examines a dark side of Cairo’s past when it had a Jim Crow mind-set and crooked policemen and was awash in liquor and teeming with prostitutes and gambling houses. The violence of the era led the town’s Catholic priest to lament, “Must this fair city of ours go ever in garments spattered with blood?”