“‘Do you not understand your own language?’ David Walker famously asked white America. It is an enduring question for activists and scholars of the antiracist left, and one that Rebecca N. Hill engages in this imaginative and provocative study. Men, Mobs, and Law critically compares and connects a series of cases framed by state-sanctioned premature death to disentangle the rhetoric, strategy, and gendered racial politics of radical campaigns for justice that overlay deeper movements for social change.”-Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
“Men, Mobs, and Law is a brilliant work of scholarship. Rebecca N. Hill argues that anti-lynching and labor-defense movements represent two sides of the same coin, not simply because they share a concern for social justice, but because they embody a fundamental opposition between the mob and the state. Hill draws on the most sophisticated analyses of race, gender, class, history, politics, and literature to reorient our thinking about the meaning of ‘popular justice.’”-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Men, Mobs, and Law is a terrific book, which will speak to wide readerships about the functioning of the state, the nature and complexity of movements that have challenged the state, and the problems that race and class pose for traditional conceptions of American democracy. The book is organized around dramatic cases. These are stories that many of us know well, but Rebecca N. Hill’s treatment of them is fresh, lively, richly detailed, and impassioned.”-Peter Rachleff, author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement
