As this book comes at the culmination of a long period of research into racial violence, stretching back to the days of my doctoral dissertation, I feel like I could simply copy and paste all the acknowledgments from my previous books and articles here and be done with it, in addition to thanking all the contributors to the edited volumes I have undertaken. However, there are certain individuals to whom I am personally indebted for this book. My friend and colleague Richard Buckelew, who wrote the first dissertation on lynching in Arkansas and so, in many ways, set this field in motion, read through various drafts of this manuscript and offered much good feedback, including the suggestion that, despite my hesitations, I attempt to take these ideas and fashion a concise definition of lynching from them. William A. Johnsen, one of the foremost scholars on René Girard, also read through the full text and offered significant encouragement for its publication. William H. Pruden III, a true scholar and gentleman, gave some wonderful feedback on some some early sections of this work, and the peer reviewers helped to save me from some of my more unfortunate compositional habits, as did copyeditor extraordinaire James Fraleigh. Grif Stockley has been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration who, despite his protestations otherwise, is a true historian in all respects, as well as a true humanitarian. Brian Mitchell and I covered much of the state during the various events of the year 2019, when the commemoration of the Elaine Massacre was in full swing, and so had a chance to discuss some of the ideas in this present volume. Nancy Snell Griffith has written extensively about the many lynchings in the state for the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, which certainly made putting this book together much easier, aside from just giving the citizens of this state and beyond the facts, as best as they can be determined, about our shared past. In addition, my new friends Kwami and Clarice Abdul-Bey have motivated me to think more deeply about lynching in their own work as co-conveners of the Arkansas Peace and Justice Memorial Movement, an organization dedicated to commemorating the state’s history of racial violence with the aim of achieving reconciliation across boundaries of race, class, and belief. Alongside my day job, I have also now and then taught undergraduate and graduate classes as an adjunct professor, classes that touched upon some of the issues explored here, and I want to thank all of my students through the years for motivating me to think more deeply and precisely about the nature of racialized violence.
Every writer needs an editor who can share his or her vision and offer direction in exactly how to arrive at that promised land. Editor-in-chief David Scott Cunningham is just such a person, and it has been a treat to work with him and the staff of the University of Arkansas Press once again. I genuinely appreciate the commitment of the University of Arkansas Press, led by director Mike Bieker, to publish material that challenges how we look at our collective past. This was my first time working with the very capable managing editor Janet Foxman, and I look forward to doing so again. (Welcome to Arkansas, Janet!) Too, my good friend Stephanie Harp, a scholar of lynching in her own right and a damned fine proofreader, went through the text and found multiple small errors that I had missed, and I cannot thank her enough for helping me appear to be somewhat competent, as well as for her encouragement and enthusiasm.
Finally, this book would not exist without my wonderful wife, Anna, who insisted that I undertake my own project again—not another edited volume or coauthored work, but something I wrote alone. And she put up with me regularly descending into fits of absentmindedness, or running around in search of a notepad as the latest idea rose to the surface at inopportune moments, or occupying the kitchen table with various open-faced books because I had run out of space on my desk. I try my best not to fall into the stereotypes of typical scholars and writers, but when I do so fall, she is always there to catch me, and she always forgives me if dinner gets burned because I suddenly have to go look up a citation and then get lost again among my various books. And so I say to her, in those words that William Shakespeare put in the mouth of Henry Bolingbroke, that “all my treasury / Is yet but unfelt thanks, which more enrich’d / Shall be your love and labour’s recompense.”