A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America.

By James H. Madison. (New York and Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xiv, 204. $24.95, ISBN 0-312-23902-5.)

Indiana University professor James H. Madison recounts the 1930 lynching of Tom Shipp and Abe Smith in Marion, Indiana. The two young black men--along with James Cameron, who narrowly escaped--were in jail on charges of murdering Claude Deeter and raping Mary Ball when a mob of white men and women stormed the jail and hung the two young men from a tree outside the nearby courthouse. Madison uses this case as a starting point to examine racial dynamics in Marion in the decades before and after the lynchings. After recounting the events surrounding the lynching of Shipp and Smith, Madison provides a brief overview of the history of lynching. The remaining chapters explore the dynamics of racial segregation and its impact on both the black and white communities of Marion; the efforts of individual African Americans and the NAACP to achieve and maintain civil rights "as most whites drew tighter the boundaries that separated them from their African American neighbors" (p. 2); the local NAACP activist Katherine "Flossie" Bailey's campaign to bring members of the lynch mob to justice; the narrative of events regarding the lynching as put forward by James Cameron, the third black youth accused of murder and rape, who had escaped; and how the lynching shaped the lives of both black and white residents during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and throughout the rest of the century.

As Madison tells the reader, the book is lacking in "analysis and interpretation" but filled with the words and deeds of Grant County residents (p. 3). Depending heavily on oral interviews, court records, and newspapers, Madison provides a quick read. He is at his best when documenting Flossie Bailey's efforts to bring the murderers of Shipp and Smith to justice. Madison's study is well researched and thought-provoking, but unfortunately, it leaves much unanswered about the tradition of racial violence in the Midwest and reveals nothing new about the practice of lynching. In an attempt to refute the notion that lynching was a southern phenomenon, Madison fails to explain why the proportion of lynchings that occurred in the South rose from 82 percent of the national total during the 1880s to more than 95 percent during the 1920s. Indeed, lynchings occurred in the Midwest, but unlike in the South, the majority of victims were white. Between 1880 and 1930, 181 whites and 79 blacks were lynched in the Midwest, compared to 723 whites and 3,220 blacks lynched in the South (see Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 [Urbana, Ill., 1993], p. 8). While lacking in historical analysis, A Lynching in the Heartland documents in superb detail the tragic 1930 lynching of Abe Smith and Tom Shipp and its lasting impact on the black and white community of Marion, Indiana.

CRYSTAL FEIMSTER
Boston College