How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children: Stacey Patton on Strung Up

“The lynching itself was the explanation. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.” — Stacey Patton

For Halloween, a true American horror story. Last week, Joseph Kelly came on the show to argue that racialized American fascism has a prehistory running back to 1818. But today’s guest goes much, much further — both in time and in criminality. Stacey Patton wrote her doctorate on the racialization of American childhood and her new book is entitled Strung Up. It’s the story of how white America learned to lynch Black children.

“Learned” is key. Patton writes about the people who turned up to watch the lynchings so endemic in American history. She traces the practice back across the Atlantic, to a Europe with centuries of history of public execution and the punishment of children as theater. And she sets out the two versions of 19th-century American childhood. The Lockean child to be nurtured and rewarded. The fallen child to be corrected and punished. White childhood and Black childhood. Trick or treat. No candy for guessing who got what in America.

Patton describes an image from Waco, Texas in 1916, then a supposedly modern and progressive town. The first people to reach the lynching of Jesse Washington were children, running as though to a parade. Small boys were paid to gather kindling. A reporter asked a father why he had a toddler on his shoulders and was told the child could not learn the “proper way” too young.

There will be those who say that Patton exaggerates in order to vilify American history. But last night I saw Once Upon a Time in Harlem, the excellent documentary by David Greaves, built from his father William’s 1972 footage. It’s not really about racial crimes, but there’s one scene in the movie featuring photos of White kids at the lynching of Black people. Stacey Patton’s Strung Up is already a USA Today best-seller. It’s not hard to understand why. Happy Halloween.

FURTHER READING

•   Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press, October 2026). Patton also wrote Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America and the memoir That Mean Old Yesterday.

•   Kohen Wiley was shot by an officer in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Mississippi in June. The state attorney general ruled the shooting justified on 19 October; the officer has since resigned and the family is seeking a federal investigation.

•   Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights — the scholarship Patton builds on about who was allowed to be innocent.

•   Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, is the thesis Patton pushes back on: childhood as a modern invention, a claim later historians have narrowed.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Stacey Patton is a journalist and academic in the School of Communications at Howard University. Her doctorate in African American history examined the racialization of childhood in America between 1880 and 1954. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday and Spare the Kids, and writes a widely read newslette