Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children

"An unflinching and visionary work that recovers the central role of children in the making of racial violence."--Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with the corrupting force of a system that trained children to become its willing executioners

Strung Up examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence. Drawing on meticulous archival research and vivid narrative storytelling, Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn.

Nationally recognized child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton locates the roots of this violence not solely in the United States, but in Europe's long history of anti-child brutality. She reveals how centuries of public executions, corporal punishment, religious spectacle, and sanctioned cruelty exposed white children to extreme violence early and often. This violence, she argues, conditioned them to associate pain, domination, and death with moral order.

Patton traces this desensitization across the Atlantic where white children raised within these traditions became adults primed to reproduce racial terror, transforming inherited practices of child cruelty into instruments of white supremacy in the post-emancipation United States.

Blending history with developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and research on adverse childhood experiences, Strung Up shows how violence is not only taught, but biologically and psychologically embedded across generations. Patton demonstrates how racial terror functioned as a system of socialization that shaped perception, behavior, and moral reasoning long before it produced the mob, the rope, or the fire.

The image on the front cover is a World War I era photograph depicting a mock lynching of a Black child, reportedly at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. The author purchased it from the Philip J. Merrill, Nanny Jack & Co Archives.

Author: Stacey Patton
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 10/06/2026
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.80d
ISBN: 9780807016206


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/24/2026
Foreword 08/27/2026

About the Author
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist, author, college professor and nationally recognized child advocate whose work focuses on the elimination of corporal punishment in homes and schools. Her writings on education, child welfare, and race have been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education, NewsOne, Black Enterprise, and other outlets.