 Blackstone Presents, a lynching at Port Jervis, race and reckoning in the gilded age, by Philip Dre. This book is read by Dionne Graham. Nations reel and stagger on their way. They make hideous mistakes. They commit frightful wrongs. They do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this? So far as the truth is ascertainable. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935. Introduction One morning in the spring of 1985, I drove along a country road in Alabama to the Tuskegee Institute, one of America's oldest and most venerated black colleges. I was researching a book about the 1964 murder of the civil rights workers James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner in Mississippi, and had heard there was a folder on the case in a collection at Tuskegee, then known as the lynching archives. When a librarian led me to the room where the materials were kept, I was surprised to see not a solitary cabinet, as I'd expected, but dozens of containers and cardboard boxes, sixty-three in number. She explained these held a century's worth of newspaper clippings and other published accounts of the many thousands of lynchings in the United States, most of African Americans. This substantial repository, overseen by the pioneering black sociologist Monroe Nathan Work in the years 1912 through 1935, and maintained for decades by students and staff, had defied lynching's code of impunity and silence. It had done this by refusing to allow the stories of what the crusading black journalist Ida B. Wells called America's national crime to be forgotten and die along with its victims. Notably, I was told this archive held only the known cases, those recorded by the press or civil rights groups, but that an immeasurable number still remained unknown or unsubstantiated. It was my encounter with the Tuskegee collection and its unavoidable truth that lynching was not a series of random, aberrational incidents, but an institutionalized form of white terror. That led me to write the book at the hands of persons unknown, The Lynching of Black America, which was published in 2002. The chronological accounts in the Tuskegee collection, although drawn from all over the country, chiefly concerned the southern states where historically most lynchings took place, but incidents of racialized mob violence occurred in the north as well. There, given their infrequency, and because they tended to reveal the hypocrisy of the region's vaunted superiority as a place of assured civic authority and respect for the rule of law, they often attracted greater notoriety.