Rebecca Hill’s first book started out as a graduate school paper.
The book is Men, Mobs and the Law, published this year by Duke University Press. In it, Hill, an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science, finds common ground between two seemingly dissimilar 19th and early 20th-century protest movements—one aimed at defending early labor organizers against criminal prosecution, the other directed at the practice of lynching in the South.
From Sacco and Vanzetti to Mumia Abu-Jamal
“In my first year of graduate school, I wrote a paper comparing the legal defense mounted for Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists tried and executed for murder in 1920, and the defense of the Rosenbergs, who were convicted of espionage in the early 1950s,” Hill says. “That idea later became the basis of my dissertation.” In graduate school, Hill was active in politics and got involved in the public defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death for the 1981 shooting of a Philadelphia police officer.
“But no Pennsylvania governor was willing to sign the death warrant until 1995, when the state elected its first pro-death penalty governor,” she recalls. “The case got me thinking about the role of defense organizing throughout American history.” By the time she turned the idea into a book, she had extended the story’s historical arc forward to the 1980s and back to the antebellum era and John Brown’s anti-slavery revolt. She had also focused in on the labor and anti-lynching themes.
“With the advent of organized labor in the 19th century, union leaders were often prosecuted for their activism,” Hill says. “The same period saw the advent of anti-lynching campaigns. Between 1877 and 1920, more than 3,000 African-Americans were lynched in the South.” In her book, Hill asks—and attempts to answer—the question, “What do these different types of political campaign look to accomplish?” She concludes that both were focused on defending the rights of individuals, “contrary to a common belief that they subordinated individual welfare to the success of the movement.” But equally important, both forms of protest eventually came together “to address the excesses of the government and gain popular support.”
High praise
While Men, Mobs and the Law has not yet been reviewed, it has garnered enthusiastic praise from prominent writers and scholars. Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, calls the book “a brilliant work of scholarship,” noting that Hill “draws on the most sophisticated analyses of race, gender, class, history, politics, and literature to reorient our thinking about the meaning of ‘popular justice.’” Hill recently appeared at a signing at a Manhattan bookstore where all the copies of her book sold out. Is that a sign the book is destined for commercial success?
“It’s really too soon to tell,” Hill says.
