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Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be interviewing the author of a book titled American Bloodlines, Reckoning with Lynch Culture, published by University Press of Kentucky in 2025. Now, this book was written by Sonja Lee, who I have the pleasure of speaking with today, and investigates a really intriguing history. Well, intriguing in and of itself, important in and of itself, but also personally important to Sonja as well. So we have multiple sort of levels and layers of historical investigation going on here, talking to some extent about the present and also going back into the earlier part of the 20th century as well. So I don't want to give too much away at this point, but, Sonja, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [01:56]
C
Thanks for having me, Dr. Meltu. I really appreciate it.
- [02:00]
B
Well, I'm very pleased that you said yes to this and we get to have a discussion about the book. But before we get into the details of what you've written, can you maybe introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why, what this book is kind of at its core about? I was trying, as you could tell, in my introduction, to not give away spoilers about the case at the center of it, to hopefully leave you to do that introduction.
- [02:24]
C
Thank you very much. And yes, my name is Sonya Lee. I'm a writer and a writing mentor who lives in Portland, Oregon, near my family. And this book is American Bloodlines Reckoning with Lynch Culture. And it's really about an event that happened in the summer of 1936 when rainy Bethea, a young black man, was charged for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman by the name of Lisha Edwards. At that time, the prosecuting attorney requested that Bethea be charged on rape alone so that a public hanging, rather than an electric chair in a prison, might take his life. And then what occurred in Owensboro, Kentucky, was an all white, all male jury took four and a half minutes to find him guilty. So Owensboro, Kentucky, then becomes, through this execution, what was to be called the last public execution in America. And in the process, 20,000 white people and news people from around the nation showed up to watch Rainy Bethea hang. They came in such large numbers, in part because it was promised that a white woman sheriff was going to be the one to avenge the crime. And she didn't say anything about whether she was going to pull the lever or not. And that built up a kind of her silence, built up this kind of momentum for the spectacle. And it was happening in the 30s, you know, in this time where there was a lot of debate about gender and proximity to power. And it just evolved that it brought much more attention to the town. This was Sheriff Flores Thompson was her name. And when she decided not to pull the lever that day, Kentucky imagined, and this was a very absurd kind of public relations campaign that the journalists were so disappointed that they collectively moved to humiliate the state. So in reflection on this, and despite these many efforts at the time and continuing from 1936 to make this execution seem acceptable, the community's injustices were stark. And these were some of them. Not one statement was made by the defense. For months that summer, the local newspapers promoted Bethea's guilt and kind of, in this form of verging on yellow journalism, fanned the white community's anxiety. And then we have Sheriff Thompson kind of stoking the country's gender fears by being promised as the hangman. And eventually there was a habeas corpus hearing. Five black lawyers stepped up to provide defense for that hearing. And then ultimately the judge denied them a right to an appeal. So he was charged in June. By August 14th, he was executed. And so you had the summer of swelling interest, the gallows being built along the Ohio river, people coming by to see what was happening on the evening prior and up to what was to be a sunrise execution. And this is not my statement of it. This is, of course, according to news reports and historic photographs, white people held what they called necktie parties. It's a very gruesome sounding term. And they made something that ought to have been not done at all, but certainly if it was done, to be done solemnly into this kind of brutal carnival of the observation of Bethesda death. They sold Cokes and hot dogs. And just as in like many lynchings in America, which I grew to study and learn about somewhat, there were always children and families who attended. So it was when this went out to the nation, Kentucky was the one who was so humiliated because of the actions that they'd taken, even though it would take America up until the 21st century to create a law against munching. So this is part of what provides the background to American bloodlines. And woven through that is my own reckoning with what happened in my family in relationship to these events.
- [07:48]
B
Yeah, I think that's the other really key sort of foundational aspect to discuss, which is how you came to know about these events.
- [07:56]
C
I was 42 years old and I was at my grandmother's funeral when a neighbor kind of passed me this set of papers and saying that they had done an oral interview project with my grandmother and she had apparently given statements about her life, including that she had been at this execution. I didn't know anything about it. I was just handed it. I later opened the file when I was returning home to Seattle, where we lived then, and discovered not just the fact that she had been there, but many racist statements that she made in conjunction with what she observed and what she felt about what happened. I was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, and I left there for Canada when I was a little girl, probably about the third grade. So I was educated in Canada, married a Canadian, had children who were born in Canada. I didn't know anything about the last public execution in my hometown, but I did know my grandmother being racist. I recognized that racist voice that had been so much a part of my upbringing. And visiting back, going between a southern American culture and a northern Canadian culture. But just knowing about this event set me out to research what happened and to go more deeply into it than what I found initially meant that I needed to uncover black scholars and historians who had written about the hanging as well as lich culture in America from a very different vantage point than Owensboro and some of what white historians had said about it. So that was the initial part of my research. It took me quite some time to really dig into it because I like a good trained white woman. I did not really do a good job of questioning authority. And I had an early conversation with, with a white historian who had written about this event, who was still connected with Kentucky state government. And, you know, basically was told, there's nothing to see here. This was a criminal someplace in America, had to be the last one to do it. But, you know, all evidence points to he ought to have been executed. And I believe that until I really started to do more anti racism work myself and really felt like this was a story that wouldn't go away in my life. So I spent another 10 years researching and talking with people, going to interview my family, interviewing archivists and librarians and historians in and around the state. And then years into that research, I discovered that both sides of my family were involved in the hanging. It wasn't just my paternal grandparents. It was also I'm second cousin on my mother's side to Herman Birkhead, who was the attorney for the Commonwealth and the man I consider to be most responsible for Bithea's death.
- [11:33]
B
Those are some very intertwined histories to uncover. Indeed. But these weren't the only things that kind of weren't discussed growing up. Right. This is sort of part of a much larger, larger context. So maybe we can kind of zoom out a little bit before we get back into some of the details here. You discuss in the book kind of larger questions of race relations and settler colonialism and how that was kind of also part of this culture and context.
- [12:01]
C
Yes, I think that, you know, it's a fascinating question. I think that inside a lot of history and interpretation of history is a sense of family codes, of how we keep certain things silent in families so that we can continue to belong and how, like, even as young people, we learn very well what it is that we're permitted to speak of and what we have to keep hidden. And I really do think that that's the first part to overcome before we can even get to a systemic awareness of what it is that's happened in our histories. So I thought no one in my family except my elders knew about this event, but when I went and talked to family members, I discovered that my sisters knew about the hanging before I did, and several of my aunts and cousins reported not knowing about it. So most everyone in Kentucky is not taught about Rainy Bethea or even much about racial violence in both the public and the parochial school systems. You cannot go there as a visitor and find anything that is memorializing what happened in Owensboro on that day, even though, you know, it's arguably one of the most significant historical events in that region. So there's just so much that would grow out of this. You know, the actions in my own family were one thing, but then there was also. I wasn't trained in naming racism when I observed it. So becoming oriented to what's the meaning of when my father uses racist phrases? What's the meaning of the Confederate flag outside? What's been taught to me? I did grow up in another culture, one that was often racist, which is Canada. But also at the time, in this 1970s, it was also really trying to align itself with multiculturalism. I'm thinking about the first prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who helped create policies for bilingualism and multiculturalism that would go on to recognize diversity in languages and religions and customs and so on. So the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be created, you know, through my childhood and up until adult life. And the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada has that capacity to acknowledge that everyone has freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief, opinion, peaceful assembly, association with the guarantees for those rights or freedoms is happens equally to all genders. So there was this process of, I think of from a personal level, of traveling back and forth between Canada and the US and looking at how each cultural did and didn't support equal rights. But I was really never exposed to how in particular, white people might be oriented to or encouraged to understand the privilege that was already baked into the system. I didn't understand until adulthood, the system still that still carried the permission to exert racial violence and the ways that that was being reinforced all around me. So I would say that the research that I did for this book was as a historian, and it was also alongside the personal development that's required to be able to really recognize what's going on, systemic systems that the nation and larger forces are designing at the same time as the personal is being examined. And, and I think, just say one more thing about Canada. When we were taught about diversity in Canada, that was really only conceptual. It wasn't. Let's take into account the specific ways that our family and our ancestors have benefited due to colonialism and slave and violence against others. I think that that's a process that's mostly beginning through a truth and reconciliation process in some nations, but it's still not really even discussed very much amongst families or communities. I was talking with a friend recently over the last month about One of the passages in American Bloodlines that describes my grandfather seeing an arrowhead from the corn fields with our family farm and reaching down to pick it up, and then telling this little girl me about Kentucky being named for the land of the blood red ground. And what he was saying in this coded way was to signify the rich hunting grounds of the region and how there were only nomadic people, therefore whoever just came through. So in my family, just like in other colonizer families, the line was that our family came in and took what was free for the taking. And that's kind of what we're given a lot. And that indigenous people had their own relationship with that land wasn't told in our family or our communal stories. So there's this period of 200 years, really in white. Where white. American historians argue that American Indians never lived in Kentucky. They acknowledge that it was a territory of disputes. But there was a land speculator by the name of John Filson who created this lie in his book of about 1788 that was called the Discovery Settlement and Present State of Kentucky, where he wrote that Indians had no claim to that place because there was an ancient white race that predated the indigenous tribes. So his book then, which had maps and locations and, you know, invitations to colonize in it, it's really no surprise when we come from that kind of a whiteness origin story, that our communities pass these lies down to us and that that became the truth so that my grandfather could hand me that arrowhead and, you know, hope that that became the particular story that I accepted. But, you know, I'm thinking through things and I'm thinking about, so what does that sound like now? Like, what does that sound like in present day America where white supremacists, including those in our government today, who insist on this same baseless belief in the existence and the. The superiority of a pure white race, and they enact policy designed to privilege, you know, so called white ethnicities and home ownership and immigration and business financing and laws and cultural networks. And in part, I. There's kind of a double meaning to the title of my book, American Bloodlines, because it is an acknowledgement of my lineage, but it's also a kind of satiric nod to the awareness of this concept of race that only exists to defend privilege, and that's whiteness.
- [19:50]
B
That's a lot of different layers and things to be untangling and thinking about, and a lot of work that clearly.
- [19:56]
C
Has gone into that.
- [19:58]
B
I'm curious why you decided to write all of it down. In a book?
- [20:03]
C
Yeah. Sometimes I question, too. I work with a lot of writers in the United States and Canada, and we talk about the forces behind writing. And I have to say, in all honesty, sometimes I feel like I may not have decided so much as I felt compelled. There was an obsession to write this book, and part of it was happening because my ancestors hadn't been able to get to this point of declaring their racism. But seemingly I had been given the capacity to do so. And I want to say I was given the capacity to do so mostly by black women who taught me. And so I really felt that I ought to. I ought to be able to step up and do the work. But also, it had come to the point in my writing where the story was so big in my life and I was so aware of it that I couldn't really write anything that didn't turn into it. You know, even if I was trying to hide it in fiction, it was becoming this story. So I really began to become aware that until I tackled what was hidden in my family line and made a reckoning of what was owed, that I really wouldn't be able to move forward. And there were a few other black scholars who'd written about Bethea and also about what had happened in Owensboro. It didn't seem to me that there was anyone who had detailed the full story of it and the responsibility of the community to him. And I really and truly felt then, still feel today that the descendants of Bethea are owed that. I think that's really important. I'm in touch with some folks from the Remembrance Project, which is affiliated with the Equal Justice Initiative, who are in Owensboro really trying to get the community and the government and the region to look at ways that we can properly educate and talk about this event.
- [22:17]
B
So a book and other ways of engaging with this as well, that's good to know. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about something that you mentioned earlier when describing the case. And now that we have kind of this broader personal and historical context in our discussion, I'd love to kind of pick that thread back up, because in the subtitle of the book, right. Reckoning with Lynch Culture. Lynching is unfortunately, right. Quite famous in the American South. But I can imagine there might be some people thinking about the case as you described at the beginning and going, well, hang on a second. That's not a lynching. There was a justice process. There was a conviction handed down, etc. Now, you've already explained to us why that process had A whole bunch of issues with it in terms of rule of law as we'd understand it. Now, in the book, you use the term legal lynching to kind of make sense of some of these seeming contradictions. Can you tell us more about what you mean by that term?
- [23:17]
C
Yeah, I think it will be a big leap for some readers. And I do want to talk about what the process was for me, because it was a process that took a number of years to come to the conclusion of. So legal lynching is a term that I first heard defined from Dr. George C. Wright in his book Racial Violence in Kentucky. I think it's 1865-1940 lynchings, mob rule and legal lynchings. Legal lynchings is in quotations in that title, as it often is, because it sounds like an oxymoron. Right. How can it be legal under the justice system and be a lynching? That's the opposite process. But I also look to this meaning that comes from the Equal Justice Initiative in there. They do a comprehensive report on lynching which is available online. I highly recommend people have a look at that themselves, which says extrajudicial mob violence operated hand in hand with legal execution as a means of exercising lethal social control over the black population. Neither lynchings nor legal executions required reliable findings of guilt, and complicit law enforcement officers handed over prisoners to the lynch mob. So when I drilled down into looking at the specific details of the Bethea case, what was it that the community did to ensure justice in this case? Because if they went to those kinds of actions, then I couldn't in all good faith call this a legal lynching. But simply put, there was nothing the community did to ensure justice other than they put on a sham trial. There was absolutely no defense mounted for Rainy Bethea. And by that I mean not one word was said in trial, not during the jury selection process. No cross questioning of any witnesses, no closing remarks, nothing. I also have suspicion about the confessions Bethea was said to have made to police officers and jailers. Number one, he was drunk when he was erected. Sorry. Arrested for the crime. He had a history of, you know, kind of drunken, disorderly behavior. He was quite young, in his early 20s.
- [25:50]
B
He.
- [25:50]
C
When he was arrested two years prior for stealing a purse. And that's when his criminality was first established in the area, and he was sentenced to prison for a year. So when they went out looking for who might have done this, they were essentially looking for someone who already had a criminal record. And that was part of what they deliberately said, that they did as part of their process. The other thing that happens when you look at the situation is Bethea doesn't seem to understand his plea. He changed it to guilty right before the trial. And then later in his habeas corpus hearing, his lawyers and he stated that he felt pressured to do this to keep himself from being killed by the mob, that somehow he ascertained that that was going to keep him alive during the whole process of investigation. Two other suspects were released without much ado, just brief, cursory information. His lawyers, at the end of the trial didn't make a motion for a new trial that cost him an appeal. The Owensboro media were just rampaged. Every single piece of information that they could get. They were convinced of his guilt. They pushed large pictures of him where he looked much more mature than his age. They reported him as being older, as did my grandmother aging him, like, some 15 years and her reporting of him. So they inserted themselves into the police investigations and trials. There's even some interviews I did with current journalists who reported on information that they had from the journalists who were with the Owensboro Courier Journal during this time, who stated that they would often be at the crime scene before the investigators were and be back writing their story before the police showed up. This was common practice. The doctor and the coroner were both at the scene earlier than any police, and they kind of tramped around the room and made their own conclusions with which they stated at trial. So all of this before investigators really arrived. They were just looking for the conclusions that they'd already made. But I think also, bottom line, there's very little likelihood that this would have happened to a white man or anyone with power or a voice in Kentucky society. And Rainy Bethea was a young black man who was an orphan, and he had very little support in that community. He did not have a lot of friends. He worked and lived often in the same place, in garages or little side apartments for the people he worked for. And I think that white people used that lack of status to take his life.
- [29:15]
B
What you've just described there is a whole bunch of essentially processes going wrong and processes going wrong for racial reasons.
- [29:23]
C
Right?
- [29:24]
B
Is that what makes this a legal lynching?
- [29:27]
C
So it is what makes it a legal lynching. If you consider that this is how lynch culture operates. It uses the mob and the status of white people to gain a conclusion, which under the appearance of doing everything correctly. So it goes under the. Obviously, there were officials under the court system. There was a judge, There were lawyers who were assigned. But like What Equal Justice Initiative and black scholars talk about. This was a lynching that had moved into the legal system, and it had operated from the beginning with the premise of his guilt. And those are all the ways that it enacted that guilt in advance of a reasonable and just trial. That is the term of what a legal lynching is. I can say more about that, if you like.
- [30:36]
B
Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that a bit more. Because, I mean, what you're describing definitely doesn't sound like it would happen only in this one case. Right, that. Let's talk more, I think, about these kind of lynch culture aspects of it that you've raised.
- [30:51]
C
So lynch culture is embedded. This is my definition of it. It's embedded in every action that upholds a system that makes it easier to punish indigenous, black and other marginalized groups rather than create and sustain the culture of justice. It's a very wide definition. We tend to think of lynch culture, though, as something that happens out there and usually in the past and not in our communities and families. And we can often find lynch culture still evident, though, in nations and community and in ourselves. So in many ways, you're right. Lynch culture and legal lynching doesn't just happen in this case. It is America. Lynch culture is America. So that's why this book became very important to me, too, because there's a bridge here between what happened in Rainy Bethea in 1936 and the lynch culture that's happening now. So, you know, we. We'd like to think that the U.S. legal system is guided by principles and fairness and impartiality and justice for all at the same time. Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated as white men. And even though the Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person should be deprived of life or liberty or property without due process of law, disregard for due process happens every day in this nation, in this federal administration. It's pretty visible in the city that I live in and in many other towns that contractors and government forces like ice, which is our Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is rounding up people on the street without any regard for a just legal process. But lynch culture is also evident in very specific racial violence that's happening today, like the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, where in the year following the protests in that city, the Kentucky Senate proposed a bill to make insulting a police officer a crime and whose language sounds like the black codes, the black codes, which would have replaced the slave codes after the south was no longer allowed to enact slavery. So I think that lynch culture becomes everywhere you look here. It's like in the incendiary rhetoric of Stephen Miller, whose hate mongering is now, I would call that politically ascendant in Washington. And I think one of the most important pieces linked back to what's happening now as a result of lynch culture being active here is that this governance that we're in embraces quite a lot of white nationalist views. And the end goal of this kind of hatred is a vilification of people and organizations who support equal rights, which in some ways are in many ways threaten the white nationalist project. So the mob isn't required if the state can be mobilized to enact racial terrorists through its laws and customs and procedures. And that's where lynch culture and legal lynching becomes appropriate terminology, I think, in this case as well. But I know I want to say something else, Dr. Melcher, and that is instead of reconciling ourselves to doom here, because I think that white people can hear stories of racial violence and just feel, you know, under it, there's so much to look at, there's so much to do. I think that we can also take instruction from black activists and abolitionists, abolitionists of this time and of earlier times in America, who not only opposed slavery, but also confronted the savagery of lynchings. I mean, most of us know about Ida B. Wells, who collected the data on societal factors of lynchings. But there was also the NAACP, who was doing this work here as early as 1916. At this time, there was the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and many, many other organizations. But what I think happened after Owensboro's last public execution was what Brian Stevenson calls the stepchild of lynching, which is it reverted to the death penalty. And so, you know, slave patrols, black codes, bounty hunters, militia groups, those were the precursors to this racist criminal justice system and biases that happened that then moved into racial profiling and police force and cases like Rainey Bethea's. So while I can see that Lisha Edwards was a victim of rape and murder, I see Rainey Bethia as a victim of state violence. He was also a victim of lynch culture that defined his body as a terror that might weaken the power of whiteness. And I believe that's exactly how it functions. Both legal lynching and lynching function not just to cause a death, because that would be a completely different operation entirely, but to cause a message to the community at large. This is what happens when you act outside of our status and control and power.
- [36:52]
B
Definitely important to think about that wider context. Both in history and the present. Another thread you mentioned earlier, I want to make sure we pick up on is the Canadian aspect of all of this. How has thinking through all of these things in the US Changed your thinking on Canadian history and the present?
- [37:11]
C
Yes, it very much has changed it. I was living in Canada much of the time that I wrote this book, applying for grants, and the book was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. And I was living in Banff national park in Canada, which has this outsized mythology about what represents Canada, like not just those iconic mountains of the Canadian Rockies, but the forces of the federal government, which is represented by a national park system which now in current day, operates the town in conjunction with elected representation. You see these pressures there now of this profitable tourism industry, which is opposing a government that interprets protection of nature through the lens of control and authority. So all of that was happening, and I kind of wanted to get to the root of how this place was managed into this position. And you can't really do that without researching how it got here, as you know, as a historian. In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed by workers, including 15,000 Chinese laborers who worked in really dangerous conditions in this scheme to unite the country. During that era, three white railway workers said that they discovered the hot springs in Banff, though there was a long tradition of hunting, fishing, and gathering medicines that had been essential to Indigenous people in that area, primarily the Stoney people. The government at that time viewed the Stoney as stragglers and then lobbied for them to be confined to reserves, introducing game laws and then eventually monitoring their activities. And along with the Canadian Department of Indian affairs, they introduced a segregationist pass system to confine Indigenous people on reserves and suppress the resistance. This ended thousands of years of Indigenous people being in relationship with the territory around Banff. So a couple of things that I found out that I wasn't completely aware of. In addition to not knowing much about the pass system, the cpr, the Canadian Pacific Railway, wanted to entice people to this notion of the romantic wilderness. And they did so in collaboration with the national park system. And so part of this strategy, which is still somewhat going on today, is to create this illusion of a land that was never inhabited. Another one was to appeal to white sportsmen who wanted to, you know, come and have these unique experiences of game hunting in the Canadian Rockies. And in order to allow for the surplus game to be available in the hunting grounds adjacent to Banff, they had to stop the Indigenous from doing so. So now centralized control comes from creating national parks in alignment with railroad companies. So same process as we're talking about in the states, where certain truths get suppressed, like denying what happened in the past system. You still can't go to Banff and really find an honest portrayal of what happened there during that time. The past system was meant to be a temporary measure to quell the Northwest Rebellion, but it became permanent and lasted from the 1880s to the 1950s. And I want to say something else about Canada too, which is that they have undergone a truth and reconciliation process as a country to help its entire society face what happened in its residential schools. These were extreme harm, in some cases murders, harm of children, when indigenous children were required to go to government and church operated residential schools and be removed from their families. And Canada went through a process to help its country and its entire society face what happened, which included some monetary payments, but also, I think, more most importantly, included a way for people in the nation to actually hear storytelling about those experiences, actual facts and events that happened. So that's not a static moment in time, that's not an exchange, but it's a process. And though at times there, governments and communities can still inhibit the progress of those recommendations, it is significantly different than what is happening in America right now. I just want to point that out. Even though Canada has its share of lynch culture or being operable there, it's under a, I think, a very different mode than what America is, which has really never left the time of the Civil War in this respect. At the same time, the Yellowhead Institute reports that Canada is falling far short of its 94 commitments to action. And that is in part because the Canadian culture, I believe, has a picture of itself as a benevolent nation. And it does a really poor job of educating on whiteness and living there, which I also talk about in my chapter on Canada. We had a chance to really hear and reflect on stories about the harm of residential schools as well as missing and murdered Indigenous women, because there's days that communities and the nation sets aside for reflection. So in these ways, Canada is far ahead of America, which has very few ways of orienting toward reparation for slavery. And in truth, what's going on right now is that reparation is prohibiting conversation and prohibiting facts and history and in active policies from being moved forward in certain specific ways about slavery under this ideal that somehow America isn't as bad as certain people think. One of the pieces that I write about also in this chapter and that many other people have suggested before me, is that the government of Canada considered the land Back movement and return the management of national parks to Indigenous people. And this is happening somewhat in Canada with land guardian programs where Indigenous people are managing protected areas, they're monitoring animals, they're testing water and so forth. And they're very, very successful programs that are underway and I think could be a model for what it might be to give the national parks back to Indigenous as people.
- [44:45]
B
And this is clearly something that you are continuing to be engaged on. Although the book is obviously out in the world, you're no longer working on it. Is there anything further that you're kind of engaged on in this issue or any other projects you're currently working on? You want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [45:00]
C
Yes, I am still engaged in work with some organizations coming to the table, showing up for Racial justice, the Owensboro Remembrance Project, any place where people are doing thinking about reparations and in, you know, talking with others about the ways that we can educate. I think that I hope it helps the book helps readers think about kinship differently and activates people to become more involved. I'm currently writing a novel and thinking about the next book after that and mentoring other wonderful writers and their book projects and really happy to be in kinship relationship, particularly here in my community in Portland, but also across America with people who are interested in reparations and in doing some of the work around investigating their own lineages to share what they know and to share with families and communities. I think a lot about what Bill Hook said, which is that one of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities and resistance and places where we know we're not alone. And I think that's absolutely very necessary in this country right now.
- [46:38]
B
Well, that certainly sounds like a lot of work that will keep you busy. So anyone interested in learning more can of course read the book we've been discussing titled American Reckoning with Lynch Culture, published by University Press of Kentucky in 2025. Sonja, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [46:55]
C
Thank you so much. I really appreciate being here. Sam.