Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children
Dr. Stacey Patton discusses her new book with Dean Jelani Cobb and Prof. Nina Berman.
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.
This event is sponsored by the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at Columbia University.
Friday, October 9, 2026, 12:00 - 1:15pm
Registration required: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/strung-up-how-white-america-learned-to-lynch-black-children-tickets-2002409724389?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=true.
Box lunch will be provided.
Columbia Journalism School, Brown Institute, 2nd Floor, Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027