Place the 203 in a row, allowing 600 feet of space for each human torch, so that there may be viewing room around it for 5,000 Christian American men, women, and children, youths and maidens; make it night, for grim effect; have the show in a gradually rising plain, and let the course of the stakes be uphill; the eye can then take in the whole line of twenty-four miles of bloodand-flesh bonfires unbroken.... All being ready now, and the darkness opaque, the stillness impressive-for there should be no sound but the soft moaning of the night wind and the muffled sobbing of the sacrifices -let all the far stretch of kerosene pyres be touched off simultaneously and the glare and the shrieks and the agonies burst heavenward to the Throne.-Mark Twain, 1901, on lynchings in the two previous years'On Friday evening, October 11, 1991, Clarence Thomas accused America of executing a "high-tech lynching."> He, an African American, was the victim. The perpetrators were the opponents to his appointment to a seat on the United States Supreme Court, eagerly aided and abetted by the media, particularly television. I am indebted to Professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage for suggesting that I write a retrospect on lynching. I was comfortably settled in Rome during July and August 1995 with no other writing tasks before me. I began to write about Clarence Thomas, and the rest simply unfolded. I am exceedingly grateful to friends and superbly able colleagues who helped me bring this essayto print: Amanda Scoggins, my undergraduate assistant, who processed the early drafts; Rosalie Radcliffe, who did the later drafts; Steven Niven and Gary Frost, graduate students in the Department of History at uxc-Chapel Hill, who prepared the footnotes; and Susan Arrneny, whose editorial talents are matched only by her patience. I am especially grateful to David Thelen, who caught the vision of fixing on paper the image of several historians doing history. He caught us in motion and said, "Freeze." We froze. The downside for the writers is that we were not allowed to polish our language and broaden our references to other scholars so as to buttress our positions and our egos. I felt that instead of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, I was diligently polishing the sow's ear. The upside is that the reader sees not only what we did but also how and possibly why we did it. Possibly, too, the reader sees herself or himself.
