The following is a guest post by Michael Ayers Trotti, author of The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South, which is available now wherever books are sold. This was not what white southern state officials in the 1880s thought punishment should be. When African American John Williams, condemned for murder, was publicly hanged in 1881, he “fairly danced up the steps of the scaffold with a light and airy step, bounding to the platform in three jumps and bowing to the crowd.” “I am proud to have such a...