MILES PARKS, HOST:
The last public execution in the United States happened less than a century ago in Kentucky. Rainey Bethea, a Black man accused of raping a white woman, was hanged in 1936. Now his death is at the center of a new book. From the Appalachia & Mid-South Newsroom, Derek Operle has this story. And a warning - this story includes descriptions of racist violence.
DEREK OPERLE, BYLINE: Bill Shelton painted a shocking picture of the scene from Rainey Bethea's hanging.
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BILL SHELTON: Everybody went, everybody had a wonderful time, and it was over (mouth pop sound) just like that.
PARKS: That's from a 2013 Davis County Public Library interview Shelton gave before his death. In it, he remembers the festive atmosphere, the sea of people gathered around the scaffolding as Bethea walked calmly to his death.
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SHELTON: They came from everywhere. And there was hawkers. They sold sandwiches, and they sold cold Colas, and you'd have thought it was a big picnic or something.
OPERLE: In her new book, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning With Lynch Culture," Owensboro native Sonya Lea examines the 1936 case through court records, contemporary reporting and her own family history. Lea was inspired to look into the case after learning her grandparents attended the hanging as newlyweds. And in her research, she learned she was related to the prosecuting attorney. She says it's made her think harder about racial violence.
SONYA LEA: There's just so many things layered up where things could have been different for Rainey Bethea. But at the same time, we can start to see the connections how racial violence is still evident in our community.
OPERLE: On a summer morning in 1936, a 70-year-old white woman named Elza Edwards (ph) was found dead in her Owensboro home. A local doctor determined she'd been strangled and raped. And two days later, authorities shifted the investigation to Bethea, a Black man in his 20s who Edwards had hired to work in her home. The prosecution used Bethea's fingerprints found in the room he was paid to clean. They were not on the victim's body. Lea says the evidence against Bethea was flimsy.
LEA: One of the things that we can do through this case is to look and see how it might have been possible that justice would have been done. And that just takes a little bit of curiosity.
OPERLE: Bethea was charged only with rape, not murder. That's because they wanted to use an archaic Kentucky law that punished convicted rapists with public hanging.
LEA: They brought an old law out of hiding so that they could then try for rape alone and hang.
OPERLE: A murder charge would have carried a sentence of death by electric chair. After just 4 1/2 minutes of deliberation by an all-white jury, Bethea was found guilty. His defense counsel called no witnesses and delivered no closing argument. A little more than two months passed between Edward's death and Bethea's hanging, and in the run-up, a media circus descended on the town. Public hangings had been common in the U.S. in the 1800s. But by the 1930s, they'd been on the decline for decades, as attitudes changed and many states started to have executions in private by gas chamber or by electric chair. So this rare public spectacle in 1936 drew around 20,000 people.
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OPERLE: Today, there is no historical marker on the riverfront where Bethea was executed. That's something Rhondalyn Randolph has been wanting to do for more than a decade. She's the president of the local NAACP and leads the Owensboro Community Remembrance Project.
RHONDALYN RANDOLPH: It shows a respect to Rainey's humanity. It shows that our community is not that community anymore, and we're able to move forward by doing, you know, the right thing.
OPERLE: Sensational nationwide coverage of Bethea's public hanging embarrassed many in Kentucky, leading the state to ban the practice two years later. For NPR News, I'm Derek Operle in Owensboro, Kentucky.
(SOUNDBITE OF KENDRICK LAMAR SONG, "SING ABOUT ME, I'M DYING OF THIRST") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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