Study by Hill ’91 Explores the History of U.S. Radical Politics

Rebecca N. Hill ’91 is the author of Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Duke University Press) in which she compares two seemingly unrelated types of leftist protest campaigns: those intended to defend labor organizers from prosecution and those seeking to memorialize lynching victims and stop the practice of lynching. Her incisive new study suggests that these forms of protest are related and have considerably influenced one another. She recognizes that both campaigns worked to build alliances through appeals to public opinion in the media, by defining the American state as a force of terror, and by creating a heroic identity for their movements.

Hill focuses on the narratives produced during the abolitionist John Brown’s trials and execution, analyzes the defense of the Chicago anarchists of the Haymarket affair, and compares Ida B. Wells’s and the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaigns to the Industrial Workers of the World’s early 20th-century defense campaigns. She also examines conflicts within the campaign to defend Sacco and Vanzetti, chronicles the history of the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense, and explores the Black Panther Party’s defense of George Jackson.

Hill is an associate professor in the department of social science at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York.