Entries tagged with “Daniel LaChance”
Issues
Dec 12, 2023
New Research Finds That Historical News Coverage Reduced Executed Black Men to “Faceless, Interchangeable Public Safety Hazards” While Executed White Men Were Portrayed As “Tragic Heroes”
In a recently published academic article, Emory University History Professor Daniel LaChance writes about an important and underrecognized distinction in the way newspaper editors and journalists covered the executions of Black and white men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Professor LaChance argues that the portrayals of the defendants made legal executions “a high-status punishment that respected the whiteness of those who suffered it.” While the length and detail of articles…