Hanging of Rainey Bethea: Race, Gender, and Spectacle in 1930s Kentucky

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  • Fuller, Hannah Mariska
    • College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History
Abstract
  • Rainey Bethea’s execution in Kentucky in 1936 was the last legal public hanging in the US. Although some aspects of Bethea’s death were typical of hangings of Black men in the Jim Crow South, this execution became a spectacle. It drew crowds of up to 20,000 people and national media attention, largely because a white woman was charged with hanging Bethea. The county sheriff, Florence Thompson, breached women’s traditional roles under Jim Crow as executioner rather than victim. As a result, it sparked a national controversy about power, resistance, and the gendered nature of capital punishment; two years later, Kentucky became the last state to outlaw public hangings. My research positions the spectacle of Bethea’s execution in the broader political and social context of the 1920s and 30s to examine the state’s efforts to centralize power alongside the activism of African Americans who chipped away at Jim Crow. My work tracks the confluence of three forces prompting a significant change in capital punishment: the impact of women disrupting gender hierarchies, the increasing political power of Black Kentuckians in a border state, and politicians and other authorities attempting to shirk claims of lawlessness and backwardness. Together these elements reveal that, rather than a concession to national shaming of Kentucky, the banning of public hangings signaled the state’s grab for power during a moment of social fracture in the New Deal era. By examining the transition from public to private executions in a broader social and political context, my work challenges notions of “modernizing” the penal system and provides key context for contemporary debates about capital punishment.
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  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
Advisor
  • Gellman, Erik
  • Clegg, Claude
  • Kotch, Seth
Degree
  • Master of Arts
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2024
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