20,000 people watched a Black man hang in Owensboro 90 years ago. A new book looks at why

In the summer of 1936, Rainey Bethea was put to death in Owensboro. His hanging on the banks of the Ohio River drew tens of thousands to the western Kentucky city and created a media circus that made waves across the country, ultimately becoming the last public execution in the U.S.

Now, nearly 90 years later, a new book from Owensboro native Sonya Lea grapples with the hanging's history, looking at it through the lens of lynch culture and racial violence in America and contextualizing Bethea's case as a "legal lynching," meaning that the letter of the law was used to carry out racial violence instead of vigilante mobs.

In "American Bloodlines," Lea takes a hard look at why this "brutal carnival" happened, examining Bethea's case through court records, contemporary reporting and her own