Paul Griffith writes, "A new collection of essays denounces Tennessee’s longstanding ambivalence over the death penalty," for the current Nashville Scene. It's a review of Tennessee's New Abolitionists: The Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State , edited by Amy L. Sayward and Margaret Vandiver. It's published by the University of Tennessee Press (303 pp., $24.95.)
Since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976, Tennessee has executed only six people. That's far fewer than most Southern states but far too many for the essayists in Tennessee's New Abolitionists: The Fight to End the Death Penalty in the Volunteer State, which seeks to explode the myth of retributive justice and expose the state's uneven application of capital-sentencing law. In this collection, editors Amy L. Sayward (chair and professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University) and Margaret Vandiver (professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Memphis) present a wide range of articles that tell the story of a passionate minority at odds with a political Goliath backed by a largely unreflective mainstream.
During the years following the Civil War, Tennessee was the only formerly Confederate state to outlaw execution. Especially in urban areas, the "Athens of the South" trumpeted a progressive attitude toward politics and social issues that disguised deep-seated prejudices and economic problems. Those issues re-emerged in the wake of World War I: As resources became short, and racial and political intolerance once again dictated public policy, the death penalty was reinstated. Since then, Tennessee, unlike its Southern sister states, has been remarkably ambivalent on the subject of capital punishment — a phenomenon Sayward attributes to the state's wealth of Southern Protestants who remain split between Christian progressivism and the myth of redemptive violence.
In the first of its three sections, Tennessee's New Abolitionists provides a history of the state's anti-death penalty struggle, shedding light on the mixed sentiments that have kept Tennessee's executions to a minimum even as capital sentencing has increased.
Related posts are in the books index.
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