How did the people in these mobs — made up mostly of white men in the American accounts I’ve read — rev themselves up to peak barbarity? I have stared at the pictures of glassy-eyed men and boys (and sometimes women) standing beneath dangling bodies or standing above charred ones. I have read the histories of communities consumed by the desire to not only kill, but to mutilate. In 1893, Henry Smith, a Black man accused of killing a white girl, was lynched in Paris, Texas, before a crowd estimated at 10,000 people. His body was burned with “red-hot” irons “inch by inch until they were thrust against the face.” His eyes were burned out and the hot irons shoved down his throat.

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