THE LEGEND OF WYATT OUTLAW

Far-reaching history of a forgotten Black civil rights pioneer whose short life offers timely lessons.

“Beware you guilty, both white and black.” So reads the note pinned to Wyatt Outlaw’s clothing by the Klansmen who lynched him on Feb. 26, 1870, in the small town of Graham, North Carolina. Outlaw’s sins were many, in the eyes of the white supremacists: He was, write Allen and Boggs, “a coalition builder who worked with white and Black citizens”—whence the warning—“and believed in justice and the rule of law.” Outlaw’s murder had lasting consequences as a prelude to the end of Reconstruction and the advent of Jim Crow segregationism. Allen, a native of Graham, began his research into Outlaw’s life by writing a play, its events connecting with his own life and the lives of all Black Americans. “I wasn’t meant to feel at home in Graham’s town square, where a Confederate statue still stands in front of our historic courthouse,” he notes—the courthouse where Outlaw was hanged before a crowd of 100. Yet the authors point to anomalies: North Carolina was the last state to secede to join the Confederacy and had a smaller caste of slaveholders than its neighboring states; its revanchism against Blacks and Radical Republicans came after the war (that Confederate statue dates to 1914) and endures. “Hate in this county is generational,” one activist remarks, and that’s just so: The authors connect Outlaw’s fate to that of George Floyd and other victims of racist brutality, not least those Black protestors in Graham terrorized by local police in 2020—adding, “and it’s hard not to connect the violence to the many instances of police and white supremacist violence faced by Reconstruction-­era voting rights leaders.”

A well-crafted contribution to history “in a society where telling the truth about history makes you an outlaw.”