About

Seth Kotch is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He conducts research in modern American history, with a specific focus on the social history of criminal justice. His notable work includes the book 'Lethal State,' published by UNC Press in 2019, which explores the history of the death penalty in North Carolina from its colonial origins through its various phases, including its relationship to lynching, its decline in the mid-20th century, and its resurgence in the 1970s as part of the backlash against the civil rights movement. Kotch's digital projects include 'A Red Record,' a student-driven project examining lynching and its victims in the American South. He is the Lead Principal Investigator of the LDF Oral History Project, documenting the history of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's civil rights advocacy. Additionally, he served as Co-Principal Investigator of 'Media and the Movement,' a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which investigates the role of journalists and media in the civil rights movement. He also served as Principal Investigator and Project Supervisor on the Civil Rights History Project, a nationwide oral history initiative administered by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture and the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South by Michael Ayers Trotti (review)

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Reviewed by: The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South by Michael Ayers Trotti Seth Kotch (bio) The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South. By Michael Ayers Trotti. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 266. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $32.95.) At a time when the white gaze of the academy bores into the bodies left behind by the struggle and slaughter of Reconstruction, Redemption, and Jim Crow, it takes a particularly keen and sensitive eye to see the humanity at the center of an overwhelming vision of grief. This book, which examines 1,200 southern counties to understand the experience of public hangings—and then the transition of those hangings from public to private—is keen and sensitive, in its regard both for the scholarship around capital punishment and lynching and for the people of the region. As Trotti attends to this history, he more broadly explores southern religion, white supremacy, and racism in the southern criminal justice system. Crucially, he thinks on the page about the tools historians use to understand these histories. [End Page 279] Trotti dug into a huge number of national, regional, state, and local newspapers; government documents; manuscript collections; the scholarly literature on race, violence, and religion in the South; and contemporaneously published books, such as the work of Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Thomas Nelson Page, whose vicious racism condemned Blackness on and off the gallows. The balance of primary and secondary sources, and Trotti's nuanced engagement with the national and regional conversation—or, more accurately, racist harangues and under-read rebuttals—will make this book particularly useful in the undergraduate and graduate classroom. Evangelical Christianity, "filled with blood and sacrifice" (9), offered an object model for the dramatic public hangings that endured well into the Gilded Age in the South. The Black observers in the mixed-race crowds would often see the condemned person (most often a Black man) as a martyr, and they attended his hanging not to condemn his crime but to celebrate his ascension to a heavenly roost. That condemned man often understood his central role in the process as a Christ figure reminding his community not only of their inevitable sin but also of their inevitable salvation. That salvation came to those condemned for murder as well as for rape and burglary, both capital crimes in the South long after they were abandoned as such elsewhere. The riotous, even jubilant crowds at what Trotti calls "uncivil executions" rankled white elites (103), who preferred a cowed Black populace to one that co-opted their solemn rituals. Those elites used their soapboxes and political power to begin to push executions indoors, where they could be tamped down and segregated. Trotti follows the method he used in an earlier article on counting lynchings1 and applies it to legal execution, revealing wide differences in the number of legal executions recorded across different data sets. Recent studies continue to add executions to the South's count, where the executions of African Americans represent both the largest data set and the largest incomplete data set. The new counts Trotti brings together here as much as double the execution rate, especially in the years immediately after the Civil War. Trotti draws attention to the chilling fact that while executions were racially discriminatory across the United States, "the simple fact is that almost all African Americans to die legally from the noose did so in the South" (93). These executions were a "steady, constant exercise of state power" (102). Trotti also grapples with the long effort to explain the relationship between capital punishment and lynching, or to even find the right language to describe it. He looks to the audiences to find key differences between the two related practices: that the crowds at lynchings were all or [End Page 280] mostly white (this was true also of later private executions) and occasionally as enraged as a mob, whereas the crowds at public executions were mixed and often looked more like a congregation. The transition to private, state-run executions that took place in the early twentieth century...

  PublisherDOI

• Unduly harsh and unworkably rigid: the death penalty in North Carolina, 1910-1961

  Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2020-06-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Some contemporary observers believe that southern states' prolific execution record can be traced back to a violent southern past. But an examination of concerns about the pain inflicted by the noose, the electric chair, and the gas chamber; of the complex influence of race on the death penalty process; of recommendations of mercy by jurors and governors' acts of executive clemency; and of the controversy that these issues raised reveals that the history of the death penalty in North Carolina, the South, and the nation, is much more nuanced. Concerns about pain and its effects on an audience inspired lawmakers to try to make executions less painful and less visible. North Carolina became among the nation's first adopters of the electric chair and the gas chamber, but failed to dull public interest in executions and focused the conversation about the death penalty on methods rather than motivations. The racism of the Jim Crow South informed the death penalty, and North Carolina disproportionately executed African Americans, especially those who committed crimes against whites. However, all-white juries could show even African Americans accused of shocking crimes some leniency, applying a brutal logic that revealed the flexibility of the racial caste system. In an era when murder, rape, burglary, and arson carried mandatory death sentences, juries showed mercy by withholding guilty verdicts, formally recommending life sentences, following a guilty verdict with petitions to the governor for clemency. North Carolinians knew that their death penalty was capricious, and they exploited it to introduce mercy into the process. All the while, some North Carolinians were trying to persuade their fellow citizens to reject death as punishment. This dissertation invites a reconsideration of vengeance, justice, and race in one southern state. The death penalty's history in North Carolina is one of anxieties and ambivalence as much as racism and vengeance.

  PublisherDOI

• An Emotional Craving

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2019-02-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  As the death penalty was falling out of use in North Carolina, the civil rights movement was underway. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in <italic>Furman v. Georgia</italic> that the death penalty as practiced was unconstitutional. Politically conservative North Carolinians who viewed the Supreme Court as a weapon of liberal overreach reacted by reinstating the mandatory death penalty and ultimately adopting the bifurcated sentencing protocol now in use around the country. The renewed interest in the death penalty emerged from the tough-on-crime rhetoric adopted by conservatives and the Republican Party during and after the civil rights movement. North Carolina resumed executions in 1984.

  PublisherDOI

• Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina

  Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2019-01-10

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The General Sense of Justice

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2019-02-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the enduring relationship between lynching and capital punishment in North Carolina in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Lynching was an essential way North Carolinians communicated their racial animus to official state actors, who responded with legal lynchings—the unfair trials of African American defendants before all-white juries. The threat of lynching hung over many death penalty trials. The starkly racist application of the death penalty pleased lynch mobs because of its hostility to Black people, and pleased state officials because of its apparent orderliness.

  PublisherDOI

• The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2019-04-16 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2019-02-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter theorizes the death penalty as an outcropping of our political failings and our desire to fix failing institutions rather than eliminate them. It argues that the death penalty has failed by any reasonable measure, but also that this failure is a normal feature of institutions. It lays out the different kinds of failures the death penalty has undergone: to punish fairly, to punish painlessly, to bring resolution to victims of crime, to have any effect at all on crime rates. Today’s death penalty even fails to execute, as there have been no executions since 2006.

  PublisherDOI

• Intelligent and Civilized Sentiments

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2019-02-25

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter tells the history of some of the elements that contributed to the declining use of the death penalty in North Carolina. Journalist Nell Battle Lewis railed against the practice as racist, un-Christian, and barbaric. Paul Green echoed those sentiments as he campaigned to save death row inmates from death. Yet their activism had little tangible result. More significant was a change in state law that allowed juries to formally recommend mercy following a conviction, meaning that judges were no longer required to deliver mandatory death sentences. The end of the mandatory death sentences ended executions, which ceased in 1961 and would not resume until 1984.

  PublisherDOI

• Lethal State

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2019-02-25 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike. In this book, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty, including lynching, in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, Lethal State helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it. Kotch argues that Jim Crow justice continued to reign in the guise of a modernizing, orderly state and offers essential insight into the relationship between race, violence, and power in North Carolina. The history of capital punishment in North Carolina, as in other states wrestling with similar issues, emerges as one of state-building through lethal punishment.

  PublisherDOI

• The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

  University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2019-04-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  focuses on the transition from local public hangings to state-controlled electrocutions in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. The chapter addresses the impact of this shift on African American communities. Although the death penalty had long served as an instrument of racial control, the ritual of a local hanging nevertheless had allowed the condemned and black witnesses a public space to express religious convictions and honor the condemned’s suffering. Once the state seized control of this ritual, African Americans were largely excluded as witnesses. The modern death penalty thus came to represent the racial subjugation of Jim Crow, indeed having more in common with lynchings than legal hangings had.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert P. Mosteller

  2 shared

• Jack Bass

  1 shared

• Elijah Gaddis

  1 shared

• Walter Timo de Vries

  Technical University of Munich

  1 shared