Karen Branan

The Family Tree, a lynching in georgia, a legacy of secrets, and my search for truth, by Karen Branan (pp 259). When the author learned from her father that he had killed a Black woman in his youth — an accident — she began a long search into her Georgia family and community. Turns out, her father did not kill anyone, but she was in fact related to a long line of people in her home town in Harris County, Georgia who directly or indirectly took part in lynchings and other horrendous treatment of Black residents. Clearly, unearthing her family and community history, including her own youth experiences, was exceedingly painful. She admits to searching for exculpatory details about her own family, and still cling to some of them, all the while acknowledging her own racism, that of her family, and of her community. In exquisite and sometimes overwhelming detail she shares a history of racism that is complicated by widespread, commonly known but universally suppressed sexual relations between Whites and Blacks. Mostly, the sex was between White males and female Blacks, and was almost always non-consensual. Many White men even had unacknowledged Black families in addition to their White wives and children. In effect, it was the rare individual who was not somehow related to people across the purported racial divide. Sparing little detail, Branen describes the overt and brutal racism of her family and community, and the complicity of every White community member, including named members of her family — and herself. A failing of the book is not having family trees of many of the interrelated characters, just to make sense of the sizzling array of names and relationships. This is a painful book to read, and has to have been an extremely difficult book to write, in no small part because of her family’s and the community’s resistance. The book includes historical perspectives to provide an understanding of how widespread lynchings, White complicity, corrupt legal systems, and political inaction created and perpetuated horrendous abuse of Blacks. This not the best book I’ve read on the subject in the last year, but it’s important because it is written from such a personal perspective.… (mehr)

Karen Branan relates the story of her family sparked by her discovery of a lynching in Hamilton, Georgia, her ancestral town. She found herself related to one of those hanged because of an ancestor's second family with a black woman. While it is obvious the author researched the story well, the story seemed to drag a little too much in places. In places she seems to include abstract information that could not come from an interviewed source and did not come from the cited account. It is an interesting read that shows a dark side of Southern history. I appreciated the author's family chart in the front of the book which helped place individuals. I detest the blind endnotes used in this book. Please give me footnotes or at least numbered endnotes so one is aware of their existence!… (mehr)

Journalist Karen Branan has deep roots in Harris County, Georgia. Everything she thought she knew about her family and the history of her community was upended when she learned of a 1912 lynching of three black men and a black woman. Not only was she related to some of the mob, she also learned that she was related to some of the victims. (Another of her discoveries was that many of the white community leaders of Harris County had a second black family, including some of her relatives.)

This is an important topic, and I had a high interest in reading the book. However, I had a hard time following the narrative. The book could have used a family tree diagram, a list of characters, or both. It was difficult for me to remember who was who, especially between reading sessions. It might have helped if Branan had consistently described people in terms of how they are related to her instead of (or maybe in addition to) how they are related to each other. The narrative might flow better if some of the details were provided in footnotes instead of in the main text.… (mehr)

This is a memoir and history of life and death in Harris county, Georgia, mostly from 1900-1990s.

Its a worthwhile read, if a bit unsettling and unnecessarily difficult.

For a "factual" book, it contains an awful lot of assertions about the motives and thoughts of historical people which I doubt the author has any documentation for.

There are a lot of unsupported statements such as "The YMCA, built to keep blacks in their place...". This is a surprising statement to most people, which I doubt there is any documentation for. Yet the author just puts these statements out there baldly without further comment.

In my opinion, this lack of rigor detracts from the impact of the research the author has done on an important subject.… (mehr)