Hoodtown

This is a study of five pioneer-immigrants: Mathew and Sarah Shearer, Hugh and Lydia Shearer, William Shearer and some of their descendants of upper South Carolina and other states.

This book traces the history of mob violence in North and South Carolina, probing the origins of a phenomenon that has left an open wound in the American psyche. Lynching marked the violent outer boundaries of race and class relations in the American South between Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Everyday interactions could easily escalate into mob violence and did so thousands of times. Bruce E. Baker examines this important aspect of American history by studying seven lynchings in North and South Carolina and looking behind the superficial accounts and explanations provided at the time to explain the deeper causes and wider contexts of these events. Many studies of lynching begin only after Reconstruction had ended and African- Americans found themselves with little political power. This Mob Will Surely Take My Life, however, provides the most thorough study yet written of the Ku Klux Klan's most violent episode - the killing of thirteen black militia members in Union, South Carolina, in 1871- to argue that this act of mob violence set the stage in important ways for the entire lynching era. Enmities born in Reconstruction lingered afterwards and lay behind an 1887 lynching in York County, South Carolina. As lynching became an unsurprising part of life in the South, African-Americans even found that they could use it themselves, in one case to punish a child's killer and in another to settle a church's factional squabbles. The book ends with a discussion of the varied forces that opposed lynching and how, by the 1930s, they had begun to be effective.

It's mayhem, murder and masks in the acclaimed genre-bending novel from the "First Lady of Hard Case Crime" Christa Faust (Money Shot, Choke Hold).Hoodtown, ghetto of masked wrestlers, inner-city sanctuary of hooded culture. Evolved from lucha libre, the family gimmick is sacred, and the mask is the sole expression of one's identity.Now, Hood prostitutes are turning-up murdered and worse, unmasked, and the 'Skin' establishment is as much help as a paid-off ref. Enter X, former luchadora with a bruised past, a bum knee and no time to play Santo. She's no hero, but there's nobody else to tag-in, as her hunt for a killer uncovers a conspiracy that could take down all of maskedkind.Like Casablanca with wrestling masks, Hoodtown is vintage pulp noir with a lucha libre pop culture twist.This expanded second print edition of the long-sold out HOODTOWN includes introductory texts by Latina filmmakers Ivy Agregan and Gigi Saul Guerrero, a 12 page "Art of Hoodtown" gallery featuring unused roughs and originals by illustrator Rafael Navarro, and a sample chapter of Matt Wallace's lucha libre novella RENCOR: Life in Grudge City.