On the anniversary of the 1925 lynching of Robert Marshall, a Black itinerant coal miner, Gerlach said, “We cannot undo the past, but we can acknowledge past injustices and make commitments to work toward a future filled with understanding and respect for all people.” Justice Denied: Lynching in Utah, 1849-1925 is his life’s attempt at historical understanding and remembering the victims “as something other than just names in historical records.”
Gerlach argues that, though lynching is associated with the American South, vigilante movements were most common in the American West. Utah presents a unique case study. Utah’s Mormon-dominated towns had little need for organized extra-legal law enforcement, but an emphasis on “law and order” did not eliminate the extralegal practice of lynching from occurring in the state. Gerlach documents the lives and deaths of sixteen individuals, all but one murdered in the second half of the nineteenth century. The long duration the author has taken to reconstruct these life stories is due, in part, to the absence of many direct identities in the historical record.