[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]
- Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
-- Lewis Allen, "Strange Fruit" (popularized by Billie Holiday)
Slavery
and war were the human institutions most closely related to
eliminationism as it was practiced historically, proceeding as they did
from the same dark, violent corner of the human psyche -- the one in
which resides the impulse to dominate our fellow humans, along with its
cornermate, the impulse to reduce our fellow humans to mere objecthood.
Thus
the lion's share of the eliminationism practiced by the European
colonists in the Americas had gone hand in hand with warmaking and
enslavement. Most of the violent eradication of the native population --
particularly the extermination of the straggling remnant of Indians in
North America after 1800 -- had occurred under the pretense of waging
war, which itself was merely a pretext for taking land. And in the early
years, at least, when the Spanish took many hundreds of thousands of
Mesoamericans as forced labor for their mines -- which was itself a
death sentence -- slavery played a significant role in the natives'
extermination, both physically and culturally; even those slaves kept
alive were usually forced
conversos for whom observing any of their traditional rites or ceremonies was punishable by death.
The
natives, however, were seen in quite distinct terms from the Africans
captured as slaves and brought to American shores by the colonists. The
former were identified with the wilderness and were the equivalent of
untameable beasts, which played a large role in the white settlers'
inclination toward rubbing them out. But African slaves were seen as
completely subservient and thus a negligible threat.
This
may explain why, during the years leading up to the Civil War, blacks
in the South were rarely the victims of lynchings -- since they were
viewed as property, it was considered an act of theft to kill someone
else's slave. The main exception to this was directly related to those
occasions in which the slaves were perceived as actual threats --
namely, putting down slave revolts.
The fear of black
insurrection (and there were a handful of real slave revolts, notably
Nat Turner's 1831 Virginia rebellion, in which some sixty whites were
killed) was so pervasive among Southerners that any rumor that one might
occur could bring swift death to the alleged conspirators, even if, as
was often the case, it later turned out there were no such plans. In any
event, when lynching did occur in the years before the Civil War, the
victims predominantly were whites. Many of these were in the antebellum
South, where lynch-mob treatment was often administered to abolitionists
and other "meddlers."
If blacks' slave status largely
protected them from racial violence before the Civil War, then its
abolition also left them remarkably vulnerable to such assaults upon the
South's defeat. Certainly, once emancipated, they became seen as a real
threat to whites, and particularly to their dominant status; much of
this perception, particularly regarding the violent nature of the newly
freed blacks, as we shall see, was more an illusion produced by
psychological projection than real in any meaningful way.
This
became immediately manifest, during Reconstruction, when black freedmen
were subjected to a litany of attacks at the hands of their former
owners that went utterly unpunished. As documented by Philip Dray in his
definitive study,
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America,
these crimes turned up in hospital records and field reports from the
federal Freedmen's Bureau, all of which described a variety of
clubbings, scalpings, mutilations, hangings and even immolations of
former slaves, all within the first year after Appomattox.
In
1866, the violence became discernibly more organized with the emergence
of the Ku Klux Klan, which originated with a clique of Confederate
veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, and spread like wildfire throughout the
South. Initially much of the Klan night riders’ activities were
relegated to whippings, a punishment intended to remind the ex-slaves of
their former status. But as the assaults on blacks increased, so did
the intensity of the violence visited on them, culminating in a steady
stream of Klan lynchings between 1868 and 1871 (when the Klan was
officially outlawed by the Grant Administration); at least one study
puts the number at 20,000 blacks killed by the Klan in that period. In
the ensuing years, the violence did little to decline, and in fact
worsened, despite the Klan's official banishment.
David M. Chalmers in
Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, describes the early Klansmen was drawing from both the upper and lower strata of society, but unquenchably violent [p. 10]:
- The
method of the Klan was violence. It threatened, exiled, flogged,
mutilated, shot, stabbed, and hanged. It disposed of Negroes who were no
respectful, or committed crimes, or belonged to military or political
organizations such as the Loyal and Union Leagues. It drove out Northern
schoolteachers and Yankee storekeepers and politicians, and "took care"
of Negroes who gained land and prospered, or made inflammatory speeches
or talked about equal rights. It assaulted carpetbag judges,
intimidated juries, and spirited away prisoners. It attacked officials
who registered Negroes, who did not give whites priority, or who
foreclosed property.
The Klan's violence,
however, was not broadly eliminationist, but rather carefully channeled.
Its clear intent was not to drive out blacks generally -- they were,
after all, a valuable source of labor -- but to keep them under the
thumb of their white "superiors." The chief means of doing this,
however, entailed eliminating anyone who might pose even the slightest
hint of a threat to the status of whites, particularly "interlopers" and
"outsiders" who arrived after the war to help the freed slaves get on
their feet:
- Although Klansmen occasionally sortied out
across the moonlit countryside to punish criminal behavior, they most
frequently called upon Radicals, Union and Loyal Leaguers, Republican
candidates, and Northern schoolteachers. The purposes were clearly to
destroy the basis of Negro political effectiveness by driving out its
leaders, white and black. The particular opposition to schoolteachers
seems based on the reasoning that the Negro was not capable of learning
anything other than polticial insurrection and insolence toward whites,
and in the years before the war, teaching a Negro to read had been a
serious crime. In eastern Mississippi the new institution of public
schooling had to face the added problem of economic depression. During a
period when times were hard and Reconstruction had made labor uncertain
and elevated livestock theft to a common profession, the farmers were
called upon to pay taxes for a new school system which they feared might
eventually mingle white and Negro schoolchildren. The response was a
veritable reign of terror which saw schools burned and teachers whipped,
tortured, murdered, and driven out of the state.
Francis Simkins' study
of the South Carolina Klan observed that the Klan's campaign was
"against the Negro as a citizen -- one attempting to be a voter and at
times, the social equal of other men -- rather than against the Negro as
a violator of law or the infringer upon the rights of other men." So to
rationalize away their own wanton criminality, the Klan and its
supporters relied on rhetoric aimed to convince the public of the
criminality of the black population.
The chief purpose
of the Klan, as Exalted Cyclops Ryland Randolph of South Carolina put
it, was to stop what they saw as an insidious Northern plan "to degrade
the white man by the establishment of Negro supremacy" -- though, of
course, their actual purpose was to degrade the black man by the
establishment of white supremacy. This kind of precisely mirrored
projection was present in nearly every aspect of white racial hatred
toward blacks, particularly regarding the most common defense for the
wave of lynching that was to follow -- namely, that it was a natural
community defense against savagely lascivious black men and their wanton
desire to rape white women.
Sexual paranoia, rooted in
long-held Christian European notions
about sexuality that associated it with sinfulness, with the "muck" of
nature and the wilderness, was central to the lynching phenomenon. In
the years following black emancipation -- during which time a previously
tiny class of black criminals became swelled by the ranks of
impoverished former slaves -- a vast mythology arose surrounding black
men's supposed voracious lust for white women.
"The
Negro race," after all, was still closely associated with the jungles of
Africa, the "heart of darkness" in the European mind; and sexual
voraciousness was assumed in such folk, for though tame they might be,
they still were scarcely a step removed from wild men of the jungle
themselves; still scarcely human. Yet this was a legend for which in
truth there was scant evidence, and one that stands in stark contrast to
(and perhaps has its psychological roots in) the reality of white men's
longtime sexual domination of black women, particularly during the
slavery era.
In any event, the omnipresence of the
threat of rape of white women by black men came to be almost universally
believed by American whites. Likewise, conventional wisdom held that
lynchings were a natural response to this threat: "The mob stands today
as the most potent bulwark between the women of the South and such a
carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the
annihilation of the Negro race," warned John Temple Graves, editor of
the
Atlanta Constitution. Such views were common not merely in the South, but among Northerners as well. The
New York Herald,
for instance, lectured its readers: "[T]he difference between bad
citizens who believe in lynch law, and good citizens who abhor lynch
law, is largely in the fact that the good citizens live where their
wives and daughters are perfectly safe."
The cries of
rape, for many whites in both South and North, raised fears not merely
of sexual violence but of racial mixing, known commonly as
"miscegenation," which was specifically outlawed in some 30 states.
White supremacy was not only commonplace, it was in fact the dominant
worldview of Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most
Caucasians believed they represented Nature's premier creation (having
been informed this by a broad range of social scientists of the period,
whose views eventually coalesced into the pseudo-science known as
eugenics), and that any "dilution" of those strains represented a gross
violation of the natural order. Thus it was not surprising that a number
of lynching incidents actually resulted from the discovery of
consensual relations between a black man and a white woman.
Underlying
the stated fear of black rape, moreover, was a broad fear of economic
and cultural domination of white Americans by blacks and various other
"outsiders," including Jews. These fears were acute in the South, where
blacks became a convenient scapegoat for the mesh of poverty that
lingered in the decades following the Civil War. Lynching in fact was
frequently inspired not by criminality, but by any signs of economic and
social advancement by blacks who, in the view of whites, had become too
"uppity."
There were, of course, other components of
black suppression: segregation in the schools, disenfranchisement of the
black vote, and the attendant Jim Crow laws that were common throughout
the South. But lynching was the linchpin in the system, so to speak,
because it was in effect state-supported terrorism whose stated intent
was to suppress blacks and other minorities, in no small part by
eliminating non-whites as competitors for economic gain. These combined
to give lynching a symbolic value as a manifestation of white supremacy.
The lynch mob was not merely condoned but in fact celebrated as an
expression of the white community’s will to keep African-Americans in
their thrall. As a phrase voiced commonly in the South expressed it,
lynching was a highly effective means of "keeping the niggers down."
As Chalmers describes the early Klan violence:
- [I]n
addition to lynching for rape ... the Klan whipped for sass, insolence
or theft. Here and elsewhere, industrious Negroes who improved their
farms also received attention from the Klan.
Other
suffered because they violated the racial mores. The Klan punished
Negroes who associated with poor white women. White prostitutes in South
Carolina accused of receiving Negroes were tarred and driven away. A
Negro was killed and his daughter was whipped because she had "caused
some embarrassment" to a white family by beating the child of one of its
members. Another Negro girl was beaten for "breaking the peace" between
a wife and her husband.
Many of the poor, ignorant,
illiterate South Carolina men, who later confessed in open court,
pleaded that they had only joined the Klan to avoid becoming its
victims. Their night riding had been crudely conceived and carried out,
with none of the dash and the disciplined planning that marked much of
the Klan activity elsewhere. Generally speaking, however, the
leadership, if not the rank and file, represented some of the best
elements of society, with the younger men usually the most venturesome.
Acts of violence were usually applauded by the conservative press and
justified then, and afterward, by the always allegedly bad reputation of
the victims.
Moreover, in addition to the
night-riding type of terrorist attacks, mass spectacle lynchings soon
appeared. These were ritualistic mob scenes in which prisoners or even
men merely suspected of crimes were often torn from the hands of
authorities (if not captured beforehand) by large crowds and treated to
beatings and torture before being put to death, frequently in the most
horrifying fashion possible: people were flayed alive, had their eyes
gouged out with corkscrews, and had their bodies mutilated before being
doused in oil and burned at the stake. Black men were sometimes forced
to eat their own hacked-off genitals. No atrocity was considered too
horrible to visit on a black person, and no pain too unimaginable to
inflict in the killing. (When whites, by contrast, were lynched, the act
almost always was restricted to simple hanging.)
A
classic instance of this occurred in the little East Texas town of
Center, about sixty miles due north of Jasper, in 1920. The victim was a
black teenager named Lige Daniels, who was accused of killing an
elderly white woman who lived in Center. When word reached the governor
that mob violence was imminent, he wired the captain of the Seventh
Cavalry stationed nearby to protect the prisoner. The cavalry, however,
never showed. The captain later explained that he had been unable to
"find any members of his company in time for mobilization."
So
at about noon on August 3, 1920, a mob of about one thousand men
stormed the Center jail, knocked down the steel doors, and dragged
Daniels outside, where they proceeded to beat him severely. A rope was
thrown over a nearby oak tree, and Daniels was then hung.
A photo postcard that was available for many years afterward, mostly in
the backwaters of trinket shops, recorded the event. It is a remarkable
photo, and not only for the warm glow of the sun peering through the
oak tree and bathing Lige Daniels' corpse, hanging from the bough, in an
almost angelic light. What makes the portrait unforgettable instead is
the crowd gathered below—stern-faced fathers and laborers, all looking
quite proud of themselves; and a handful of children. One young boy (he
appears to be about ten), dressed in his Sunday shirt and tie, is
beaming beatifically. He probably remembered that day till he died.
There
were many such postcards. Perhaps the most notorious were those from
the lynching of another black teenager, Jessie Washington, by a mob of
several thousand residents of Waco, Texas, on May 16, 1916. Washington,
who was retarded, had confessed to the murder of an elderly Waco
resident. At the moment his conviction (with four minutes' deliberation
by a white jury) was announced, the mob surged forward into the
courtroom and dragged Washington outside, where he was stripped, beaten,
stabbed, and wrapped with a chain, which was draped over a tree limb,
just above a pyre of wooden crates. Washington was then jerked twice
into the air, and his body lowered onto the pyre, where he was sprinkled
with coal oil and set alight.
 |
| The lynching of Jessie Washington, May 16, 1916, Waco, Texas |
Afterward, mob members
proudly strung the charred corpse back up for a brief public display,
after which Washington's body was lassoed by a horseman and dragged
around the town until the skull bounced loose. Some motorists then
tossed his remains into a black bag, tied it to the back bumper of their
car, and tooled around the countryside with it in tow. A constable
finally retrieved the bag from a nearby town, where it was left hanging.
The lynchings of Daniels and Washington were mere
drops in an ocean of bloodshed. Between 1882 and 1942, according to
statistics compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, there were 4,713
lynchings in the United States, of which 3,420 involved black victims.
Mississippi topped the list, with 520 blacks lynched during that time
period, while Georgia was a close second with 480; Texas' 339 ranked
third. And most scholars acknowledge that these numbers probably are
well short of the actual total, since many lynchings (particularly in
the early years of the phenomenon) were often backwoods affairs that
went utterly unrecorded. In that era, it was not at all uncommon for a
black man to simply disappear; sometimes his body might wash up in one
of the local rivers, and sometimes not.
The violence
reached a fever pitch in the years 1890-1902, when 1,322 lynchings of
blacks (out of 1,785 total lynchings) were recorded at Tuskegee, which
translates into an average of over 110 lynchings a year. The trend began
to decline afterward, but continued well into the 1930s, leading some
historians to refer to the years 1880-1930 as the "lynching period" of
American culture.
 |
| The lynching of Rubin Stacy |
There are many postcards that recorded these lynchings, because the
participants were rather proud of their involvement. This is clear from
the postcards themselves -- many of which can be seen at the
Without Sanctuary
site -- as they frequently showed not merely the corpse of the victim
but many of the mob members, whose visages ranged from grim to grinning.
Sometimes, as in the Lige Daniels case, children were intentionally
given front-row views. A lynching postcard from Florida in 1935, of a
migrant worker named Rubin Stacy who had allegedly "threatened and
frightened a white woman," shows a cluster of young girls gathered round
the tree trunk, the oldest of them about 12, with a beatific expression
as she gazes on his distorted features and limp body, a few feet away.
Indeed,
lynchings seemed to be cause for outright celebration in the community.
Residents would dress up to come watch the proceedings, and the crowds
of spectators frequently grew into the thousands. Afterwards,
memento-seekers would take home parts of the corpse or the rope with
which the victim was hung. Sometimes body parts -- knuckles, or
genitals, or the like -- would be preserved and put on public display as
a warning to would-be black criminals.
That was the
purported moral purpose of these demonstrations, at least in the South:
Not only to utterly wipe out any black person merely accused of a crimes
against whites, but to do it in a fashion intended to warn off future
perpetrators. This was reflected in contemporary press accounts, which
described the lynchings in almost uniformly laudatory terms, with the
victim's guilt unquestioned, and the mob identified only as "determined
men." Not surprisingly, local officials (especially local police forces)
not only were complicit in many cases, but they acted in concert to
keep the mob leaders anonymous; thousands of coroners’ reports from
lynchings merely described the victims’ deaths occurring "at the hands
of persons unknown." Lynchings were broadly viewed as simply a crude,
but understandable and even necessary, expression of community will.
This was particularly true in the South, where blacks were viewed as
symbolic of the region's continuing economic and cultural oppression by
the North. As an 1899 editorial in the Newnan, Georgia,
Herald and Advertiser
explained it: "It would be as easy to check the rise and fall of the
ocean's tide as to stem the wrath of Southern men when the sacredness of
our firesides and the virtue of our women are ruthlessly trodden under
foot."
Thus the numbers of deaths produced by the
lynching phenomenon only hint at their impact, which broadly affected
literally millions of more Americans, effectively keeping them in the
thrall of terror that their white neighbors might, with the least
provocation, murder them horribly.
Of course, the
threat of the rape of white women and other pretenses for lynching
presented handy pretexts for these horrors. As always, the violence was
predicated on a fear of future violence; lynching was excused as a
preemptive act.
Yet in reality a black person could be
lynched for literally no reason at all -- in some cases, simply for
defending himself from physical assault, or for just being in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Lynching laughed at the notion of blacks
advancing through hard work; moderately prosperous blacks who managed to
do so were often the first targets of angry lynch mobs intent on
dealing with "uppity" blacks.
Lynchings unquestionably
had the short-term desired effect of suppressing blacks' civil rights;
the majority of African Americans in the South during that era led lives
of quiet submission in the hope of escaping that horrific fate, and
relatively few aspired beyond their established station in life. Those
who did often migrated northward, where lynchings were hardly unknown
(some of the most notorious occurred in places like Indiana and
Minnesota, and they in fact were recorded in nearly every state in the
Union), but were not as endemic. However, the awfulness of the mobs'
brutality, often reported and photographed in gruesome detail,
ultimately also inspired a reaction that gave birth to the Civil Rights
movement and eventually the demise of the racial caste system lynching
was intended to enforce.
The first voices raised
against lynching were heard in the 1890s, even as the bloodbath was
cresting. Civil-rights pioneer Ida B. Wells, a well-educated black woman
who had risen to the editorship of a leading black newspaper in
Memphis, began questioning the myths underlying the popular rationale
for condoning the killings. As she gathered statistics about lynching,
she noted, for instance, that even though the threat of black rape was
the foremost excuse for the phenomenon, in fewer than one-third of the
lynchings was rape even alleged. (Later, more complete statistics
particularly bore this out; congressional testimony in 1922 indicated
that only 28.4 percent of the blacks lynched between 1889 and 1918 had
been accused of raping or attempting to assault a white woman. This
remained the case over time as well; the Tuskegee Institute's lynching
data for 1882 to 1951 indicate that lynching victims were accused 41
percent of the time of felonious assault, 19.2 percent of rape, 6.1
percent of attempted rape, 4.9 percent of robbery and theft, 1.8 percent
of insulting white people, and 27 percent for miscellaneous offenses.
Moreover, among the lynching victims between 1882 and 1927 were 76 black
women.) Often the accusations of rape were completely spurious.
Indeed,
in two-thirds of the cases, Wells found, lynchings were for incredibly
petty crimes such as stealing hogs and quarreling with neighbors. A
black person could easily face an agonizing death at the hands of a mob
merely for trying to vote, or for testifying against a white man or
getting into a fight with him, or asking a white woman to marry -- and
sometimes for no offense at all.
Wells also attacked
the myth of black men's sexual voraciousness. She adroitly observed that
during the Civil War, many slave owners willingly left their wives and
daughters in the care of their black manservants, who were frequently
entrusted with the defense of the home during those years. And if black
men were prone to sexual assault, there was little evidence of it before
the war as well; contemporary historian Ulrich B. Phillips, for
instance, examined Virginia's court and criminal records from 1783 to
1863, and found only 105 blacks convicted of sexual assault over the
eighty-year span.
Wells (who became Ida Wells-Barnett
in 1895 after her marriage to Chicago attorney Ferdinand Barnett)
ultimately published her findings in a widely distributed 1901 book
titled
Lynching and the Excuse. She was soon joined in her
crusade by other leading African Americans, including W. E. B. DuBois,
Frederick Douglass and William Monroe Trotter. It was their view that
the systematic oppression of black Americans needed to be confronted
directly, and lynching was the system's most egregious component. In
1905, DuBois, Wells-Barnett, and other black leaders organized the
Niagara Movement to demand full citizenship rights for African
Americans: freedom of speech, an "unfettered and unsubsidized" press,
full voting rights, full civil liberties, and recognition of the
principle of human brotherhood. The Niagara Movement's manifesto,
written mostly by DuBois, did not address lynching directly, but
observed: "The Negro race in America -- stolen, ravished, and degraded,
struggling up through difficulties and oppression -- needs sympathy and
receives criticism, needs help and is given hindrance, needs protection
and is given mob-violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs
leadership and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a
stone. This nation will never stand justified before God until these
things are changed."
However, the leading black figure
of the time in the minds of most Americans was Booker T. Washington of
Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, acclaimed for its pioneering work in
education young black people. His famed 1895 speech (which came to be
known as the "Atlanta Compromise") before a mostly white audience at the
Atlanta Exposition had counseled black Americans to give up agitation
for political rights and social equality in exchange for the opportunity
to work and prove themselves, suggesting that racial segregation was an
acceptable and perhaps even desirable state. Washington urged blacks to
steer away from dreams of returning to Africa: "Cast down your bucket
where you are," he counseled. Instead, he admonished them to focus their
efforts on their own resourcefulness and hard work, and to emphasize
the honor of common labor. For these sentiments, Washington was widely
praised by white politicians across the American spectrum, but other
black leaders were unconvinced. The Niagara Movement, with its emphasis
on open agitation for blacks' civil rights, represented a direct
challenge to Washington's compromise.
Though this
nascent organization mostly foundered, its underlying principles came
fully to life in 1909, when DuBois, Wells-Barnett, and other Niagara
leaders joined forces with white civil-rights reformers to create the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP's
principles were broad-ranging, but within the first year of its
existence it became clear that the primary challenge it faced was in
organizing a national campaign to combat the practice of lynching -- and
for the ensuing three decades, leading the fight against lynching and
mob violence was the organization's major preoccupation.
It
was clear to the NAACP's leadership that Booker T. Washington's
"compromise" was not only counterproductive, but his prescription for
black Americans -- steady forward progress by embracing the all-American
values of hard work, integrity and individual enterprise -- was in fact
a recipe almost certain to invite vicious repercussions in the form of a
lynch mob. As the NAACP began systematically compiling information
about lynchings, it became clear that blacks who succeeded economically
and socially (particularly those who became landowners) were the
frequent targets of lynching, and any indications of civic advancement
by blacks often met violent opposition. Among the many victims of
lynchings were black postal clerks, grocery owners, farmers, and
white-collar professionals, such as doctors. Black veterans returning
from action in World War I were sometimes lynched merely for wearing
their uniforms in public.
Likewise, it was becoming
increasingly clear, even to the public, that the rationales proffered
for decades to justify the lynch mobs' actions -- particularly the
threat of black rape -- were not merely flimsy but entirely hollow, a
cover for the real motivation for lynching, which was to terrorize and
subjugate the black community. A 1918 lynching case drove this point
home in horrific fashion.
It began on May 16 when a
white landowner in rural Valdosta, Georgia, was shot to death at his
home. His wife accused a black man named Sidney Johnson, and a lynch mob
soon formed with the purpose of carrying out summary justice for the
farmer's murder. However, when it was unable to locate Johnson, the mob
turned its wrath on five black men who'd had the misfortune of being in
the vicinity at the time and lynched them instead. Among the five was
Haynes Turner, a former employee of the murdered farmer.
Turner's
wife, Mary, was eight months pregnant, and when she heard of the
murder, she vowed publicly to find the men responsible, swear out
warrants against them, and ensure they were punished in the courts. Not
surprisingly, her vow to seek justice doomed her; as an Associated Press
report of the affair put it, Mary Turner had made "unwise remarks"
about the execution of her husband, "and the people, in their indignant
mood, took exceptions to her remarks, as well as her attitude." The
local sheriff placed her under arrest, reportedly for her protection,
but then surrendered her to a mob of several hundred white men and women
-- as well as a number of children -- determined to "teach her a
lesson."
At a place outside town called Folsom's
Bridge, they stripped her, tied her ankles together, and hung her upside
down from a tree. Dousing her with gasoline, they slowly roasted her to
death. While she was still alive, a man using a knife ordinarily
reserved for splitting hogs walked up and cut open the woman's abdomen.
"Out tumbled the prematurely born child," wrote a news reporter covering
the event. "Two feeble cries it gave -- and received for the answer the
heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out of the tiny form."
Hundreds of bullets were then fired into Mary Turner's body. Sated, the
mob left her body by the roadside. She and her child were buried in a
shallow grave near the bridge.
Mary Turner's murder --
which made clear irrevocably that lynching more often than not had
nothing to do with black rape -- made national headlines. On its heels
came the "Red Summer" of 1919; there were seventy-six blacks lynched
that year, but even more horrifying were the "race riots" that broke out
in twenty-six cities, including Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Omaha,
Nebraska; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Charleston, North Carolina; and Knoxville,
Tennessee. These insurrections in fact were massive assaults by whites
upon local black populations, often sparked by an imagined offense. In
Tulsa, where a prosperous black population was literally bombed out of
existence over two days of complete lawlessness, the rioting was set off
by a black youth's alleged assault on a local white girl that later
turned out to be harmless consensual contact. Nonetheless, a Tulsa
newspaper had publicly called for the young man's lynching, and when a
group of local blacks attempted to ward off a lynch mob, the fighting
broke out. By the time the violence had subsided, as many as three
hundred black people were believed killed, many of them buried in a mass
grave, and thirty-five city blocks lay charred.
Such
horrors, and many others of similar brutality, lent real credence to the
NAACP's anti-lynching campaign. Its black-white coalition made steady
gains in attaining widespread respect for its cause, both with public
officials and the public at large, in the decade after its founding. A
1915 nationwide boycott of D. W. Griffith's film
The Birth of a Nation
(an overtly racist paean to the Ku Klux Klan and the virtues of the
lynch mob), was reasonably successful and helped attract a broad range
of supporters. Moreover, the fledgling organization worked tirelessly to
lobby local and state officials about the pernicious nature of lynching
and to act to correct the injustices.
Over the
succeeding years, the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign gathered momentum,
particularly during the fight in Congress over the
Dyer Bill,
the anti-lynching law passed by the House in 1922 but killed by
Southern Democrats in the Senate. There were subsequent attempts to pass
anti-lynching legislation. The Dyer Bill was resurrected in 1926, but
again did not survive the Senate. In 1934, a pair of Democratic senators
-- Colorado's Edward Costigan and New York's Robert Wagner -- offered a
measure that would have punished law-enforcement officials who by
neglect allowed their charges to be taken by a mob. Again the
legislation had the NAACP's full-fledged backing, and again the public
support was overwhelmingly in its favor (indeed, one poll found even
that 65 percent of Southerners supported a federal law outlawing
lynching). Ultimately, however, it met the same fate as the Dyer Bill;
it passed handily in the House, only to succumb to a fatal filibuster by
Southerners in the Senate. Two later efforts in the 1940s to pass
anti-lynching legislation met similar fates.
These
failures, however, were anything but. What no one expected was that even
though the effort to enact federal anti-lynching laws did not succeed,
the broad national debate it had inspired achieved nearly spectacular
results in undermining the lynching phenomenon. By the 1930s lynching
was no longer celebrated in the public view, but widely condemned as
barbarous and unjust by nearly every responsible segment of society.
Even in the South, the views of such Caucasian organizations as the
Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching had come to
hold sway.
Over the course of the succeeding decade,
from 1922 to 1932, lynching deaths -- which had somewhat steadily
declined in frequency after 1904 anyway -- dropped dramatically, from
fifty-nine black lynchings in 1922 to only six in 1932. The trend
continued during the 1930s; only ninety-three black lynchings were
recorded during the entire decade.
The nature of
lynchings changed dramatically during this period -- driven, almost
certainly, by the stigma that had become attached to mob justice, and
the clear withdrawal of public sanction for such murders. The mass
spectacle lynchings, which had seemingly reached their apex in the
bloody "Red Summer" of 1919, virtually disappeared over the course of
the 1920s. By the 1930s, lynchings had largely reverted back to the form
in which they first manifested themselves during the early
Reconstruction period: furtive affairs involving midnight riders,
arsonists and shooters, usually involving only a handful of
perpetrators. By 1952, when there were no black lynchings recorded at
Tuskegee (though it must be noted that, even then, this did not
necessarily none had occurred), the era of the lynch mob seemed to have
become a thing of the past.
This watershed change in
the American cultural landscape occurred with virtually no official or
legal support from Washington, D.C. Congress, of course, never enacted
an anti-lynching law. And the Supreme Court, for most of the lynching
era, had declined to involve itself in lynching cases, preferring to
leave them to the jurisdiction of state courts. A handful of decisions,
however, gradually turned the tide in the courts, and simultaneously
left a permanent impression on the larger body of criminal law:
Moore v. Dempsey
in 1923, which overruled the death sentences of six black men convicted
(in a lynch-mob atmosphere) of insurrection following a rural Arkansas
"race riot," for the first time stipulated that in light of the
requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment, any denial of due process was
the concern of the federal government;
Powell v. Alabama
in 1932, which overturned the verdict in the infamous case of the
"Scottsboro Boys," nine itinerant black workers who were convicted on
flimsy evidence of raping two white women, and which further stipulated
that the right to an attorney was an indispensable part of due process;
Norris v. Alabama
in 1935, which overturned the third conviction delivered against the
Scottsboro boys, on grounds that the exclusion of blacks from the jury
violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and
finally
Brown v. Mississippi
in 1936, which found that a Southern sheriff’s extraction of a murder
confession from a black suspect by torturing him was likewise a
violation of a defendant’s constitutional rights. However, most of these
rulings came well after the lynching era had begun its decline, and
only
Moore v. Dempsey -- delivered at a crucial juncture in the
national debate -- could be said to have had any appreciable role in the
sea change of public attitudes about mob justice.
Where
the legal system failed, though, it is clear in retrospect that the
moral suasion underlying the campaign to combat lynching succeeded.
While the NAACP's campaign to pass a federal anti-lynching law fell
short, its broader campaign to debunk the myths that had been used to
defend lynching, and to permanently stigmatize the practice as inimical
to basic American values of justice and fair play, were remarkably
effective. It could be argued that this tends to support the position of
Caucasian anti-lynching organizations like the Association of Southern
Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which had opposed federal
anti-lynching laws as an unnecessary intrusion on a natural process of
incremental change in cultural attitudes wrought by moral persuasion and
not the law. But the historical record is also clear that when
anti-lynching statutes were properly enforced -- as they were, for
example, in Illinois after 1911 -- the laws were remarkably effective
tools for changing social mores regarding lynching.
Although
lynchings declined, they did not disappear altogether, by any means.
Certainly, the deep racial animus that had always inspired them was
still alive and well, particularly in the South. They continued to occur
periodically, but instead of being treated as commonplace, they became
the subject of intensive international news coverage. The 1955 lynching
of a Chicago teenager named Emmett Till, on vacation in Mississippi, for
being "fresh" with a white woman, became a national cause célèbre,
playing a prominent role in the claims of civil-rights advocates that
justice for black people did not exist in the South.
For
those Southerners still dedicated to the tenets of white supremacy, and
who permanently opposed the substantial gains made during the 1950s and
'60s for African Americans' civil rights -- in particular the
desegregation of schools and other facilities that began with the
Supreme Court's landmark
Brown v Board of Education ruling in
1950 -- lynching continued to hold its longtime value as a tool for
terrorizing the black community and reaffirming the dominance of white
supremacy. But without the cover of public sanction, lynching and racial
violence became a surreptitious crime that was strategically deployed
in a vain attempt to stem the tide of the Civil Rights movement. As
such, lynchers frequently targeted the persons they saw as the source of
the agitation. The 1964 slayings of three civil-rights workers in
Mississippi, which became a landmark in rising national attitudes
supporting the movement, was in most respects a classic lynching. But
now the lynchers also turned to other kinds of violence: burning and
bombing African American churches, attacking civil-rights marchers, and
assassinating the leaders in the movement.
All these
events, of course, were largely playing out in the South, which had its
own special history as the place where the Klan and lynching had largely
originated. Yet that focus obscured a broader reality: Just as the
Klan, by the 1920s, had become a genuinely national phenomenon (with
national headquarters located in Indiana) so too was the lynching of
black Americans widely practiced throughout America. In fact, a quick
look at the
Tuskegee Institute's state-by-state numbers
for the so-called "Lynching Era" (1882-1968) reveals that they in fact
occurred in nearly every state in the Union, particularly in the Midwest
-- though not as prolifically as they occurred in the South. Likewise, a
survey of "race riots" in the same period reveals they occurred in a
number of places well outside the South.
The raw
numbers of lynched blacks outside the South, however, were smaller for a
simple reason: their purpose was different. Lynchings in the Midwest,
Northeast, and the West occurred for an explicitly, and broadly,
eliminationist purpose. Unlike their Southern brethren, whites elsewhere
simply chose not even to let blacks live among them, and so they
violently drove them out of their communities en masse and forbade them
to return thereafter.
Thus the fight over
Brown v. Board of Education
and school desegregation took place largely in the South for a very
simple reason: school districts outside the South largely did not have
to desegregate because blacks had not been permitted to live within
their borders for generations. They had just been driven out.
In
the South, whites chose to deal with blacks by oppressing them; in much
of the rest of the country, white communities simply eliminated their
presence altogether. And by making the South the nation's racial
scapegoat, it allowed those communities to smugly pretend that since
they had no such strife to face, they were not part of the problem.
As
a result, the unsettled legacy of racism in the South continues to be a
wound in the national psyche that refuses to heal -- and the hidden
legacy of eliminationist racism in the rest of the country continues to
fester like a long-silent cancer.
[Note: This post is a republication of a piece originally published Jan. 10, 2007.]
Confederate Heritage Month:
Day 1: Strange Fruit
It Was About Slavery
That Peculiar Institution
How Poor Whites Got Suckered
The First American War Criminals
'The River Was Dyed'
War By Other Means
Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them
Crying 'Bloody Shirt'
Hamburg and Reconstruction's End
Red Shirts and Whitewashes
