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BOOK REVIEWS
701
policy that dovetailed with their rhetoric of paternalism. At the same time, as
whites claimed the prerogative to personally define and enforce the rules of
the routine, interracial exchanges could be fraught with uncertainty and danger.
Had Berrey moved farther into the countryside, beyond more conventionally
segregated public spaces like stores, train stations, and movie theaters, he
would have found a wealth of additional stories to enrich and confirm his
thesis. Additionally, although Berrey recognizes meaningful sectional variations within Mississippi, he does not follow through with this insight. Finally,
although his thesis revolves around the flexibility of the Jim Crow routine, he
draws heavily from Leon F. Litwack’s interpretation of Jim Crow, which tugs
Berrey toward a more systematic and inflexible emphasis. More scholarship
is needed to sort out these difficulties.
In summary, Berrey has made an important contribution in tracking the
seismic shift from the discourse of accommodation to that of confrontation.
His careful attention to the multiple meanings of performance and audience
provides scholars with a wide and valuable frame with which to rethink the
many twists and turns of strategy, action, and narrative that marked the long
civil rights movement.
Lewis University
MARK SCHULTZ
Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. By Amy Kate Bailey and
Stewart E. Tolnay. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Pp. [xx], 276. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2087-9.)
Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck revolutionized the study of lynching
twenty years ago by constructing a definitive list of lynchings to replace the
flawed lists compiled by antilynching organizations. This data underlay a
series of important articles and the book A Festival of Violence: An Analysis
of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana, 1995). Now Tolnay and one of
his Ph.D. graduates, Amy Kate Bailey, have used similar methods to compile
a dataset of the victims of lynching. Many historians have done extensive
research on a few victims as part of case studies of particular lynchings or
more cursory research on a wide range of victims as part of statewide studies,
but Bailey and Tolnay’s work here is much more systematic and extensive
than anything previously accomplished and should provide the basis for much
further research.
An entire chapter is dedicated to a detailed explanation of how the authors
compiled the data on the lynching victims. They began with the 2010 BeckTolnay Confirmed Inventory of Lynch Victims, which included data on the
date, the county and state, the alleged offense, the name or names of the
victims, their race, and their sex. Then Bailey and Tolnay connected this
inventory to records in the U.S. census by a very precise process. In the end,
they were able to link 935 of the more than 2,400 victims in the inventory
with records from the last census before the person was lynched. While this
number is only about a quarter of the victims of lynching between the 1880s
and the 1930s, these findings represent a prodigious accomplishment.
Some of the conclusions Bailey and Tolnay reach reinforce ideas that
historians have assumed to be the case, but several conclusions are new and
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surprising and paint a more complex portrait of the phenomenon of lynching
and its victims. For example, one old debate centered on whether African
American men who were marginal to their communities were more vulnerable
to mob violence or whether black men who were successful drew the wrath of
their white neighbors for that very success. Bailey and Tolnay effectively argue
that both were true: as the Japanese proverb says, “the nail that sticks out shall
be hammered down,” and that appears to have been the case for poor, transient
African Americans in more settled communities and for successful African
Americans in poorer areas. Being well-off where more people were well-off,
or rootless and new where most of one’s neighbors were also new, offered
some protection against being a victim of lynching.
While Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence is a huge step
forward for understanding the people most directly affected by lynching, the
study does have limitations, which are readily acknowledged by the authors.
The most significant of these has to do with the famous fire in 1921 that
burned up the 1890 census schedules. Since the peak of lynching happened in
the early 1890s, this loss is particularly unfortunate because it means that
Bailey and Tolnay must rely on the 1880 census to try to find lynching victims
from the mid-1890s. The authors have managed to find only about 35 percent
of the victims in the 1890s, while for other decades their success rate is
between 40 and 50 percent. The other more puzzling limitation echoes Beck
and Tolnay’s earlier work: the study includes only ten southeastern states,
omitting Virginia, Texas, and Missouri. While very few lynchings occurred in
Virginia, this was certainly not the case in Texas. Perhaps ambitious students
will expand Bailey and Tolnay’s work to cover those states. Despite these
limitations, it is still no exaggeration to say that Lynched is the single most
important piece of scholarship yet produced on the victims of lynching.
Newcastle University
BRUCE E. BAKER
Visual Art and the Urban Evolution of the New South. By Deborah C.
Pollack. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiv,
366. $59.95, ISBN 978-1-61117-432-8.)
Deborah C. Pollack’s contribution to the literature on the cultural history
of the New South lies in her emphasis on taking the artists of the era as her
main subjects, rather than treating artistic production only as representation.
Starting from the premise that artists “became the impetus of the cultural and at
times physical, economic, and sociological advancement of . . . six New South
cities,” her task is to explore the influence of “artists and other cultural strivers
in the evolution of several major New South urban centers” (p. 1). These artists
chronicled the Old South and the transformations of the New South and,
in so doing, “established a synergistic dynamic by joining forces with philanthropists, women’s organizations, entrepreneurs, writers, architects, politicians,
and idealistic dreamers” (p. 10). Pollack asserts that these allies helped usher
New South cities into an era of cultural maturity. Significantly, Pollack does not
focus solely on picturesque images of the Old South, but also examines artistic
productions that borrowed from European idioms and attempted to capture the
character of urban life. Casting a broad net from sculptors to photographers,
THE JOURNAL
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