At the Hands of Parties Unknown?
The State of the Field of Lynching
Scholarship
Michael J. Pfeifer
In October 2002 more than ninety historians and other academics gathered in Atlanta to
attend “Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies.” That Emory
University conference, held in conjunction with a touring exhibition of lynching photographs that had attracted considerable publicity, was, to many participants, an important watershed in the study of the history of American lynching. Twenty-five panels of
scholars explored collective violence in the United States from a wide range of angles; the
variety and extent of inquiry evident at the conference signaled that the study of lynching and racial violence had reached a scale and depth that would have seemed unrealistic
even just ten years earlier. As the fifteenth anniversary of the conference approaches, it
seems appropriate to assess how lynching scholarship has developed over the last several
decades, to measure the current strengths and weaknesses of the field, and to examine
where future scholars might best direct their energies in grappling with the role of collective violence in the varied American regions where it took root during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. It is also an opportune moment to reflect on what the phenomenon
of lynching—that is, informal group killing—can reveal about the historical processes of
state, social identity, and cultural formation in the United States and in global cultures.1
I began studying American mob violence twelve years before the Emory conference; an
undergraduate senior thesis on lynching in Missouri grew into a doctoral dissertation on
the relationship of lynching to the criminal justice system across the United States. The
flowering of lynching scholarship over the following decade could not have been fully anticipated in 1990, as the history of mob violence was obscured in relative oblivion. The
Michael J. Pfeifer is an associate professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
I am grateful to Edward T. Linenthal, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bruce E. Baker, and an anonymous reviewer for
their comments on an earlier version of this essay.
Readers may contact Pfeifer at [email protected].
1
A traveling exhibit of lynching photographs attracted much attention in 2000. See “Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America,” traveling exhibition, Photographs from the Allen-Littlefield Collection (Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga.). See also James Allen et al., Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, 2000); and Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of
Lynching in America, http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html. For analysis and critique of the exhibitions, see Dora
Apel, “On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11,” American Quarterly, 55 (Sept.
2003), 457–78; Jonathan Markowitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis, 2004), 137–
41; and Bettina M. Carbonell, “The Afterlife of Lynching: Exhibitions and the Re-composition of Suffering,” Mississippi Quarterly, 61 (Winter–Spring 2008), 197–215.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau640
© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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December 2014
The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship
833
scholarship was quite diffuse and rather old: some of it produced by antilynching activists
who had exposed the actions of lynch mobs from the late nineteenth through the midtwentieth centuries; some of it the fruit of the first wave of social science researchers in the
early twentieth century who viewed lynch mobs as lab specimens for a science of society;
and some of it a product of the wave of studies of American violence in the 1960s and
1970s that sought to understand the cultural roots of that turbulent period’s riots, assassinations, violent crime, wars, and acts of terrorism. In public culture and local memory,
though, lynching still met with reticence. Mid-twentieth-century histories of the American South, where several thousand African Americans were lynched in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, had not ignored mob violence but had paid it little attention. For example, C. Vann Woodward’s highly influential Origins of the New South,
originally published in 1951 and otherwise highly attentive to matters of race and class,
devoted a mere two paragraphs to lynching. Yet in the 1980s and early 1990s change was
clearly afoot as scholars of the U.S. South began to look carefully at the role of collective
violence in southern society in the years after Reconstruction.2
As they revised and deepened their analyses of the New South to incorporate the insights of the “new social history,” southern historians in the final decades of the twentieth
century effectively rediscovered lynching violence, excavating its nexus with race, gender,
sexuality, and social class as capitalist transformation and Jim Crow racial proscription remade the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Revolt against
Chivalry, a pivotal 1979 examination of the white southern antilynching activist Jesse
Daniel Ames, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall interpreted the link between allegations of rape and
lynching as a “folk pornography of the Bible Belt” that connected the region’s racism and
sexism. Hall viewed Ames’s campaign against lynching as a manifestation of “feminist anti­
racism.” With a similar institutional focus, Robert L. Zangrando charted the antilynching
efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp). In
his 1980 study Zangrando argued that “lynching became the wedge by which the naacp
insinuated itself into the public conscience, developed contacts within governmental
2
Michael J. Pfeifer, “Lynching and Criminal Justice in Regional Context: Iowa, Wyoming, and Louisiana,
1878–1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1998). For writings through which the antilynching movement
documented and systematically analyzed American mob violence, see Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other
Writings: The Anti-lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster (Boston, 1997); National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918
(1919; New York, 1969); Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill, 1933); and Walter White, Rope
and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929; Notre Dame, 2001). Ida B. Wells and her campaign against lynching
have spawned prolific scholarship in recent years. See, for example, Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword among Lions;
Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York, 2009); James West Davidson, “They Say”: Ida B. Wells
and the Reconstruction of Race (New York, 2008); Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform,
1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2000); and Angela D. Sims, Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation
of American Terror (New York, 2010). For early twentieth-century social science research on lynching, see James Elbert Cutler, Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905; New York, 1969);
Paul Walton Black, “Lynchings in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 10 (April 1912), 187–99; Paul Walton
Black, “Attempted Lynchings in Iowa,” Annals of Iowa, 11 (Jan. 1914), 260–85; Genevieve Yost, “History of Lynchings in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, 2 (May 1933), 182–219; John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern
Town (New Haven, 1938); and Frank Shay, Judge Lynch: His First Hundred Years (New York, 1938). Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, 1973); Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975);
H. John Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg, Vigilante Politics (Philadelphia, 1976). C. Vann Woodward, Origins
of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951). On the neglect of lynching in southern historical scholarship
until the late twentieth century and on the awakening of public interest in mob violence in recent decades, see W.
Fitzhugh Brundage, “Conclusion: Reflections on Lynching Scholarship,” in Lynching Reconsidered: New Perspectives
in the Study of Mob Violence, ed. William D. Carrigan (New York, 2008), 205–18, esp. 213.
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December 2014
circles, established credibility among philanthropists, and opened lines of communication with other liberal-reformist groups that eventually joined it in a mid-century, civil
rights coalition of unprecedented proportions.” Case studies of lynchings, beginning with
James R. McGovern’s 1982 examination of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in Jackson
County, Florida, highlighted the circumstances of particular instances of mob violence.
While some studies integrated the broader context better than others, each one suggested
the thick texture of social relationships and racial oppression that underlay many lynchings, as well as the pressing need for research on more cases. Studies in the 1980s explored the larger connections between mob violence and southern social and cultural
norms. In The Crucible of Race, a magisterial 1984 interpretation of postbellum southern racism, Joel Williamson analyzed lynching as a means by which southern white men
sought to compensate for their perceived loss of sexual and economic autonomy during
emancipation and the agricultural depression of the 1890s. Williamson contended that
white men created the myth of the “black beast rapist” to assert white masculine privilege
and to punish black men for a fantasized sexual prowess that white men covertly envied.
Meanwhile, the folklorist Trudier Harris pioneered the study of literary representations
of American mob violence with Exorcising Blackness, a 1984 study of African American
writers’ treatment of lynching and racial violence. Harris argued that black writers sought
communal survival by graphically documenting acts of ritualistic violence through which
whites sought to exorcise or emasculate the “black beast.”3
Scholars in the late twentieth century also closely examined numerous lynching cases
in the context of particular states and across the South. State studies of mob violence,
starting with George Wright’s pioneering 1989 study of Kentucky and continuing with
W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s highly influential 1993 study of Georgia and Virginia, explored
the dynamics of lynch mobs and those who opposed them in local social and economic
relationships and in state legal and political cultures. Examining antiblack lynching and
rioting from emancipation through the eve of World War II, Wright found that the time
of Reconstruction (not the 1890s) was the most lynching-prone era, that African Americans often organized to defend themselves and resist white mob violence, and that “legal
lynchings”—streamlined capital trials encompassing the form but not the substance of
due process—supplanted lynching in the early twentieth century. Examining hundreds
of lynching cases, Brundage discovered “a complex pattern of simultaneously fixed and
3
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching
(1979; New York, 1993), xx–xxi. See also Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women,
Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Barr Snitow, Christine Stansell,
and Sharon Thompson (New York, 1983), 328–49. Robert L. Zangrando, The naacp Crusade against Lynching,
1909–1950 (Philadelphia, 1980), 18. James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge, 1982); Howard Smead, Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker (New York, 1986). For a case
study of a northern lynching, see Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser, No Crooked Death: Coatesville, Pennsylvania and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker (Urbana, 1991); and Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser,
Coatesville and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker: Death in a Pennsylvania Steel Town (Charleston, 2011). Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York, 1984),
306–10. For profound generational shifts in southern historiography, especially in approaches to violence, gender,
and race, see David Thelen, “What We See and Can’t See in the Past: An Introduction,” Journal of American History,
83 (March 1997), 1217–20; Joel Williamson, “Wounds Not Scars: Lynching, the National Conscience, and the
American Historian,” ibid., 1221–53; and “Referees’ Reports: Edward L. Ayers, David W. Blight, George M. Frederickson, Robin D. G. Kelley, David Levering Lewis, and Steven M. Stowe,” ibid., 1254–67. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington, 1984). For another interpretation
of lynching, emphasizing race and ritual, see Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two
American Centuries (New York, 1998), 169–231.
The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship
835
evolving behavior and attitudes” in which mob violence served the important function of
racial oppression in the South across the postbellum period but also displayed significant
variation across time and space in terms of the nature and degree of mob ritual, the alleged causes of mob violence, and the persons targeted by mobs. Synthesizing the history
of the New South in 1992, Edward L. Ayers examined lynching statistics and argued that
lynching was a phenomenon of the Gulf of Mexico plain from Florida to Texas and of
the cotton uplands from Mississippi to Texas. Ayers found that mob violence was most
common in those plain and upland counties with low rural population density and high
rates of black population growth, with lynching serving as a means for whites “to reconcile weak governments with a demand for an impossibly high level of racial mastery.” In
their 1995 cliometric study, A Festival of Violence, the sociologists Stewart E. Tolnay and
E. M. Beck tabulated data from several thousand lynchings in ten southern states from
1882 through 1930. Tolnay and Beck found a strong correlation between southern lynching and economic fluctuation, with racial mob violence waxing in relation to a low price
for cotton. Tolnay and Beck held that African Americans were least in danger of falling
victim to lynch mobs when white society was divided by significant political competition
or when elite whites feared the flight of inexpensive black labor. In contrast to Ayers’s emphasis on the relationship between lynching and anemic law enforcement, A Festival of
Violence found little statistical support for “the substitution model of social control”—the
notion that southern whites lynched in response to a “weak or inefficient criminal justice
system.”4
In the early years of the twenty-first century, building on the rich work on the postbellum South done in the 1990s and the growing scholarship on law and society, historians continued to explore the relationship of lynching to the development of the criminal
justice system but broadened analysis of American mob violence to encompass regions
beyond the South and eras before the late nineteenth century. My 2004 monograph,
Rough Justice, examined the relation of collective murder to regional cultures across the
postbellum United States. Rough Justice found significant incidence of lynching in the
Midwest, the West, and the South, but not in the Northeast, and argued that lynching
developed out of a cultural battle over the changing nature of criminal justice. The contention over criminal law pitted due process reformers who emphasized the safeguarding
of legal procedure and the amelioration of unseemly public punishment through the reform of the death penalty against “rough justice” enthusiasts who sought ritualized and
racialized retribution. The two sides eventually compromised in the early decades of the
twentieth century with capital punishment that was no longer publicly administered but
that remained highly racialized even as it became more efficient and technocratic. Simultaneously, lynching lost support and declined in incidence in the Midwest, the West and,
eventually, in the South, as middle classes coalesced against mob violence. Embarrassed
by the increasing spotlight that African American activists and a nationalizing culture
4
George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge, 1990), 8–9, 11–13, 251. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia,
1880–1930 (Urbana, 1993), 15. See also W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the
South (Chapel Hill, 1997). Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York,
1992), 156–57, 495–96n69. On white mob violence in the context of the experience of African Americans in the
Jim Crow South, see Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1999).
Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana,
1995), 99–100, 256–57.
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December 2014
shone upon lynching, and fearing the loss of investment that might promote economic
growth and prosperity in the region, middle-class white southerners in the early twentieth century pressed instead for “legal lynchings”—expedited trials and executions that
merged legal forms with the popular clamor for rough justice. In this way, lynching grew
out of the death penalty and the death penalty grew out of lynching.5
Expanding the chronology and geography of American lynching, William D. Carrigan’s 2004 study, The Making of a Lynching Culture, charted the development of a culture
of lynching violence among whites in central Texas from the antebellum era through first
decades of the twentieth century. Carrigan persuasively argued that postbellum white Texans sought to justify their lynching of African Americans and Mexicans with communal
memory that valorized extralegal violence against “racial, ethnic, and political minorities”:
antebellum Mexicans, Native Americans, and slaves, and emancipated African Americans
and white carpetbaggers in Reconstruction. Carrigan showed that local authorities in
central Texas tended to defer to local memories glorifying extralegal violence as they tolerated lynching. My 2011 book, The Roots of Rough Justice, also extended the boundaries
of U.S. lynching by tracing the origins of American collective murder in Anglo-American
legal culture and antebellum social history. In novel places such as Mississippi, Iowa, and
California in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, I argued, white Americans seized upon lethal
group violence unsanctioned by law—particularly hangings—to enforce mandates of racial and class hierarchy and to pull into definition tenuous and ill-defined understandings
of social order and community. Collectively murdering African American slaves and free
blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, and nonlanded white members of the working class,
white Americans spurned growing legal reforms that offered the promise of legal fairness
to the unpopular and powerless by protecting the rights of those accused of crimes. The
Roots of Rough Justice contended that lynching arose in the early to mid-nineteenth century as those Americans committed to local hierarchical prerogatives contested emergent
notions of due process rights and state authority. Unlike in England and western Europe,
the transition to a capitalist economy in the United States was not accompanied by the
emergence of a strong centralized national state that claimed and enforced an exclusive
monopoly over violence, and by the administration of criminal justice to secure the rule
of law. Rather, American criminal justice developed along a path that emphasized local
authority and opinion, self-help, ad hoc law enforcement practices, and the toleration of
extralegal violence. The formation of American criminal justice was a highly contested
process, as lawyers, judges, and middle-class reformers fought for due process and the
rule of law against rural elites and working-class people who sought to retain rough justice—that is, criminal justice grounded in local prerogatives of honor, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and crime control. Because of factors that included slavery, industrialization,
urbanization, and westward migration, the book argued, the due-process forces were at
5
For a work that incorporates examination of nonsouthern regions and a brief but suggestive discussion of
lynching violence before the Civil War, see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black
America (New York, 2002). Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1878–1946 (Urbana,
2004). On lynching and the death penalty in postbellum Tennessee and Florida, see Margaret Vandiver, Lethal
Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (New Brunswick, 2006). On lynching in the Midwest and
the West and its relationship to southern lynching, see Michael J. Pfeifer, “Introduction,” in Lynching beyond Dixie:
American Mob Violence outside the South, ed. Michael J. Pfeifer (Urbana, 2013), 1–12. For a cross-regional analysis
of mob violence and capital punishment in U.S. history, see Howard W. Allen, Jerome M. Clubb, and Vincent A.
Lacey, Race, Class, and the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in American History (Albany, 2008).
The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship
837
their strongest in the Northeast but weakest in the South, with the forces in the West and
the Midwest lying in between.6
Crucially, scholars in recent years have demonstrated that the victims of racially motivated lynching were as diverse as the targets of American racial prejudice. While reliably comprehensive statistical data is still lacking, scholars do know that white Americans lynched at least several thousand African Americans in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and quite possibly several thousand more in the era of emancipation
and Reconstruction. Whites also lynched hundreds of Native Americans and persons of
Mexican descent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholars in recent years
have made signal contributions in excavating the history of the lynching of Hispanics. In
a deeply researched 2006 book Ken Gonzales-Day highlighted the extensive lynching violence that plagued California from the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades
of the twentieth century. Gonzales-Day documented 352 victims of mob killing in the
Golden State from 1850 through 1936, with 132 of those lynched (38 percent) identified as Mexican or Latin American. Gonzales-Day argued that the widespread lynching
of Hispanics should lead historians to rethink histories of the West that have tended to
ignore the racial dimensions of vigilante violence in favor of a narrative of “frontier justice.”7
Gonzales-Day urged historians of lynching to broaden interpretations that have tended to focus on the lynching of African Americans in the South. In a series of influential articles and in their important 2013 book, Forgotten Dead, William D. Carrigan
and Clive Webb documented the lynchings of 547 persons of Mexican descent. Allegations of property crime (“banditry”) and homicide loomed larger, and sexual allegations
less prominently, in the accusations that whites made against Mexican lynching victims,
compared to those made against African American lynching victims in the South. Carrigan and Webb argued that diplomatic pressure from Mexico eventually helped stem the
lynching of Mexicans. Like Gonzales-Day, Carrigan and Webb showed that the history
of mob violence against Mexicans compels expansion of the chronology and geography
of American lynching beyond the postbellum South, as numerous lynchings of Mexicans
occurred in the antebellum era and the great preponderance of incidents occurred in the
Southwest. While historians have also begun to analyze the numerous lynchings of Native
Americans that occurred in the nineteenth century and the dozens of collective killings of
Chinese in the American West, much more work must be done on these aspects of the extensive history of mob violence against “racial others” in the developing American West.8
6
William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916
(Urbana, 2004), 12–15. Michael J. Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana, 2011).
For cultural analysis of police torture of African Americans in the mid-twentieth-century South, see Silvan Niedermeier, “Violence, Visibility, and the Investigation of Police Torture in the American South, 1940–1955,” in Violence
and Visibility in Modern History, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier (New York, 2013), 91–92.
7
The most accurate count available is that nearly 2,500 African Americans were murdered by lynch mobs from
1882 through 1930 in Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas,
Kentucky, and North Carolina. See Tolnay and Beck, Festival of Violence, ix. This tally excludes six states that were
wholly or partly southern in their historical development. Tuskegee Institute data enumerates a total of 793 lynching victims between 1882 and 1968 in 6 states on the southern periphery: Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Texas. See Zagrando, naacp Crusade against Lynching, 4. Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the
West: 1850–1935 (Durham, N.C., 2006).
8
William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans, 1848–1928 (New York,
2013); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “‘Muerto por Unos Desconocidos (Killed by Persons Unknown)’:
Mob Violence against African Americans and Mexican Americans,” in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity,
and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, ed. Stephanie Cole and Allison Parker (College Station, 2004), 35–
74; William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “A Dangerous Experiment: The Lynching of Rafael Benavides,” New
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December 2014
Lynching scholarship in the last decade or so has also displayed a meaningful cultural
turn, with much recent attention given to the relationship between mob violence and different varieties of cultural production. In a series of important books beginning in 2002
with The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, Christopher Waldrep brilliantly historicized the rhetoric of American mob violence, compelling historians to recognize the evolving, unstable
meanings of the word lynching in American history and to use the term with greater care
and precision in their own work. Waldrep carefully documented the origins and development of the language of lynching in the United States, its use by African American activists to resist white racial violence, and its globalization as non-U.S. observers sought
ways to describe mob violence in the United States and in their own cultures. In Legacies
of Lynching (2004), Jonathan Markowitz surveyed the collective memory of lynching as
invoked and represented in contemporary American popular culture. Addressing a wide
assortment of cultural representations of lynching, Markowitz held that “the range of
possible meanings attached to lynching is determined in relation to the constraining influences of history and to current configurations of power and knowledge.” In the 2009
Lynching and Spectacle Amy Louise Wood analyzed the connections among lynchings and
public executions, religiosity, photographs, and motion pictures. Wood identified a shift
in lynching pictures, from photographs and early motion pictures that offered a vicarious way for white southerners to reenact white supremacy through “witnessing” a white
mob’s lynching of an African American to later photographs and Hollywood films (such
as Fury and The Ox-Bow Incident) that used lynching imagery to criticize the barbarity
and injustice of lynch mobs. Wood persuasively argued that antilynching activists successfully inverted the original function of lynching photographs, “putting the most excessive
and sensational elements of lynching, as well as viewers’ voyeuristic impulses, in service
against lynching.” In her 2007 book, On the Courthouse Lawn, Sherilynn Ifill addressed
the complex, unfinished legacy of lynching for the many American communities where
it occurred. Focusing on racial mob violence in the 1930s on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,
Ifill advocated a reconciliation and restorative justice process that would in some measure
redress the lingering effects of racial lynching on the local level—for example, the devastation of African Americans who witnessed the mob killing, the complicity and silence
of the white community and institutions such as the white press and the criminal justice
system, and racial disparities in terms of economic resources and representation in the
legal system.9
Mexico Historical Review, 80 (Summer 2005), 265–92. For a Texas case study, see Nicholas Villaneuva Jr., “‘Sincerely Yours for Dignified Manhood’: Lynching, Violence, and American Manhood during the Early Years of the
Mexican Revolution, 1910–1914,” Journal of the West, 49 (Winter 2010), 41–48. On mob violence against “racial
others” in the West, see, for example, Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 86–88; Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 46–50; and Scott
Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (New York, 2012). On the lynching of 29
Sicilians, another ethnic group perceived as racially different in the postbellum South, see Clive Webb, “The Lynching of Sicilian Immigrants in the American South, 1886–1910,” American Nineteenth Century History, 3 (Spring
2002), 45–76. On the lynching of Sicilians in Colorado, see Stephen J. Leonard, Lynching in Colorado, 1859–1919
(Boulder, 2002), 135–42.
9
Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New
York, 2002); Christopher Waldrep, ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York, 2006); Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era
(Lanham, 2008); William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep, eds., Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical
Perspective (Charlottesville, 2013). Jonathan Markowitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis, 2004), xxxi. On lynching in the context of Jim Crow culture, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness:
The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998), 199–238. For analyses of literary and visual
representations of lynching from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, see Jacqueline Goldsby,
A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago, 2006); and Sandy Alexandre, The Proper-
The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship
839
Recent work has also helped elaborate understanding of lynching in the postbellum
South. In Southern Horrors, a 2009 study of women and the “politics of rape and lynching,” Crystal Feimster added considerable depth and nuance to the understanding of
southern women, gender, and mob violence. Feimster did this in part through a comparative analysis of the African American antilynching activist Ida B. Wells and the white
prolynching advocate Rebecca Latimer Felton. Feimster read Wells and Felton deftly and
thoroughly, locating the origins of their perspectives on white male supremacy and violence in their respective Civil War experiences (especially for Felton, who was twenty-seven
years older than Wells), Reconstruction, and the years after the return of white conservatives to power in the South in the late 1870s. Feimster’s analysis of Felton stressed the
ways Felton’s infamous 1897 advocacy of the lynching of black men was simultaneously
consistent and at odds with the journalist and political operative’s long-standing critique
of white male patriarchy and her shifting positions on mob violence. Feimster persuasively argued that Wells and Felton were similar in their quest throughout their careers to
puncture and prove false the claims of white masculine power, whether they were used to
justify the rape of black women, the lynching of black men, or to relegate white women
to the confines of masculine protection and the household. Feimster also richly examined the role of southern white and black women as participants in and victims of lynching. Evocatively emphasizing that white women lynched in a disavowal of male efforts to
circumscribe female autonomy, Feimster analyzed black and white women as victims of
male lynchers who, like male rapists, refused to respect women’s bodies. (In some cases,
Feimster showed, lynchers and rapists were actually the same men.) Other recent work
has enriched knowledge of lynching in the postbellum South through case studies and
state studies. In Troubled Ground (2010) Claude A. Clegg constructed a compelling microhistory of several early twentieth-century lynchings in North Carolina, adeptly locating the significance of these events in the matrix of local race relations and in the eventual
evolution of attitudes toward lynching in the Tar Heel State. Terrence Finnegan’s deeply
textured 2013 study of lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, A Deed So Accursed,
compared social and cultural relations in the two states to suggest why, from 1881 to
1940, Mississippi logged 572 victims to South Carolina’s 178 victims.10
ties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching (Jackson, 2012). For narratives of southern and
western vigilantism and lynching, see Lisa Arellano, Vigilantes and Lynch Mobs: Narratives of Community and Nation
(Philadelphia, 2012). For lynching in the context of the Protestant culture of the postbellum American South, see
Donald G. Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice: Lynching in the American South,” Mississippi Quarterly, 62 (Winter–Spring 2008), 27–70. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in
America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, 2009), 14. Fury, dir. Fritz Lang (mgm, 1936); The Ox-Bow Incident, dir. William
Wellman (Twentieth Century Fox, 1943). On lynching in the folk culture of North Carolina’s lower Piedmont, see
Bruce E. Baker, “North Carolina Lynching Ballads,” in Under Sentence of Death, ed. Brundage, 219–46. On lynching in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black theater, see Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Urbana, 2012). Sherrilyn A. Ifill, On the
Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century (Boston, 2007). For a community
study that explored the lengthy legacy of racially motivated lynchings in Marion, Indiana, in 1931, see James H.
Madison, Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York, 2001). For an overview of lynching
in American culture, see Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven, 2012). For the argument that an
end-of-lynching discourse continues to shape and distort discussion of American mob violence, see Ashraf H. A.
Rushdy, The End of American Lynching (New Brunswick, 2012).
10
Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).
On African American women’s relationship to lynching, see Evelyn M. Simien, ed., Gender and Lynching: The
Politics of Memory (New York, 2011). For case studies of lynchings of African American women in Georgia, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, see Julie Buckner Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens, Ga.,
2011); and Maria DeLongoria, “‘Stranger Fruit’: The Lynching of Black Women, The Cases of Rosa Jefferson and
Marie Scott” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri–Columbia, 2006). For a journalistic treatment of the lynching
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Possibly the most important contribution of recent scholarship on postbellum southern lynching is how these new works have begun to provide a much fuller sense of African
American responses to lynching, which ranged from testimony to armed self-defense to
institutional activism to artistic representation. While scholars have not ignored African
American responses to white mob violence, much lynching scholarship (including my
own) in the last two decades has tended to focus more on the structure and context of
lynching violence than on its impact on African American communities. Focusing on the
violence and those who perpetrated it, scholars have spent less time analyzing the ways
blacks responded in deed and word to the extraordinary brutality performed ritualistically before large crowds and the everyday violence perpetrated by smaller groups with
less public attention. In her essential 2012 book, They Left Great Marks on Me, Kidada E.
Williams powerfully intervened in the academic narrative of lynching, recovering African
American testimonies of white terror and what she called the “vernacular history” that
blacks constructed of white efforts to resubjugate African Americans after Reconstruction.
Williams mined Freedmen’s Bureau records, congressional hearings, black newspapers,
the correspondence of federal agencies such as the Justice Department, and the records
of civil rights organizations such as the naacp to recover the voices of African Americans
who witnessed white violence and strategized to counter it. Beginning with the response
of African Americans to Ku Klux Klan actions during Reconstruction, Williams revealed
a consistent African American counternarrative that exposed the ways whites lawlessly
infringed on blacks’ rights. She showed that blacks energetically beseeched federal officials to take note, even as federal officials followed the U.S. Supreme Court in deferring
to state authority that mostly ignored or abetted whites’ violations of blacks’ rights. Williams highlighted the complexity of African American responses to white violence, which
ranged from deference to defiance and included self-improvement, exodus, and armed
self-defense. Vitally, Williams demonstrated that a “politics of defiance” and advocacy
of armed self-defense were central to the African American response to racial violence,
with black people often advocating and practicing confrontation of white racism and defense of their communities. Williams’s approach was inclusive, incorporating the words of
black activists and African American print culture as well as the letters and testimony of
“ordinary people”—members of the African American community who had experienced
or been otherwise affected by white violence. Williams argued that the counternarrative
that African Americans constructed about white violence assisted the rise of antilynching
activism from the 1910s through the 1930s, forging a pivotal prologue to the vernacular
history of white racism and African American community empowerment that guided the
civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.11
of two African American couples in Walton County, Georgia, in 1946, see Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The
Last Mass Lynching in America (New York, 2003). On the lynching of women and children in the West, see Helen
McLure, “‘I Suppose You Think Strange the Murder of Women and Children’: The American Culture of Collective
Violence, 1675–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Methodist University, 2009). For a list of female lynching victims,
see Kerry Segrave, Lynchings of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851–1946 (Jefferson, 2010). Claude
A. Clegg III, Troubled Ground: A Tale of Murder, Lynching, and Reckoning in the New South (Urbana, 2010); Terrence Finnegan, A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940 (Charlottesville, 2013).
On Mississippi’s prolific record of racial mob violence, see Julius E. Thompson, Lynchings in Mississippi: A History,
1865–1965 (Jefferson, 2007). On lynching in the Carolinas, see Bruce E. Baker, This Mob Will Surely Take My Life:
Lynching in the Carolinas, 1871–1947 (London, 2008); and J. Timothy Cole, The Forest City Lynching of 1900: Populism, Racism, and White Supremacy in Rutherford County, North Carolina (Jefferson, 2003).
11
Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York, 2012). On African American responses to mob violence, see Karlos Hill, “Resisting Lynching: Black Grassroots Responses to Lynching in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, 1882–1938” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Illinois, 2009).
The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship
841
Keeping in mind the strengths of the lynching scholarship of the last two decades, I
would like to suggest where weaknesses remain and where future scholars might most
fruitfully direct their energies as the field continues to develop. Scholars might best focus
their efforts by keeping the experiences and responses of the victims of racially motivated
mob violence (including African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans) at the
fore of their inquiry, whatever that inquiry’s central concerns. Among matters in most
dire need of scholarly attention are the legacies of lynching, an excavation of collective
killing in the South before 1880 and of lynching in other regions of the United States, the
compilation of a national database that spans eras, and the study of American lynching
and mob violence in other cultures in comparative, transnational, and global perspectives.
As Williams’s book brilliantly notes, the myriad responses of African American communities to white violence need a great deal more attention, including better integration
into case studies, state studies, and examinations of lynching and cultural production.
While the experience of African Americans with lynching has hardly been neglected by
historians, it has been less central to histories of the phenomenon than should be the case
given the contours of American lynching history; perhaps five thousand or six thousand
African Americans were murdered by white mobs in the American South, with hundreds
more killed by whites in other regions of the country. Keeping the black (or Hispanic or Native American) experiences of and responses to white racial violence—whether
it be testimony, armed self-defense, institutional activism, or artistic representation—at
the fore of the story changes the narrative, rendering it fuller, more accurate, perhaps
more complex, but also much more reflective of the brutality, devastation, and resilience
through which mob violence was experienced by communities. Similarly, Sherrilyn A.
Ifill’s plea for Americans to confront “the legacy of lynching in the twenty-first century”
should serve as a call to action. While scholarship has started to address the lingering effects of mob violence in the many American communities where it occurred, this endeavor merits considerably more effort and attention than it has received. Attempts to memorialize and grapple with the history of lynching have been made in the last fifteen years or
so as a public conversation has begun—perhaps most notably in the U.S. Senate’s 2005
apology for its historic failure to adopt antilynching legislation, which elicited considerable press attention—but such efforts remain anomalous, fitful, and embryonic. In the
majority of American communities where lynchings occurred, little or no effort has been
made to confront this history, and a local heritage of mob violence against African Americans, Hispanics, or Native Americans lurks unexamined within communal memory, perpetuating further silences and inequities.12
12
Recent scholarship, especially that focused on civil rights activism, has begun to explore African American
responses to racial terror at the local level. On black responses to racial terror in fin-de-siècle Florida and in 1960s
and 1970s Alabama and Mississippi, respectively, see Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black
Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley, 2006); Hasan
Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York, 2010); and Akinyele
Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York, 2013). Ifill,
On the Courthouse Lawn, xix–xx. For the Senate apology, see Congressional Record, 109 Cong., 1 sess., June 13, 2005,
p. S6364–88. For media coverage of the U.S. Senate apology see, for example, Wendy Koch, “U.S. Senate Moves
to Apologize for Injustice,” usa Today, June 13, 2005; and Martin C. Evans, “An Apology for Old Form of Terror:
Senate Expects to Vote Tomorrow on Resolution regarding Its Failure to Help End Practice of Lynching,” Newsday,
June 12, 2005, p. A34. On efforts to memorialize lynchings in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1920 and in Price, Utah, in
1925, respectively, see Dora Apel, “Memorialization and Its Discontents: America’s First Lynching Memorial,” Mississippi Quarterly, 61 (Winter–Spring 2008); and Kimberley Mangun and Larry R. Gerlach, “Making Utah History:
Press Coverage of the Robert Marshall Lynching, June 1925,” in Lynching beyond Dixie, ed. Pfeifer, 143–47. On an
effort by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative to erect memorials at lynching sites around the South, see
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December 2014
More work must be done on the significant amount of lynching violence that occurred
in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons—including Hispanics, whites, Native Americans, African Americans, and Asians—died at the hands of lynch
mobs. Regional boundaries in studying lynching have, perhaps more than anything, reflected the parochialism of regional histories and of the limiting circumstances that guide
the generation of scholarship, as southern historians typically do not read western history,
western historians do not read southern history, and dissertations and first books necessarily encompass what it seems feasible to study (as opposed to what might be studied to
fully encompass a topic). Shaped by these constraints, lynching scholars have sometimes
posited the southern experience with mob violence as the American norm, casting the
lynching violence in other parts of the country as anomalous or insignificant, and ignoring or eliding the lengthy and complex histories of collective murder that occurred in
other parts of the country. Scholarship on western violence has been particularly incurious about other regions—at times even incurious about its own region—the scholarship
has long been shaped by a peculiar debate over whether the nineteenth-century West was
violent. Southern historians, at least, have never doubted that the South was violent. The
stalemated debate over whether the West was violent conspired with understandable distaste for the region’s tradition of valorizing vigilantism to effectively discourage meaningful study of western lynching until relatively recently. Fortunately, scholars have begun
to remedy this in the last fifteen years with important studies of mob violence in Colorado, California, and central Texas—by Stephen J. Leonard, Gonzales-Day, and Carrigan,
respectively—as well as Carrigan and Webb’s work on the lynching of Mexicans in the
Southwest. Much more needs to be learned about lynching violence in the West and the
Midwest. For example, some of the most lynching-prone swaths of the West—Texas and
Montana—still have not received serious, comprehensive scholarly treatment. The Tuskegee Institute tallied 493 lynchings in Texas from 1882 to 1968, ranking the Lone Star
State third among U.S. states (behind Mississippi and Georgia) in the number of victims
of mob violence, yet no scholar has taken on the magnitude and the ethnic and regional
complexity of that violence across Texas; east Texas, among the most lynching-prone areas of the cotton belt, still awaits a lynching historian. Among territories and states in the
Northwest, Montana probably tallied the greatest number of lynching victims, with dozens collectively murdered amid the homicidal social sorting of the mining and ranching
booms from the 1860s through the 1880s, but scholars have yet to examine systematically
Montana’s lynching violence. In the Midwest, the central and southern tiers of counties
of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa—settled by backcountry migrants with origins in
the upper South and the mid-Atlantic typically a generation or two removed from North
Britain—were especially prone to communal violence that sought to avenge allegations
of homicide, sexual offenses, and transgressions of property. Nowhere along the middle
border were lynchers more entrenched than in Indiana, where mobs murdered at least sixty-six between 1858 and 1930, eighteen of them African Americans. The field still lacks
a comprehensive study of lynching in the Hoosier State, much less of mob violence in
other corn belt states such as Illinois or Ohio, where, from the antebellum years through
the mid-twentieth century, lynchers murdered at least forty-five victims (eighteen of them
black) and twenty-eight victims (fourteen of them black), respectively. Even as the field of
lynching history needs more state and local studies of the Midwest and the West, it also
Campbell Robertson, “Before the Battles and the Protests, the Chains: In Montgomery, Ala., a Move to Remember
Slavery Exactly Where It Happened,” New York Times, Dec. 10, 2013, pp. 17–18.
The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship
843
needs scholarship that strongly incorporates the perspective of those targeted by racial
violence, such as African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Scholars of lynching history also need to learn much more about the connection of gender and lynching in
and outside the South, including the masculinist ideology of male lynchers and, as Crystal Feimster has shown, the crucial perspective and experience of women as participants
and victims in mob violence across the United States.13
Even the South, which has received the lion’s share of attention from historians (and
understandably so, as the majority of American lynching probably occurred in Dixie),
merits considerably more labor from lynching scholars. Lacunae include aspects of the
history of the New South—the most well-traversed ground of lynching territory for
scholars. Keeping the experience of the African American community at the fore, scholars ought to research and write studies of lynching in Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee,
and Florida—states with extensive lynching histories that have not yet benefited from
comprehensive study. Given the digitization of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century
newspapers, such work would be much easier today than it was the 1980s and 1990s,
when earlier generations of lynching scholars researched and wrote pivotal state studies
using dusty, flaking hard copies and myopia-inducing microfilm. Historians should also
ask new questions of lynching in the New South. What was the relation of actual lynchings to “near lynchings”—incidents where mobs gathered but dissipated before seizing
and killing a lynching victim? What set of factors—for instance, group dynamics, mob
leadership, aggressive preventative action by the authorities, visible armed self-defense by
African Americans, local patterns of black-white relations—might forestall an attempt
at collective murder or by contrast lead to the enactment of lynching? Moreover, it is essential that scholars probe deeper and earlier into the southern past, abjuring the relative
ease and convenience of research conducted with lists of postbellum lynching incidents
13
For an examination and comparison of nonsouthern lynching and southern lynching, see Pfeifer, ed., Lynching
beyond Dixie. For the view that the West was not especially violent, see Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New
York, 1968). For a characterization of that debate several decades later, see Robert R. Dykstra, “Quantifying the
Wild West: The Problematic Statistics of Frontier Violence,” Western Historical Quarterly, 40 (Sept. 2009), 321–47.
On western bloodshed, but with the assertion that frontier mayhem was overstated, see Eugene Hollon, Frontier
Violence: Another Look (New York, 1978). For the argument that the frontier was violent, but in specific ways, see
Roger D. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier (Berkeley, 1984), 247–60. On
high homicide rates in counties in Nebraska, Colorado, and Arizona, see Clare V. McKanna, Homicide, Race, and
Justice in the American West, 1880–1920 (Tucson, 1997). For an interpretation of the history of homicide across
American regions that looks at broader patterns and regional particularity, see Randolph Roth, American Homicide
(Cambridge, Mass., 2009). Leonard, Lynching in Colorado; Carrigan, Making of a Lynching Culture; Gonzales-Day,
Lynching in the West. On Kansas, see Brent M. S. Campney, “‘Light Is Bursting Upon the World!’: White Supremacy and Racist Violence against Blacks in Reconstruction Kansas,” Western Historical Quarterly, 41 (Summer
2010), 171–94); Brent M. S. Campney, “‘And This in Free Kansas’: Racist Violence, Black and White Resistance,
Geographical Particularity, and the ‘Free State’ Narrative in Kansas, 1865 to 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University,
2007); and Christopher C. Lovett, “A Public Burning: Race, Sex, and the Lynching of Fred Alexander,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, 33 (Summer 2010), 94–115. On mob violence in fin-de-siècle southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas, see Kimberly Harper, White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in
the Southern Ozarks, 1894–1909 (Fayetteville, 2010). On a 1942 lynching in Missouri’s bootheel, see Dominic J.
Capeci, The Lynching of Cleo Wright (Lexington, Ky.,1998). For a case study of mob violence in Indian Territory in
1898, see Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., Seminole Burning: A Story of Racial Vengeance (Jackson, 1996). Zagrando, naacp
Crusade against Lynching, 5. On lynching in northeast Texas, see Brandon Jett, “The Bloody Red River: Lynching
and Racial Violence in Northeast Texas, 1890–1930” (M.A. thesis, Texas State University at San Marcos, 2012). On
vigilantism in Montana in the 1860s, see Frederick Allen, A Decent Orderly Lynching: The Montana Vigilantes (Norman, 2004). For comprehensive state and territory lists of western, midwestern, and northeastern lynchings, see
“Appendix: Lynchings in the Northeast, Midwest, and West,” in Lynching beyond Dixie, ed. Pfeifer, 261–317. For a
recent assessment of midwestern history, see Jon K. Lauck, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History
(Iowa City, 2013). Feimster, Southern Horrors. For an interpretation of women and children in western lynching, see
Helen McLure, “‘Who Dares to Style This Female a Woman?’: Lynching, Gender, and Culture in the NineteenthCentury U.S. West,” in Lynching beyond Dixie, ed. Pfeifer, 21–53.
844
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December 2014
compiled by early twentieth-century antilynching activists and later sociologists and historians. As noted above, George C. Wright found in his work on Kentucky that more
lynchings occurred during Reconstruction than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Beyond his work and that of a few other intrepid historians such as Carrigan,
Williams, Gilles Vandal, and Bruce E. Baker, relatively little is known about lynching
violence in the pivotal years that began with emancipation in the mid-1860s and ended with the return of white conservatives to power across the South by the mid- to late
1870s. Substantial evidence suggests that whites collectively murdered several thousand
African Americans during Reconstruction, sometimes through paramilitary organizations
such as the Ku Klux Klan and sometimes in more routine, everyday enactments of brutal
white supremacy in an era of continual contestation of racial boundaries and prerogatives. Southern historians need to comb difficult sources such as newspapers (alas, southern white newspapers were largely, but not entirely, reticent on white mob violence after
emancipation), coroners’ records, and African American testimony to the Freedmen’s Bureau and congressional hearings to document and tabulate the number of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, white Republicans, who died at the hands of conservative
white southerners in the dozen years after the Civil War. Scholars should also delve back
further into antebellum and colonial southern history to locate the roots of southern mob
violence. I have argued that a small-scale but significant practice of lynching slaves developed in the antebellum years as white southerners cleaved over the role of formal law in
policing African American resistance and deviancy. Needed, however, is much more research on the origins and extent of informal collective violence in slavery, which arguably
served as an essential precursor to the much more extensive collective racial violence that
followed emancipation and the end of slavery.14
The field also still needs a comprehensive database on American lynching and reliable
statistics that could be extrapolated from it. For many years scholars relied on the data
and statistics compiled on lynching incidents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries by the Tuskegee Institute, the naacp, and the Chicago Tribune. While this data
can be quite useful for individual cases and meaningful in aggregate terms, it also incorporates numerous errors—including incorrect dates and locations of incidents as well as
other misreported and misinterpreted information. These lynching lists, which are available on the Internet and are still often cited, are also problematic in the sense that they begin with the era in which the organizations began collecting data—the early 1880s. This
is not, however, when lynching began; the 1860s and 1870s, as noted above, saw many
acts of mob violence directed against African Americans, while the 1850s witnessed numerous mob killings of Mexicans in the newly annexed American territories in the Southwest, most prominently in California. By virtue of how and when they were compiled,
14
On postbellum lynchings of whites in Alabama and other southern states, see John Howard Ratliff, “‘In Hot
Blood’: White-on-White Lynching and the Privileges of Race in the American South, 1889–1910” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Alabama, 2007). Walter Howard, Extralegal Violence in Florida during the 1930s (Cranbury, 1995).
Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 19–60; Carrigan, Making of a Lynching Culture, 112–31; Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post–Civil War Louisiana, 1866–1884 (Columbus, 2000), 90–109; Baker,
This Mob Will Surely Take My Life; Bruce E. Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American
South (Charlottesville, 2007), 84–87; Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me; Thompson, Lynchings in Mississippi,
4–16; Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 81–87. For a recent interpretation of racial violence in the Reconstruction
South, see Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago, 2013). Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 32–46. For data documenting 56 mob executions of slave and free African
Americans in the antebellum South, see “Lynchings of African Americans in the South, 1824–1862,” ibid., 93–99.
For a synthetic treatment of lynching in American history that includes discussion of the colonial and antebellum
eras and slavery, see Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Lanham, 2011).
The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship
845
the traditional lynching lists thus omitted the thousands of African Americans murdered
by mobs in the Reconstruction South and the hundreds of Mexicans and Native Americans lynched in the Southwest, and the lists also effectively imposed an artificial chronology on scholars who used the data. Tolnay and Beck made significant progress in “cleaning up” the data on the postbellum South, verifying reported lynchings (and finding new
ones) in primary sources, but their database of postbellum southern lynching left out the
southern periphery (Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Texas),
in the process omitting hundreds of lynchings. Also still missing are reliable statistics for
lynchings outside the South. The traditional lynching lists included nonsouthern states,
but their information tended to be less reliable for areas outside Dixie. It is imperative
that cliometricians and others interested in the quantitative analysis of U.S. lynching
collaborate to compile a central, accessible database of comprehensive, reliable lynching
data that spans regions and eras and that can be adjusted to incorporate new data—for
example, the thorough research that scholars will, I hope, undertake on Reconstruction
lynching. Until this happens, analysis of American lynching in quantitative terms will remain, at least in part, an exercise in speculation. This egregious gap in knowledge of the
dimensions of American lynching is an injustice to the thousands who died at the hands
of American lynch mobs, and it should be remedied by future scholars who must shirk
the regional and chronological parochialism and the proprietorial attitude toward their
research that has at times contributed to this grossly inadequate situation.15
Finally, from a broader perspective, scholarship on the history of lynching in the United States has until quite recently been largely an exercise in, and an argument for, American exceptionalism—most particularly, the exceptionalism of the American South, with
Jim Crow–era southern lynching viewed ahistorically and parochially as effectively sui
generis. Until the last few years, U.S. lynching historians had done little to analyze the
antecedents for American extralegal collective homicide in early modern Irish and British
cultures, had largely eschewed the role of ethnicity and transnational identities in American lynching, had spent little time looking at international perspectives on U.S. lynching,
and had neglected comparison of American lynching with the analogous practices of illegal collective murder that have occurred across global cultures and eras. This has begun
to change, however. Recent work, including significant collections of essays edited by
Carrigan, Waldrep, Manfred Berg, and Simon Wendt have started to “globalize lynching
history” (in Berg and Wendt’s phrase) with comparative studies of modern lynching in
Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, early modern Europe, and the ancient Near East. Future scholarship ought to energetically continue this trend, focusing
on transnational connections and making informed comparisons that pursue structural
similarities and differences between American lynching and mob violence across world
cultures. Analyses that carefully stress the universality of mob violence across cultures
and eras and the particularity of its occurrence in certain cultural and historical contexts
will situate American lynching in fuller context and provide a more informed basis for
understanding the dynamics of lynching and other forms of collective violence such as
15
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States. On
methodological problems with lynching statistics, particularly for the regions outside the South, and on strategies
for compiling a national inventory, see Lisa D. Cook, “Converging to a National Lynching Database: Recent Developments,” Historical Methods, 45 (April–June 2012), 55–63. On methodological problems involved in the quantification of lynching, see Michael Ayers Trotti, “What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South,”
Journal of American History, 100 (Sept. 2013), 375–400. I do not share Michael Ayers Trotti’s view that methodological challenges, significant as they are, may outweigh the benefits of counting American lynchings.
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December 2014
vigilantism, rioting, and terrorism in the United States and in other global cultures. This
has certainly been the case in a course on global lynching and collective violence that I
teach at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where students typically make rich and
illuminating comparisons of lynching, vigilantism, and rioting in the United States, Latin
America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa.16
Unfortunately, lynching cannot be dismissed as a phenomenon peripheral to U.S. or
global history. To the contrary, mob violence matters to historians of the United States
and other nations as a key index of contested state formation, as a brutal and culturally
powerful collective expression of social values such as honor, race, gender, sexuality, and
class, and of understandings of criminal justice in opposition to or in tension with evolving structures of state authority. The history of state formation, social values, criminal
justice, and developing notions of “rights” in the United States and other societies simply cannot be understood without a grasp of how lynching—and the varied responses
of those communities that have been targeted by lynchers—has punctuated the uneven
pathway of state development, notions of criminal justice, and concepts of civil rights.
Lynching is central, then, to the histories of, among other places, the United States, Latin
America, and a number of sub-Saharan nations. Mob violence should be fully integrated
into those respective histories. Even as scholars continue to deepen their understanding
of the patterns and significance of lynching in particular regions, they must keep in focus
the profound implication of lynching violence for the contested development of notions
of “civil” and “human” rights and the proper role of the state in the United States and
elsewhere.17
16
On British and Irish influences on American lynching and analysis of U.S. mob violence in a global context,
see Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 7–11, 67–81, 88–91. On the Norwegian community’s collective murder of a Norwegian farmer accused of mistreating his family in Trempeleau County, Wisconsin, in 1889, see Jane M. Pederson,
“Gender, Justice, and a Wisconsin Lynching, 1889–1890,” Agricultural History, 67 (Spring 1993), 65–82. For the
argument that participation in lynching violence against African Americans was a way for Irish, Czechs, and Italians
in Brazos County, Texas, to assert “whiteness,” see Cynthia Skove Nevels, Lynching to Belong: Claiming Whiteness
through Racial Violence (College Station, 2007). On lynching and other forms of collective violence in structural
terms across global cultures, see Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control,” Sociological
Forum, 11 (March 1996), 97–128. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism
and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective (New York, 2011); Carrigan and Waldrep, eds., Swift
to Wrath.
17
For the argument that U.S. lynching in the long nineteenth century paralleled prolific lynching violence in
contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa as an important episode in contested state formation, see
Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 88–91. This is not to deny or elide key structural differences in the contexts for mob
violence among these respective cultures. For contrasting interpretations of recent Latin American linchamientos,
see Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, “When ‘Justice’ Is Criminal: Lynchings in Contemporary Latin America,” Theory
and Society, 33 (Dec. 2004), 621–51; and Christopher Krupa, “Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in
Ecuador,” American Ethnologist, 36 (Feb. 2009), 20–39. For a survey of nonstate violence in recent decades across
the varied regions of sub-Saharan Africa, see Bruce E. Baker, Taking the Law into Their Own Hands: Lawless Law
Enforcers in Africa (Aldershot, 2002).