The Multiple States and Fields of
Lynching Scholarship
Michael Ayers Trotti
A stereotype of a lynching can be evoked with eight words and two commas: a mob, a
noose, a swinging body defiled. But there were so many differing sorts of lynchings, so
many disparate contexts (place and era) and wider impacts, and so many divergent ways
of studying this varied violence that it is quite challenging to articulate the range of
scholarship connected to the history of lynching.
Michael J. Pfeifer’s review of the field is therefore all the more impressive, succinctly addressing multiple trends in this work from the last generation. His essay will be invaluable to
scholars and students orienting themselves to lynching and will help researchers working on
racial violence better contextualize their work. I particularly laud his emphasis on the various
ways scholars study racial violence—through its cultural impact, for example, or in studies of
victims—for that is perhaps the most notable way in the last decade that the scholarship has
broadened the understanding of the place and meaning of racial violence in U.S. history.1
Pfeifer ends his essay with a look ahead, calling for increased attention to the legacies of
lynching in the victims’ communities as well as for three ways of expanding the study of lynching: earlier in time for the South; more study of lynching outside of the South (including the
development of a national database of lynchings); and more comparative, international studies
of mob violence. I offer a few comments on this forward-looking vision of the field.
More national studies of lynching can be helpful, but regional studies should also be
promoted. While it is all too true that scholars can be parochial, it is also true that national-scale studies can elide meaningful differences between regions, blurring distinctions
that are worth pursuing. In particular, I find much less explanatory power than does Pfeifer in arguments explaining the variability of lynching across the nation due to the regionally variable strength of due process forces in conflict with traditions of rough justice.2
Regions differed in a variety of ways, and this focus on state formation and the growing
and contested power of law obscures, to my thinking, how the West had quite a different lynching regime than the South did in chronology, in targets, and in justifications for
the violence. The field should continue to promote local and regional studies of lynching.
Michael Ayers Trotti is a professor of history at Ithaca College.
Readers may contact Trotti at [email protected].
1
Michael J. Pfeifer, “At the Hands of Parties Unknown? The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship,” Journal
of American History, 101 (Dec. 2014), 832–46.
2
Ibid., 834–35. Michael J. Pfeifer’s resolution of the conflict between rough justice and middle-class due process—the
evolution of capital punishment into an efficient and racialized punishment regime that displaced lynching—is especially
problematic. Capital punishment was already prominent and racialized throughout the nineteenth century. See Michael Ayers
Trotti, “The Scaffold’s Revival: Race and Public Execution in the South,” Journal of Social History, 45 (Fall 2011), 195–224.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau677
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The Journal of American History
December 2014
Multiple States and Fields of Lynching Scholarship
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Pfeifer proposes expanding the study of lynching, but this effort faces several challenges. The nature of newspapers—a key source for lynching study—changes throughout the
nineteenth century, and even in the late nineteenth century lynching lists diverge. In the
antebellum era and before, when papers were more uniformly partisan and elite-oriented
and when so many papers were weeklies rather than dailies, a lynching would certainly
be more difficult to find, for anything we might consider to be “news” is harder to find.
Digitization will make some newspapers, at least, more accessible to study; the process
may, however, produce a geographical skew, as not all newspapers will be so readily accessible. In addition, digitization does not solve the problems of source interpretation. Have
scholars, as Pfeifer avers, not done all the work that is required to have “reliable statistics”
of lynching, or are there substantial challenges to any attempt to enumerate lynching, as
I have argued elsewhere? We should continue to refine and elaborate upon lynching lists,
of course, but with the knowledge that some of their challenges are intractable.3
The most promising avenues for future work take off from Pfeifer’s apt characterizations of the
differing ways scholars study lynching, an expansion that has added new facets to the scholarship.
It is important to note how these studies are asking divergent questions of the past and focus,
therefore, on different sources and populations: lynching is a part of the history of whites (those
who lynch most, the causes of lynching) and of minorities (those so often lynched, the effects felt
disproportionately in their communities), and it has multiple effects upon the wider culture (the
stories, explanations, defenses, and attacks on lynching). Historians ask many different questions
of the past, and lynching is implicated in many different historical moments, populations, and
sorts of historical study, as Pfeifer’s review of the literature emphasizes. He calls for more study
(and I agree) of the legacies of lynching. I would add that the cultural and intellectual histories
of lynching—the study of how acts of violence were invested with meaning, how societies made
sense of such barbarity—will also continue to be key.4
Also essential will be one expansion of the scholarship that Pfeifer does not mention.
If terror was a goal for lynchers in the West and the South, then investigations into other
forms of violence that fostered racial terror will be vital, particularly when those acts were
protected by law and society (as lynchings were). White murders of minorities in the West
and the South (so often punished lightly or not at all—a measure of society’s collective complaisance with violence against minorities that is not far removed from lynching) as well as
the use of public and private capital punishment to impose the power of the state, are particularly important tools in the hands of majorities, and they need to be more prominent
in conversations about racial violence and lynching.5 Pfeifer warns historians of lynching
to avoid parochialism in creating regional histories; scholars should be equally wary of the
parochialism that separates the study of one form of terror-inspiring violence from another.
The multisided scholarship of lynching is continuing to evolve, and Pfeifer has offered a useful essay that evaluates the current state of the field and points toward ways to deepen that study.
3
On the changing nature of news and newspapers in the nineteenth century, see Michael Schudson, Discovering
the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York, 1978); David Mindich, Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define American Journalism (New York, 1998); and Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison, 1989). Pfeifer, “At the Hands of Parties Unknown?,” 844. On the many challenges
to counting lynchings, see Michael Ayers Trotti, “What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South,”
Journal of American History, 100 (Sept. 2013), 375–81. On the divergence of current lynching lists, see ibid., 381–87.
4
For Pfeifer’s review of this diversity in the lynching literature, see Pfeifer, “At the Hands of Parties Unkown?,”
838–40.
5
Works that explore the connections between lynching and other forms of terror-inspiring violence include
Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); John Hammond Moore, Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Columbia, S.C., 2006); Trotti, “Scaffold’s Revival”; and
Margaret Vandiver, Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (New Brunswick, 2005).