Lynching, in the United States, has influenced and been influenced by the major social conflicts in the country, revolving around the American frontier, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement. Originally, lynching meant any extra-judicial punishment, including tarring and feathering and running out of town, but during the 19th century in the United States, it began to be used to refer specifically to murder, usually by hanging.
On the American frontier, where the power of the police and the army was tenuous, lynching was seen by some as a positive alternative to complete lawlessness. In the Reconstruction-era South, lynching of blacks was used, especially by the first Ku Klux Klan, as a tool for reversing the social changes brought on by Federal occupation. This type of racially motivated lynching continued in the Jim Crow era as a way of enforcing subservience and preventing economic competition, and into the twentieth century as a method of resisting the civil rights movement.
More recently, lynching has come to have a contemporary informal use as a label for social vilification, particularly in the media, and particularly of African-Americans.
Early history
Lynching began with vigilance committees which formed to keep order during the Revolutionary War. Lynching was named either for Colonel Charles Lynch, who practiced lynching circa 1782 to deal with Tories and criminal elements, or more likely for Captain William Lynch (1742-1820) of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, who practiced lynching circa 1780. The use of lynching as a method to maintain the social order was referred to as lynch law; at this time lynchings as executions were rare. After the war, as the nation expanded so did the practice of lynching, and lynching gradually became more brutal.
Lynching on the frontier
In the period before the Civil War, lynching as ad hoc law-enforcement spread west along with the American frontier. Particularly in unorganized territories or sparsely-settled states, security was often provided by a federal marshal who might, despite the appointment of deputies, be hours or even days away by horse. As the frontier closed, local law enforcement improved, and lynching of common criminals declined. The widespread use of capital punishment by hanging gradually became associated with the word lynching (helped by the wordplay on linch). Lynching in the American Old West often referred to a legally-sanctioned hanging. Many of the other characteristics were also present, such as mob action in the sanctioned form of a posse, and public attendance.
Race-related lynching
There were two periods of heavy lynching in the southern United States. These took place between 1868 and 1871, and again in 1888 until the Second World War.
1868 to 1888
After the Civil War, lynching became particularly associated with the killing of African Americans in the southern United States. There, it can be seen as a latter-day expression of the slave patrols, the bands of poor whites who policed the slaves and pursued escapees. The first major series of lynching was essentially a purge of black and white Republicans by white Democrats. Whites had decided to prevent the ratification of new constitutions by preventing people from voting. Failed attempts at terrorization led to a massacre during the 1868 elections, when the Ku Klux Klan systematically murdered around 1000 voters across various southern states ranging from South Carolina to Arkansas. The Klan sometimes used murder in its lynchings, but sometimes whipped its victims, to remind them of their former status as slaves.[1] After years of terror by the Klan, President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress passed the Anti KKK Act of 1871. This permitted authorities to use martial law in places like South Carolina, where the Klan was the strongest. At about this time the Klan dissipated, but the US would see a reemergence in the early 20th century.
1888-1941
The second major period of lynching in the South took place after 1888. Congress housed many southern Republicans who sought to protect black voting rights by using federal troops. Because of this, there was a rush of political power pushed to the racist members of government. This time instead of targeting both blacks and whites, it was strictly blacks who were targeted and the lynching became very public. Another reaction against Reconstruction was the creation of the Jim Crow laws beginning in the 1890's, and lynching was used to enforce both these formal laws and a variety of unwritten rules of conduct meant to assert white domination. This period drew to a close in the early 1940’s with the rise of both black and white enlistment in the military and the early stages of the civil rights movement.
Social characteristics
There were often two motives for lynchings in the United States. The first was the social aspect--righting some social wrong or perceived social wrong (such as a violation of Jim Crow etiquette). The second was the economic aspect. For example, upon successful lynching of a black farmer or immigrant merchant, the land would be available and the market opened for white Americans. A black journalist, Ida B. Wells, discovered in the 1890s that black lynch victims were accused of rape or attempted rape only about one-third of the time. The most prevalent accusation was murder or attempted murder, followed by a list of infractions that included verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition and independence of mind.[2]
Lynch mobs enforced the racist social order through beatings, cutting off fingers, burning down houses, and/or destroying the crops of African-Americans. Murder was a common form of lynch mob "justice", sometimes with the complicity of law-enforcement authorities who participated directly or held victims in jail until a mob formed to carry out the murder. Hanging was the most common form of lynching but some victims were beaten, burned, stabbed, shot, or slowly tortured to death.
Most often, victims were lynched by a small group of white vigilantes late at night. Sometimes, however, lynchings became mass spectacles with a circus atmosphere. A large lynching might be announced beforehand in the newspaper, and there were cases in which a lynching was started early so that a newspaper reporter could make his deadline. It was common for postcards to be sold depicting lynchings, typically allowing a newpaper photographer to make some extra money. These postcards became popular enough to be an embarrassment to the government, and the postmaster officially banned them in 1908. However, the lynching postcards continued to exist through the 1930's.
Less than 1% of the lynch mob participants were ever convicted. Many lynchings were carried out with the tacit approval of the police, and even in the rare cases in which the murderers were tried, they were often acquitted by all-white juries in the southeastern United States. For example, the trial for the murder of Emmett Till resulted in an acquittal, with the jurors reporting than they had taken a "soda break" in order to stretch their deliberations to over an hour.
More than 85% of the estimated 5000 lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred in the southern US states but the problem was nationwide, peaking in 1892 when 161 African-Americans were lynched.
Not all lynching victims were African Americans. The 1915 murder of factory manager Leo Frank, an American Jew, was one of the more notorious lynchings of a non-African-American. Frank was convicted of murder after a questionable trial in Georgia (the judge asked that Frank and his counsel not be present when the verdict was announced due to the violent mob of people in the court house). His appeals failed (Supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented, condemning the intimidation of the jury as failing to provide due process of law). The governor then commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, and he was murdered. The incident focused attention on the problem of anti-semitism in the United States and reflected the Ku Klux Klan's revival with a pronounced anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant stance.
Not all racially motivated lynchings in the United States took place in the South. One such incident occurred in Duluth, Minnesota on June 15, 1920, when three young African-American travelers were dragged from their jail cells (where they were confined after being accused of raping a white woman) and lynched by a mob believed to number more than one thousand. The event became the subject of a non-fiction book, The Lynchings in Duluth, published in 2000, by Michael Fedo.
Anti-lynching movement
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a black journalist, was shocked when three of her friends in Memphis, Tennessee were lynched for opening a grocery that competed with a white-owned store. Outraged, Wells-Barnett began a global anti-lynching campaign that raised awareness of the American injustice. By the 1930s, the rate of lynchings was reduced to ten per year in southern US states.
With the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932, anti-lynching advocates such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter Francis White who had campaigned for Roosevelt were hoping for progress toward ending lynching. Senators Robert F. Wagner and Edward P. Costigan drafted a bill (the Costigan-Wagner bill) to require local authorities to protect prisoners from lynch mobs. A lynching in Miami, Florida affected the political atmosphere of the bill. On July 19, 1935, Rubin Stacy, a homeless African-American farmer, went knocking on doors begging for food. Frightened, Marion Jones complained to the authorities. Six Dade county deputies were bringing Stacy to jail when he was killed by a lynch mob. Because Stacy's original actions were so innocuous, lynching opponents considered Stacy's murder an egregious example. Nevertheless, Roosevelt did not support the bill, believing that it would cost him the votes of Southern whites, and thus the 1936 election. In 1939, Roosevelt did create the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department, which made efforts to combat lynching, but failed to win any convictions until 1946.[3]
1941-present
In 1946, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department gained its first successful prosecution against a lyncher. Florida constable Tom Crews was sentenced to a $1000 fine and a year in prison for civil rights violations in the killing of a black farm worker.
In 1946, a mob of white men shot and killed two young black men and two young black women near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia. The savagery of this lynching shocked the nation, and was a key factor that led President Truman to make civil rights a top priority.[4] In 1947, the Truman administration published a report titled "To Secure These Rights," which advocated, among other civil rights reforms, making lynching a federal crime. In the period after World War II, with the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet Union made effective use of the existence of lynching in the U.S. as propaganda, and it began to be seen as an embarrassment to the U.S., which was now becoming a global power. A group led by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Patterson made a presentation to the United Nations titled "We Charge Genocide." Because of the Soviet exploitation of lynching for propaganda purposes, there was a tendency in right-wing government circles to portray anti-lynching activists as communist sympathizers. Paul Robeson, in a tense meeting with Truman in 1946, urged him to take action against lynching, and began to be attacked in the press as a communist. Even Albert Einstein was branded a communist sympathizer by the FBI, because of his membership in such "communist-front" organizations as the American Crusade Against Lynching.[5]
By the Fifties, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum. A case that sparked public outrage was that of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan who was spending the summer with relatives in the South, and was mutilated and killed for allegedly having whistled at a white woman.
In 1964, three civil rights workers were lynched by white racists in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner (24), Andrew Goodman (20) of New York, and James Chaney (22) from Meridian, Mississippi, members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), were dedicated to non-violent direct action against racial discrimination. They disappeared in June of that year while investigating the arson of a black church being used as a "Freedom School". Their bodies were found six weeks later in a partially constructed dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. In 2005, 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter for the killings.
Although lynchings became much more rare in the era following the civil rights movement, they do still occur sometimes. In 1981, KKK members randomly picked out a nineteen-year-old black man, Michael Donald, and murdered him in retaliation for a jury's acquittal of a black man accused of murdering a police officer. The Klansmen were eventually caught, prosecuted, and convicted, and a seven million dollar judgment in a subsequent civil suit bankrupted a subgroup of the Klan, the United Klans of America.[6]
On June 13, 2005, the United States Senate formally apologized for its failure in previous decades to enact a federal anti-lynching law, all of which fell victim to filibusters by powerful Southern senators. Prior to the vote, Senator Mary Landrieu noted, "There may be no other injustince in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility." [7] The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 senators cosponsoring, causing some to point out that the remaining 20 did not have to take a position on the matter through either cosponsorship or a recorded vote in favor or against.
The resolution expresses "the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States."
Popular culture
Famous fictional treatments
In The Virginian, a seminal novel that helped helped to create the genre of Western novels in the U.S., the protagonist participates in the lynching of an admitted cattle thief, who had been his close friend, during the Johnson County War. The lynching is represented as a necessary response to the government's corruption and lack of action, but the protagonist feels it to be a horrible duty. He is especially stricken by the bravery with which the thief faces his fate, and the heavy burden it places on his heart forms the emotional core of the story.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson, a black man wrongfully accused of rape, narrowly escapes lynching because of his lawyer's bravery, and the disarmingly innocent behavior of the lawyer's daughter. The lawyer tells his daughter that he isn't angry at the mob, because once the feeling of mob violence gets into people, they don't act normally. Robinson is later killed trying escape from jail, after having been wrongfully convicted.
In Fury, German expatriate Fritz Lang depicts a lynch mob hanging innocent men, apparently modeled on a 1933 lynching in San Jose, California that was captured on newsreel footage and in which Governor of California James Rolph refused to intervene.
In The Ox-Bow Incident, two drifters are drawn into a posse formed to find the murderer of a local man, and suspicion centers on three innocent cattle rustlers who are then lynched, deeply affecting the drifters. The novel was filmed in 1943 as a wartime defense of American values versus the characterization of Nazi Germany as mob rule.
"Strange Fruit"
Among artistic works referring to lynching is the Billie Holiday song "Strange Fruit", written by Abel Meeropol in 1939:
- Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the roots. 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.
The stark, disturbing lyrics were rejected by Holiday's label, but she recorded it independently; the song became an anthem for the anti-lynching movement which joined the groundswell of the American civil rights movement. A documentary, also titled Strange Fruit, has aired on U.S. television.
The song has been performed by other artists, including Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson. It was also remixed by the British artist Tricky.
Clarence Thomas
The word lynching returned to popular culture with the nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas, an African-American government attorney nominated by the Republican President George H.W. Bush and supported by Republican Senators. His nomination received heavy criticism from Democratic Senators on the Judiciary Committee, and in particular allegations of sexual harassment of a female subordinate, Anita Hill, while he was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Frustrated with the detailed and embarrassing questioning, Thomas appeared before the committee and shot back a prepared statement:
- Mr. Chairman, I am a victim of this process and my name has been harmed, my integrity has been harmed, my character has been harmed, my family has been harmed, my friends have been harmed. There is nothing this committee, this body or this country can do to give me my good name back, nothing. I will not provide the rope for my own lynching or for further humiliation.
The phrase was repeated later that same day:
- There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kow-tow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.
Democrats viewed this as a calculated tactic to make them appear racist for opposing him, but Republicans defended Thomas vigorously. Thomas went on to successful confirmation, and the phrase high-tech lynching is still heard in this context.
See also
External links
Further reading
- Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Notes
References
- Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, New York: Random House, 2002.
- Wexler, Laura. Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America, New York: Scribner, 2003.
- An account of the 1946 Moore's Ford Bridge lynchings.