Lynching

By: Kate Tuttle

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Lynching

Mob execution, usually by hanging and often accompanied by torture, of alleged criminals, particularly African Americans.

Apart from slavery, lynching is perhaps the most horrific chapter in the history of African Americans. Although lynching, defined as execution without the due process of law, has been used against members of many ethnicities, the vast majority of victims have been African American men, mostly in the Southern states, during a fifty-year period following Reconstruction. Despite its stated justification—that lynching is merely a response to crime—in most cases victims had not been convicted of, or even charged with, a specific crime. As historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage has noted, lynching was not only “a tragic symbol of race relations in the American South” but also “a powerful tool of intimidation.” A constant and unpredictable threat, lynching was used to maintain the status quo of white superiority long after any legal distinction between the races remained.

Because of its unpredictability and extra-legal nature—black men knew that they could become victims at any time, for any reason—lynching cast a shadow greater than its 3,386 known black (mostly male) victims between 1882 and 1930. It is almost certain that these numbers are understated. Despite groundbreaking research into lynching by historians and sociologists, many cases were never recorded. Even those that were well documented rarely reveal the names of the perpetrators; as scholar Robert Zangrando points out, coroner's reports typically attributed the murder to “parties unknown,” even though “lynchers' identities were seldom a secret.”

This flag flew from the NAACP headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City whenever a lynching occurred.

Library of Congress

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More than an epidemic of racially targeted violence, however, lynching has become a symbol of the most disheartening aspects of American race relations. For many African Americans, there is no more potent reminder of their history of slavery, subjugation, and pain at the hands of white society. In music—most notably Jazz singer Billie Holiday's “Strange Fruit”—literature, and painting, black artists have explored this brutal and complex crime. As many scholars have pointed out, lynching was directed not only at a particular victim, but at all black people.

History of Lynching

Lynching has its roots in the lawless early days of pre-Revolutionary America. Lacking an established system of courts, jails, and legal rights, mobs often attempted to maintain social order by executing alleged criminals. From its beginning, though, lynching was also a means of controlling people deemed marginal by society's mainstream. Although slaves were often beaten, whipped, and sometimes killed by white slaveholders, systematic violence against African Americans in the form of lynching was not prevalent before the Civil War (1861–1865) and Emancipation.

In the five years that followed the Civil War, a series of constitutional amendments conferred several rights upon African Americans: freedom from slavery, legal recognition as U.S. citizens, and, for men, the right to vote. At this time Reconstruction—primarily an effort to reunite the country—began, and the federal government, dominated by Northern Republicans, maintained a presence in the South and established agencies to oversee the transition from slavery to freedom. But after their emancipation, blacks faced a threat of social violence. With white supremacy challenged throughout the South, many whites sought to protect their former status by threatening African Americans who exercised their new rights. Southern blacks, particularly political and religious leaders, became the targets of white violence. But as Republican resolve weakened, Reconstruction waned, and white Southern Democrats were able to engineer limits on state and federal rights for African Americans.

Incidents of lynching increased as Reconstruction faltered. Although good statistics on lynching were not kept before 1882, historians believe that the numbers grew throughout the 1870s and 1880s, peaking around 1892, which saw 230 victims, 161 of them African American. From that year on, white victims of mob execution sharply and steadily decreased, while blacks in the South continued to be lynched in large numbers (for instance, in 1900, 106 African Americans were lynched, compared to nine whites). From its frontier roots, when it took the place of legal law enforcement, lynching became almost entirely a Southern, racial phenomenon—in which, as historians have pointed out, mob execution was really about social control, not crime control.

With the rise in racially motivated mob execution, an Antilynching Movement was born. Its foremost voice was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an African American who in the early 1890s published several influential pamphlets detailing the horrors of lynching. Her statement that many of the alleged rapes that led to lynchings were actually consensual interracial encounters caused Wells-Barnett to be vilified by Southern whites, and she was forced to flee her home city of Memphis under threat of lynching. In addition, many of her potential supporters, middle-class black clubwomen, saw Wells-Barnett's bold and passionate rhetoric as unfeminine and supported her cautiously.

In 1909, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded, an end to lynching was named as one of the organization's top priorities from the start. In 1917 the NAACP staged the Negro Silent Protest Parade in New York City to criticize the federal government's lack of commitment to ending lynching. The Dyer Bill, which would have made participating in a lynch mob a federal crime, was first introduced in 1918 by Leonidas Dyer, a white Republican congressman from Missouri. Over the next ten years, the NAACP, led by James Weldon Johnson and Walter White, lobbied heavily for its passage, which was repeatedly blocked by Southern Democrats in the Senate. Despite its legislative failure, the Dyer Bill debate allowed the NAACP to educate the white American public about the amount and severity of racial violence that was going unpunished.

The number of lynchings began to decrease in the twentieth century, especially during the 1920s; by the late 1930s, the annual victim count was in the single digits. Although some African Americans were still lynched in the following decades, lynching was more or less ended by 1965. Historians have different explanations for the decline in lynching, among them increased public awareness, national pressure on the South, and the growing exodus of African Americans from the region in the Great Migration of the 1930s and 1940s.

Significance of Lynching

Starting in 1882, scholars at the Tuskegee Institute began collecting data on lynching, including documenting every known case of mob execution. Because of the availability of this detailed information, sociologists and historians have been able to study the phenomenon of lynching, and to try to understand this most extreme form of racial violence.

Early theories about lynching emphasized the economic and political threats that African Americans posed to the superior status of poor whites in the period following the Civil War. Historians such as Arthur Raper suggested that lynch mobs were made up of marginalized white men who murdered black men out of fear and frustration. Most historians today recognize that lynchers were, in fact, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage says, not “isolated deviants” but instead “representative … members of society.” In the collected testimony of some Southern sheriffs, jailers, and lawyers—typically the people most likely to be in a position to prevent lynching—several mention that they would release the prisoner to the mob after noticing several of the town's leading citizens among it.

Some historians have proposed a new interpretation of lynching, seeing it as a political and economic tool. Marxist historians have suggested, for instance, that rich white businessmen supported lynching, as it helped cement the racial hatred that could work to their advantage. Such scholars reasoned that without racism to divide poor blacks and whites from each other, workers on both sides of the color line could unite against their capitalist oppressors.

Although some scholarship, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focused exclusively on lynching as an economic and political event, many historians now also consider social and psychological factors in mob executions. Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, who has written about the antilynching movement, argues that lynching was intimately linked to white men's fears about black men's sexuality. While interracial sex was a staple of the prewar South (slaveholders regularly raped their female slaves), it was part of the white South's code of honor that white women must be protected from the supposed threat of black men. So, while less than 30 percent of the black lynching victims had even been accused of sexually assaulting white women, defenders of lynching continued to claim that the practice was necessary to prevent rape.

Lynching's basis in the sexual fears of white society would account, more than cotton prices or other economic reasons, for the extreme brutality with which many lynchings were carried out. It was not uncommon for lynching victims to be castrated. Many were burned alive. Other common tortures were to have their eyes gouged out, their fingers severed, or their teeth pulled out—with the white lynch mob taking home various body parts as souvenirs.

As antilynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett pointed out, the emphasis on rape as a justification for lynching only served to reinforce racist stereotypes of black men as sexual predators and to put them “beyond the pale of human sympathy.” The sexual excuse for lynching helped perpetuate both the racial and gender inequalities in American society. Lynching reflected a value system that put white men at the top of a hierarchy, above both the white women lynching was said to protect and the black men it was meant to intimidate. In this system, black women's humanity was ignored—although their vulnerability to sexual assault by white men continued to remind black men that they could not protect their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Historian Patricia Schechter says of Wells-Barnett's work that it proves that lynching was “both about sex and not about sex.” That is, most lynchings were not directly the result of rape accusations, but all of them served to remind both whites and blacks, men and women, where they stood in Southern society.

Legacy of Lynching

Despite the end of lynching, African Americans continued to suffer from inferior legal status. Subject to discriminatory segregation under the South's Jim Crow laws, blacks were unable to choose freely where to work, live, eat, or go to school. Until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, most Southern African Americans could not exercise their constitutional right to vote. If they no longer faced the threat of death at a hangman's noose, they were still vulnerable to being beaten, fired from their jobs, or arrested for whatever infractions a white person accused them of.

Increasingly, the criminal justice system—which had been, in lynching days, an accused man's one hope for safety—began to seem another arena of unfairness. Still treated as second-class citizens, black men were often tried, convicted, and executed on shaky charges. Only a strong defense and nationwide publicity saved the defendants in the Scottsboro Case—young black men who had been accused of having sex with white women—from such a lynching-like fate. Many scholars have called this sort of unequal application of the death penalty “legal lynching.”

See also Black Women's Club Movement; Fifteenth Amendment; Miscegenation; Racial Stereotypes.

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