[This is one of the essays in Murphey's book The Dispossession of the American Indian -- and Other Key Issues in American History.   It was also published in Conservative Review, July/August 1995, and is a major excerpt from Murphey's monograph on the same subject.]

 

LYNCHING: HISTORY AND ANALYSIS

            The monograph on which this essay is based resulted from an interest I first developed about fifteen years ago. As part of the preparation for a book on the history of modern liberal thought, I read the volumes of the New Republic from the magazine's inception in late 1914 to early 1985. Until the early 1930s there was an annual editorial telling the number of lynchings in the United States.

            Two things surprised me about the statistics given in the editorials. First, lynching declined year-by-year, virtually disappearing by the end of the 1920s before increasing temporarily in the early 1930s under the impact of the Depression. By the middle of the 1930s the New Republic decided there was no longer occasion for an annual report. Lynching's early demise was contrary to the naive impression, which I had shared with so many, that it had continued until it was beaten back by the Civil Rights movement after World War II. Second, lynching had not been confined to the South and simply to black victims. Certainly all Americans know of the "stringing up of desperadoes" in the West; but I had not put the Southern and Western, and even Northeastern, phenomena together. In common with most Americans, I had thought that lynching was preeminently an act of racial viciousness.

            Until quite recently, I didn't think an essay on the subject would have a place in the series of studies, republished here, that I have been making of episodes in American history for which Americans of the past are today criticized so severely. Knowing that on each subject there has been an abundance of alienated literature, I sought to answer the question of what a careful scholar, conscientious about truth, would say on the subject if he did not approach it with a preconceived animus against mainstream American society. But the phenomenon of lynching seemed so clearly indefensible that it offered only a curious side-show. It was a foregone conclusion that lynching demonstrated a viciousness for which nothing can be considered in exculpation.

            Needless to say, I have not come to a full reversal of that initial impression. Many lynchings were simple hangings, of people who had committed serious crimes and might then be considered to have "gotten what they deserved." But others carried sadism to the outer limits.
What civilized person would remotely want to defend that?

            I won't seek to defend lynching. But I will ask certain questions of it:

            What place does it occupy, when seen in perspective? How does it rank among mankind's enormities? How even does it measure up when compared to the outrages to which lynching was often a response? And in the context of a broader perspective, what does it tell us about Americans of earlier generations?

            Was it unique to American history?

            What caused it to disappear? Were "reform" and the "Civil Rights movement" the reasons for its demise, or were these simply the late-arriving midwives to a deeper historical improvement?

            Was lynching primarily -- or even significantly -- racist? Did it manifest, as so many authors have contended, a desire born out of hysteria and meanness to "keep blacks in their place"? To Americans today, anything but an affirmative answer seems perverse; but how does the conventional answer hold up as against the heavy weight of counter-evidence?

            The space available for this essay won't permit me to explore the other issues that are taken up in the full monograph, which deal primarily with very significant questions about what vigilantism tells us about law and society.

            Before examining the issues just listed, it will be important to review the facts about lynching itself, since the analysis will be based on that historical background.

Lynching before the Civil War.

            There have been a surprising number of men and places named Lynch in the United States, Ireland and England in recent centuries. The word "lynching" has at various times been traced to some punishment inflicted by or at each of them.

            The origin that has gained greatest acceptance centers around Col. Charles Lynch of Bedford County, Virginia, a Quaker and Colonel of Militia. The history that is related is that during the Revolutionary War a good many thieves stole horses and sold them to the British army. The only court for the trial of felonies was two hundred miles away in Williamsburg. In these circumstances, the Colonel's home was by local consensus declared a courthouse. The Colonel served as presiding judge, assisted by three neighbors. The forms of law were followed, and if the accused was convicted he was sentenced "to receive the Law of Moses, which is forty lashes less one, on the bared back." Since most of the thieves were Tories loyal to Britain, a convicted man was made to shout "Liberty forever!" If he refused, he was hung by his thumbs until he complied. After the war, the Virginia legislature ratified all of this, enacting "Lynch's Law" granting Col. Lynch and his associates immunity from prosecution and civil suits.1

            There were other examples of popular, extra-legal justice administered at earlier times under other names. During the colonial period when an informer for the crown was discovered, his fellow townsmen would whip him, tar and feather him, or "ride him out of town on a rail." Someone who inflicted such a punishment was known as "Squire Birch."

            A common practice in New England was for "warners-off" to order a newcomer out of town within five days if his credentials as to "character, religion, goods and other local requirements" didn't appear satisfactory. Summary punishment was applied to a wide variety of offenders: misbehaving Indians, wife-beaters, chronic drunks, sometimes even non-churchgoers and tobacco smokers.2

            The period of the American Revolution was one of great turbulence in most communities. Tar-and-feathering was widely used, and the subject was sometimes put to death.

            A book published in London in the early nineteenth century told of "regulating" in Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky, with bands inflicting punishment. An author of that time wrote that "if a man, whom the public voice has proclaimed a thief or a swindler, escapes justice for want of a legal proof of his guilt, though the law and a jury of his fellow citizens have acquitted him, ten to one he is met with before he can quit the neighborhood, and, tied to a sapling, receives a scourging that marks him for the rest of his life." An author talking about the frontier in Kentucky said that if a second punishment became necessary both the man's ears were cut off.

            In 1834 a crowd in what later became Iowa formed a popular tribunal with a jury of twelve to try a man for murder. After he was convicted, the citizens made arrangements to hang and bury him. One was named acting sheriff, and three others collected money to cover expenses. It was at about that time that President Andrew Jackson gave lynching presidential approval by advising Iowa settlers that it was all right to lynch murderers.

            In 1835 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the townspeople turned against the gamblers who dominated the city. A crowd surrounded a tavern, which in turn led to a shoot-out with the gamblers. After a local doctor was killed in the melee, five of the gamblers were beaten and hung in doorways. Their bodies were left there for twenty-four hours before they were taken down and buried.

            Animosity and conflict increased in the United States during the thirty years preceding the Civil War. Where slavery existed, the punishment of slaves became more frequent and severe, although the cases are said to have been sporadic and isolated.

            In 1849 in the Gila River valley in what is now Arizona a murderer was tried by a popular tribunal consisting of an ad hoc judge and jury and was executed by a firing squad chosen by lot. There will be more about this sort of frontier tribunal in the section on lynching in the West.

            Lynching as execution was already common in Kansas in the 1850s. A New York Tribune correspondent in 1858 wrote that "There is a very general disposition to pass over the helplessly useless forms of Territorial law and corrupt Federal courts, and try these parties (i.e., horse-thieves) by Lynch law." To this were added lynchings that stemmed from the border wars that flared before the Civil War. In November 1860 militant abolitionists in Kansas hung two men and shot another for returning a runaway slave to his owner in Missouri.

After the Civil War: Overall.

            Statistics about lynchings must be taken with caution, since there is little guarantee that an accurate count was made. Most of the published statistics were kept from the early 1880s onward.

            We can at least arrive at a rough impression of magnitude. The 1871-3 figures show 48 people lynched in the South, 17 in the West, and ten in the Northeast (figures that seem quite low in light of the facts we will be reviewing). One author concludes that during the 22-year span between 1882 and 1903 a total of 3,337 people were lynched. During that period, the numbers per year varied between a low of 97 and a high of 235. He observes that there was "a general increase in the lynching of negroes from 1882 to 1892, and a general decline" thereafter. A "general but irregular decline in the lynching of whites" began in 1884, eight years earlier. In the West where mostly whites were lynched, the main provocations were murder and theft; in the South where lynching was mainly of blacks, the most common reasons were murder and rape. As to race, the following comparisons apply: In the South, 567 whites, 1985 blacks, and 33 others; in the West, 523 whites, 34 blacks, and 75 others; in the Northeast, 79 whites, 41 blacks, and no others. In all, there were 1,169 whites, 2,060 blacks, and 108 others put to death. As lynchings continued they became increasingly cruel, with torture and burning more frequent, even though such cases were few in number compared to hanging and shooting. (The cruelty was, of course, not really new; the earlier and contemporaneous cutting off of ears, and floggings with as many as 200 lashes, show that the age didn't shrink from inflicting pain.) It may surprise us that of the total who were lynched, 63 were women, of whom 40 were black and 23 white.

            Robert L. Zangrando cites figures for the period of 1882-1968 in his book The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950.3 The order of magnitude is indicated by his 87-year total of 4,742, of which 1,297 were white and 3,445 black. Of equal significance is the declining numbers shown over the years: prior to 1902, there was only one year (1890) with less than 100; prior to 1923, only one year ((1917) with less than 50; prior to 1932, no years with less than 10. But after a brief increase in 1933, 1934 and 1935, there were always less than ten, and the list dwindles slowly to zero. In effect, lynching ceased to be a major phenomenon by the turn of the century, and had pretty much come to an end by the mid-1930s. If, too, it were seen on a per capita basis in light of total population, the decline would be even more dramatic. (The population of the United States doubled from 30 million in 1860 to 60 million in 1890.) The decline came first in the West and Northeast, and soon thereafter in the South.

            The decline was accompanied by a vast change in public sentiment. Frontier conditions, the backwash of the unspeakable carnage of the Civil War, the savageries of the Indian wars, and the earthiness of a mainly agricultural society all combined in the second half of the nineteenth century to produce an insensitivity to pain and a cheapness of life that is incomprehensible to us in our much more settled and urban civilization. These all eased as time passed.

            Lynching has long-since died out, but recent press reports are reminders that people in various contexts, with varying justifications, express violent collective disapproval. An Associated Press report in 1993 told that a crowd of 25 women and children in Chicago chased a man and beat him to death after he "grabbed a woman's purse in a high-crime neighborhood." A New York Times News Service story told of the attack that was made on Fidel Lopez, an immigrant from Guatemala, during the 1992 Los Angeles riot: "Lopez was dragged from his truck and beaten senseless by a mob...His forehead was slashed under the blows of a stereo speaker. His left ear was nearly severed. His genitals were spray-painted black, and his body was doused with gasoline, apparently for the purpose of setting him afire. A black preacher threw his body upon Lopez's and saved his life." The legal aftermath showed official condonation: the main attacker was convicted only of "misdemeanor assault." It would appear that no statistics are kept on all of this. But they must be kept in mind when we seek to place the historic phenomenon of "lynching" into perspective.

The West both before and after the Civil War

            Lynching was common in the West before the Civil War. The historian Hubert Howe Bancroft devoted two volumes of his work to the West's "popular tribunals." John W. Caughey says that "the frontier avengers commonly punished by whipping. Thirty-nine lashes...were the most favored number, but sometimes they applied 75 or 100 or even 200." He adds that they doubted that a whipping would deter a criminal, and therefore branded him or cut off an ear to make him recognizable. But the punishment was often death, as is apparent when John W. Caughey says that "throughout the diggings [in California] the miners meted out off-the-cuff trial and punishment. In the performance in 1849 that gave Hangtown its name, in the sadistic execution of Juanita in Downieville in 1851, and in a hundred other cases they, as Bancroft put it, left 'the quiet oaks tasselled with the carcasses of the wicked.'"4

            The same description could just as well be applied to Kansas in the 1860s. Caughey quotes from the Kansas Historical Society collections: "In the early days [the old oak bridge over the Neosho River at Council Grove] furnished a convenient scaffold from which to drop those sentenced to death by the court of Judge Lynch, which often held sessions here. The last execution to take place here was during the winter of 1866-67.
Jack McDowell was a noted horsethief and outlaw from Missouri...." An 1870 book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow reports that in Atchison, Kansas, a crowd of almost 2,000 men, women and children watched the trial and hanging of a man who (with a companion who was hung two days later) had terrorized, beaten and robbed a farm family. Frank Shay says that in Idaho "men and women came great distances to witness the executions of five, ten, and even twenty robbers and murderers."

            "Vigilance Committees" were common and were organized to varying degrees. Richard Maxwell Brown reports 19 such movements in Kansas between 1858 and 1889.5 The best known and perhaps largest were the San Francisco Vigilance Committees of 1851 and 1856. The 1856 movement grew in membership to between 6,000 and 8,000 members, and was dominated, Brown says, "by the leading merchants of the city."
Within a three-month period, it hung four and expelled 28 others, breaking the back of the corrupt political machine that had controlled the city. The Committee held a grand parade, disbanded, and turned itself into a political party that governed San Francisco for the next decade. Further south, Los Angeles was a far rougher cowtown, which had figuratively "a murder a day." There, the lynchings "far exceeded" the much tamer actions of the San Francisco committee, according to Caughey. In one instance, the city's mayor resigned his position so that he could head a lynch mob.

            Brown tells us that in 1884 a "vigilante movement of northern and eastern Montana" executed 35, and that between 1880 and 1896 a movement in San Saba county, Texas, lynched 25. He says there were major vigilante movements in Las Vegas, Socorro (New Mexico), Seattle, northern Nebraska, southern Missouri, the Creek Nation (in what is now Oklahoma), New Orleans, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

The South after the Civil War

            Several factors are particularly relevant to understanding the lynching in the South between the end of the Civil War and the virtual disappearance of lynching after 1935:

            1. The South lived through the aftermath of one of history's bloodiest wars. This aftermath took the form of chaos and a low-grade simmering conflict, both because of the devastation and dislocation inherent in a losing military struggle and in the emancipation of a large slave population, and because of the military Reconstruction that imposed hostile rule on the Southern states.

            2. At the same time, much of the South was in a frontier-like economic and social condition. Thomas D. Clark and Albert D. Kirwan cite a startling statistic: "For at least two decades following the Civil War the South was still frontier country...Vast areas of the region's landed domain remained untouched...Only 13 per cent of the entire acreage [was] open to cultivation. Not more than five per cent of this available land was cultivated annually."6 Much of the land was covered by "primitive forests."

            3. War and frontier-like conditions produced a cheapening of life. To understand this dehumanization, it would be necessary to put oneself into the conditions of the time to an extent that is virtually impossible for us today.

            4. The white population, despite its defeat, possessed a fierce spirit made up of several reenforcing elements: of localism; of community; of defiance of (and, later, freedom from) external authority; of a tradition of independence and self-sufficiency; of "honor" as a cultural system calling upon each man to defend himself and his family and community; of quiet despair over defeat and of determination about the imperative to reestablish as quickly and as securely as possible the foundations of civilized order. 5. Of course, we mustn't overlook the fact that the defeated South contained the millions of newly-freed blacks, who at first maintained the habits of discipline that had been inculcated into them during slavery, but who, as time went on and a new generation emerged, began to lose those habits. There was an overflowing of black crime, much of it petty but a great deal of it so serious as to amount almost to a reign of terror. The black leader W. E. B. DuBois spoke of "a class of black criminals, loafers, and ne'er-do-wells who are a menace to their fellows, both black and white." In his book Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940, George C. Wright reports that "when investigating lynchings in the early 1900s, Ray Stannard Baker, an  enlightened progressive,'clearly blamed Afro-Americans for the lynchings resorted to by whites.7

            6. No external authority weighed on the members of local communities. During Reconstruction, the South struggled against the overpowering external authority of the national government; then for many years after that there was no outside pressure from the national government and almost none from state governments, with the result that local communities had almost complete autonomy to act as they wished. Their citizens felt they could act with impunity so long as local sentiment approved. A lynching announced in advance by the newspapers, attended by as many as 20,000 people, participated in by elected officials and in effect ratified by them afterwards both because they agreed with the prevailing opinion and because they wanted to be reelected amounted, really, to the most direct and primitive expression of democracy.

            In the South these factors came together to form a society in extremis, but containing within itself a life-force prepared to defend its right to live. At first, the most obvious collective violence struck at military Reconstruction and black militias. The (first) Ku Klux Klan, led by the "famed Confederate cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest," was organized in direct response to Reconstruction, Clark and Kirwan tell us. "It sought to accomplish its purpose by suppressing Negro militia units and frightening Negroes from support of the radicals."

            There were important episodes that contradict the usual image of southern white-on-black lynching. Vigilante justice was meted out liberally in the Ozarks from 1839 onward without regard to race. Mary Hartman and Elmo Ingenthron have written Bald Knobbers: Vigilantes on the Ozarks Frontier, and say that "it started in 1839 when thirty-six Cane Hill, Arkansas, citizens captured, 'tried,' and lynched four murderers."8
Then after the Civil War "crime and violence exploded." In 1884 the Taney county "Bald Knobbers" (named after the treeless mountain they met on) were formed, with a membership that grew to 1,000. The Bald Knobbers were formed by northern elements, "mostly conservative Republicans and former Unionists." One opponent is quoted as saying that the Bald Knobbers [in Taney county alone] may have killed "more than thirty men and at least four women."

            Another example that contradicts the image occurred in New Orleans. Eleven members of a "Mafia faction of immigrant Italian dock workers," according to Richard Maxwell Brown, were lynched in 1891. They were thought to have murdered the chief of police, but were acquitted by a jury. When the public concluded that the jury had been tampered with, a mass meeting was announced in the newspaper. Some of the suspects were shot while attempting to get away; others were hung "before a throng of thousands." The lynching was participated in by city officials, was supported by all of New Orleans' papers, and had, according to the New York Times, the public's unanimous approval.

The Northeast after the Civil War

            As we've seen, lynching was not exclusively a southern phenomenon, but took place in a much broader context, including lynchings in the northeast. James Elbert Cutler's table shows that between 1882-1903 there were 52 in Indiana, 21 in Ohio, 21 in Illinois, 8 in Michigan, 7 in Pennsylvania, 6 in Wisconsin, 2 in New York, and one each in New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware. Of this total of 120, 79 were of whites, 41 of blacks. Murder or rape was the provocation for almost all of them. Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser's No Crooked Death: Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and the Lynching of Zachariah Walker tells of the lynching on August 13, 1911, in a small steel-mill town in southeastern Pennsylvania.9 The town had undergone rapid change as the steel mills brought in black and immigrant workers. What had been a quiet, peaceful community became frontier-like: "Drunks jeered and made gestures at passersby... Native white residents, angered by the decline in civility and the increase in arrests, violent crime, and property damage, avoided the shopping district...." A family of four had been murdered the preceding September and a non-English-speaking immigrant had been charged with the crime.

            It was in the context of this "siege mentality" that Zachariah Walker, a black who had come to Coatesville from Virginia, got drunk, shot at two immigrant workers, and then shot and killed Edgar Rice, a white security officer for one of the mills. The next day, virtually the entire white community became involved in a manhunt for the killer. After Walker's arrest, a crowd of from 4- to 5,000 people formed, pulled Walker out of a hospital in which he was being treated for injuries, and burned him alive. In the aftermath the lynching was condemned by virtually all media outside the local community, but public opinion in Chester county, where Coatesville is located, supported it. Criminal charges were brought against several of the leaders, but the trials resulted in acquittals.    

                            Issues of perspective

Was lynching unique to American history?

            As part of the Left's hostile cultural critique of American society, it is common to say that the United States "has a history of violence" that explains why our crime rate is higher than in, say, Europe or Japan. But Cutler tells of lynching in nineteenth century Russia: "The Russian law provides only a light punishment for horse-stealing, and, since the peasant's horse is almost his only property and is his chief instrument of labor, summary methods seem necessary in order to check the veritable plague of horse-stealing...When a thief is caught, the common way is for the men of the village to club him to death...Another method is to tie the criminal by the feet to the tail of a young and active colt which is then ridden at a gallop until little is left of the horse-thief. There is also the method of execution whereby the thief is bound hand and foot...and the women of the village thrust needles...[into him] until death ensues." He distinguished the Russian situation from that in the United States by saying that it "is found in the loosely organized society of the peasants in the rural districts." But, of course, that is no distinction at all.

            Although Cutler then argued that "nothing like lynch-law can be said to prevail in Europe," he followed this by saying that "occasionally mobs put persons to death who have committed some brutal and outrageous crime." He cited how a man had recently (in 1902) been lynched in Hungary after he deliberately burned his wife, parents and three sisters to death. "A similar report tells of the lynching of a Bohemian village schoolmaster...." Referring to China, Cutler mentioned the "secret tribunals for thieves and robbers." He pointed back, too, to the Vehmgerichte in feudal Germany, a highly organized series of popular tribunals that "afforded some protection against the outrages of the princes and nobles"; "lynch-law in the United States has never been administered by an organization so perfect and extensive as that of the Vehmic courts."

            Shay provides similar evidence: "Summary justice has been meted to individuals throughout history. There are isolated instances in modern Europe, but these bear the stamp of genuinely spontaneous action on the part of the people who, outraged by his criminality, fell upon the offender and put him to death."

            Today, "popular justice" flourishes in several parts of the world where for one reason or another society is unsettled:

            David Weisburd's 1989 book Jewish Settler Violence: Deviance as Social Reaction tells in sociological terms about vigilantism, in which death is sometimes inflicted, by Jewish settlers in the Gush Emunim settlements on the West Bank.10

            Brazil today makes any part of nineteenth century America look tame. An Associated Press story on August 25, 1991, told how "Brazilians fed up with rampant crime and turnstile justice have turned to vigilantism, forming lynch mobs and killing suspects in record numbers. No exact figures are available, but some officials say more than 500 people will die in lynch-mob executions in 1991, three times more than any previous year [emphasis added]. National attention was focused on lynchings last November 23, when 5,000 residents of Matupa...attacked three prisoners in a police car. The three had just been arrested for trying to rob a rancher's home and holding three women and four children hostage. In the space of two hours, the mob beat the three men with metal rods and rocks, poured gasoline on them and burned them alive...In January, 1,500 people stormed a jail in Andira...and tried to kill two prisoners accused of killing a taxi driver." A press report on December 5,1993, said that in Rio de Janeiro, where "the city has registered more than 3,000 homicides a year since 1989," there was a front-page photo in September 1993 of "a man being burned in a bonfire by residents of the neighborhood after he was identified as the person who had torched a house, killing an infant girl. A tree limb had been inserted into his body."

            Another press report on the same day told how "people's courts" had sprung up among blacks in South Africa prior to the election of Mandela: "In the absence of any legitimate mechanism of law enforcement in the [black] townships, a private culture of street justice and people's courts has evolved...They feel like they are doing something for the community if they kill a criminal figure or a member of an opposition faction."

            An Associated Press story on January 4, 1994, told how "thousands of youths disappeared in Sri Lanka in 1989 and 1990. They were allegedly killed by government-sponsored vigilante groups that crushed a two-year anti-government campaign by Sinhalese nationalists."

            From all of this if would be difficult not to conclude that community-condoned extralegal violence in nineteenth and early twentieth century America was in no way unique. The "good and decent" people of that day were not substantially different from similar people everywhere, who will assert themselves with great energy and even cruelty if sufficiently outraged.

Was lynching essentially, or even significantly, "racist"?

            Countless authors have drummed home a major point about lynching. It is that "southern lynching was a vicious act of racism calculated to 'keep blacks in their place.'" It is only after an extensive historical review of vigilantism that we are prepared to see how mistaken -- in fact, how ideologically warped -- this assessment is.

            From a scholarly point of view, those who write such assertions should feel obligated to support them with evidence and argument. Instead, they have counted on an intuitive connection based on the coexistence of two facts: that the lynching of blacks occurred, and that southern whites were "racist."

            That both of these elements, lynching and racism, existed cannot be doubted. But it is a post hoc fallacy to conclude that southern "racism" was the cause of the lynching of blacks. To assert the connection, it is necessary to argue that "but for the existence of racism, the lynching, or at least a significant part of it, would not have occurred." (This is the "but-for test" that juries are instructed to use to determine causation in tort cases.) To establish this clearly, those asserting the thesis would do well to negate the presence of any other cause sufficient to explain the lynchings. In addition, they need to rebut the many counter-examples that show that southerners often acted in ways that the "racist" hypothesis would not predict. Those things directly contradict the generalization.

            Do the critics of the South do this? One searches the very extensive literature in vain looking for it. The literature is polemical, occasionally scientistic in the context of the social sciences, sometimes even analytical about peripheral issues, but it never questions or seeks to justify its central supposition: that blacks were lynched because of their race.

            There is, of course, a major alternative explanation for the lynching of blacks, and that is the crime that was so widespread and outrageous.Arthur F. Raper, an author who asserts a racial linkage, gives the comparative murder rates: "In 1921-22, the homicide rates in Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans per 100,000 Negro population were 103.2, 97.2, 116.9, and 46.7 respectively, while the corresponding rates for the white population were 15.0, 28.0, 29.6, and 8.4."11 These figures are eloquent testimony that serious crime was the primary provocation for lynching. If those murder rates had existed in the post-Civil War West, the perpetrators, whatever their race, might well have expected to swing from the bridge over the Neosho river.

            The only linkage to racism that is persuasive, albeit only in part, is in the cases where a lynching occurred without an outrageous provoking cause. It seems sensible that if there was no genuine provocation, the lynching must have been caused by the other main potential motivating factor, race prejudice. The weakness in it lies in there having been whites who were also lynched for "minor offenses." If race was the cause, how is that to be explained?

            This doubt is deepened when we take into account all of the counter-evidence that militates against the racism-as-cause explanation. Here is the rebutting evidence I have noticed:

            1. Some may not credit it because it can be taken as a self-serving statement by a white southerner, but to me there is significance in what Henry W. Grady, perhaps the leading exponent of the white South's perspective during the last decades of the nineteenth century, was able to write in Century Magazine in 1884. What he wrote must have rung true to his readers, at least from their perspective, since if it were known to them to be nonsense his article would have had little persuasive value. He was talking about the treatment blacks received in southern courts, but it has a bearing on the nature of the "prejudice" that is said to have animated whites: "There is an abundant belief that the very helplessness of the negro in court has touched the heart and conscience of many a jury, when the facts should have held them impervious. In the city in which this is written a negro, at midnight, on an unfrequented street, murdered a popular young fellow...The only witnesses of the killing were the friends of the murdered boy. Had the murderer been a white man, it is believed he would have been convicted. He was acquitted by the white jury, and has since been convicted of a murderous assault on a person of his own color. Similarly, a young white man, belonging to one of the leading families of the State, was hanged for the murder of a negro."

            2. It is especially worthwhile to notice the last sentence of the quote just given from Grady, which tells that a white man, even one of prominent social standing, was executed for killing a black. This is inconceivable to the proponents of the racial thesis. It also runs counter to a Marxist class analysis.

            3. Southern lynching was not limited to blacks. Whites, and even white women, were lynched, too, obviously not for reasons of racial prejudice. Cutler's statistics show 567 whites lynched in the South between 1882-1903. When other parts of the country are included, Zangrando's statistics indicate 1,297 whites between 1882 and 1968. A famous case of a white man's being lynched is the August 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia after he was convicted of rape-murder. Wright tells how in eastern Kentucky in 1868 nineteen supporters of the Republican Party, apparently all white, were murdered within a four-month period. He says that even though a number of whites were killed for this reason relating to the aftermath of the Civil War, murder was the most frequent provocation. He mentions a white who was lynched for murdering his mother-in-law, another for killing his wife. In 1877 five members of the Simmons gang, all white, were taken from their jail cells and lynched. In the 1880s, several vigilante committees were formed to catch and lynch outlaws. We recall that the Bald Knobbers in southwest Missouri involved white-on-white vigilantism, including lynchings. Richard Maxwell Brown tells of the White Cap movement (another of the many names for vigilantism) that "first appeared in southern Indiana in 1887, but...spread to the four corners of the nation... [W]hite capping was the most prevalent as a sort of spontaneous movement for the moral regulation of the poor whites and ne'er-do-wells of the rural American countryside. Thus, drunken, shiftless whites who often abused their families were typical targets of White Cap violence." This was a movement directed at what in those days respectable society called "white trash." If all of this went on and was not racially motivated, why are we to conclude that blacks were lynched for a totally different reason?

            4. In Tennessee in 1911, according to Shay, four white men "lynched" a black and his two daughters with no known provocation. "Two of the white men were ultimately hanged for their part in the lynching." If indiscriminate anti-black racial brutality had been part of the community ethos, the white men would not have been executed.

            5. Wright says "there were cases of blacks being lynched by whites for the murder of blacks" (emphasis added). This is incongruous if one accepts the racial hypothesis, since according to it whites would have welcomed blacks' murdering of other blacks.

            6. Blacks did some of the lynching themselves, sometimes of other blacks, sometimes of whites. Shay says that "in 1908, at Pine Level, Johnston County, North Carolina, it is recorded that an unnamed Negro entertainer was lynched by Negroes for putting on a poor show." [Notice, too, that the lynching here was for insufficient provocation, which when done by whites is taken as evidence of their racial motivation.] Another case cited by Shay occurred at Caddo Parish, Louisiana, in 1934 when "a thirty-year-old Negro was beaten to death by members of his own race because of an alleged insult offered by [him] to a colored girl...." Most significant is the case in Clarksdale, Tennessee, in 1914, "when Negroes...lynched a white youth for the rape of a Negress. The coroner's jury, believe it or not, brought in a verdict of justifiable homicide and freed the blacks" (emphasis added). Shay's exclamatory "believe it or not" underscores how greatly the white coroner's jury's action contradicts the conventional wisdom. The historian E. Merton Coulter tells how "in Chicot County, Arkansas, in 1872 armed negroes took three white men from jail, riddled them with bullets, and went about burning and pillaging."12 This shows that it wasn't just white mobs that succeeded in getting people from the custody of jailers.

            7. We might surmise that someone propounding the conventional theory that "racism was the cause" would suppose that there would have been more lynching of blacks in Mississippi, considered a notoriously "racist" state, than in Kansas, where at the beginning of the Civil War anti-slavery forces prevailed over the pro-slavery faction. It is surprising, then, that Donald L. Grant tells us that "the number of lynchings per thousand Blacks in Kansas during the 1890s was practically the same as in Mississippi."13

            8. The most important refutation of the racism explanation lies in southern lynching's place as just part of a much larger mosaic of turmoil and popular justice, such as occurred in colonial America, in the entire country before the Civil War, in the West, in the Northeast, and in the world at large whenever society is unsettled. It is extremely arbitrary and selective to consider the lynching of blacks in the South just by itself, dropping the larger context. Seen just by itself, the racial hypothesis seems plausible, which is why readers quite gullibly accept the charge; but seen as part of a larger phenomenon occurring at exactly the same time, it comes to share in the explanations that are appropriate to the phenomenon as a whole.

Did the civil rights movement cause the disappearance of lynching?

            A common feature of modern social legislation has involved another post hoc fallacy. During the very period when an evil is disappearing because of an improvement in the economic level or a change in the condition of society, public campaigns are waged and laws are passed for the evil's abolition. As the evil disappears, the agitation and legislation are assigned the credit. This was true with child labor, the disappearance of which was due to a long-term secular trend away from agriculture and to rising economic well-being. Child labor was praised in the 1830s while it was still necessary, but as families became able to dispense with it, it faded out. In most people's minds the early-twentieth century campaign against child labor, resulting in legal prohibitions, is credited with having eliminated it, but that is almost entirely an illusion. While families still needed their children to work, there was no way to get the state legislatures to abolish it.

            This misunderstanding also occurs about lynching. Zangrando is typical of much writing on the subject when he says "as opposition mounted in the 1920s and 1930s, the number of reported lynchings declined."

            It is much more accurate to say as Raper did in 1933 that "lynchings will ultimately fade from the scene with the general rise in the cultural level." Indeed, it was virtually at the end of doing so when he wrote. Cutler told of the state anti-lynching laws that were passed, and then added that "it is difficult to point out in what way these laws have brought about a decrease... [A] marked decline in the number of lynchings per year began several years before the greater number of anti-lynching laws were enacted."

            Needless to say, the post-World War II Civil Rights movement had nothing to do with the demise of lynching, which had virtually disappeared by the mid-1930s.

How great an enormity was lynching when seen in historical perspective?

            At Coatesville, to Zachariah Walker and to Edgar Rice and his widow and four children, historical perspective was irrelevant. But in a scholarly context it amounts to a distortion of truth not to put lynching into perspective by seeing it in context. Its magnitude needs to be understood in comparison to other historical facts. In terms of the numbers of lives taken, lynching was minor when compared to many of the enormities committed in almost any century, and most especially in the twentieth. Zangrando, we've seen, has given the total as 4,742 people for 1882-1968.  It appears that many lynchings in the West went unreported and that there is probably a major undercounting for the South for the decade right after the Civil War. Entirely arbitrarily, solely for the purpose of gaining perspective, let us multiply that number by more than five to make the total 25,000 over the 70 years between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the dying-out of lynching in 1935. Let us then consider the fact that most of the killings were a local community's direct response to a monstrous act of murder, rape, or other spoliation first committed by the person lynched. In the moral balance, the provoking crime by the person lynched must surely have an off-setting weight of some sort. If this is taken into account, the total takes on a considerably diminished significance. If we had a way to remember the victims of those who were lynched and to gauge their suffering, we might even find that the balance was not adequately redressed by the punishments that were inflicted, although this can hardly be true where lynching was by burning and torture.

            Compare the resulting diminished number, whatever the reader concludes it to be, with the press reports of June 1, 1994, that 20,000 bodies were found in a single convent in Rwanda, hacked to death in the reciprocal genocides being committed in that country. Or compare it to the 10- to 15,000 Polish officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest. We know that Stalin cut off the food supplies to the Ukraine and other places in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1932-33, starving an estimated seven to nine million people to death in a deliberate act of state policy. And Public Television belatedly tells us of a hitherto unknown 30,000,000 (30 million!) Chinese who were starved to death, again as a matter of state policy, under Mao in the early 1960s. These events have hardly received a ripple of attention from a world distracted by its on-going concerns; and, perhaps more significantly, academia has devoted almost no attention to them. Today's American society sometimes takes a partisan position in favor of things just as heinous. For years, the United States and the world at large supported the African National Congress (ANC) in its drive for power in South Africa, while fully informed that burning people alive through "necklacing" was a deliberate ANC policy. Newsweek on June 2, 1986, told among other things of a 62-year-old woman, Mary Skhosana, who screamed for mercy while she was forced to drink gasoline and was burned to death with a gas-filled tire around her neck. We should consider these things as we seek to assess the weight to give to lynching in comparison to other enormities in world history.

            Part of our revulsion comes from the supposition, which is presumptively justified in light of the absence of legal proof of the provoking crimes, that at least some innocent people were lynched. If some were, they were true victims. But if we seek perspective we will realize that their agony does not count more than the agony of the victims of the thousands of individually committed murders that occur every year, or than that of the tens of thousands of highway victims killed by drunk drivers, about which we have almost no concern.

            Another reason for revulsion is that lynching flies so apparently in the face of established legal process. To the extent it undermines the ideals of law and of due process, lynching undermines one of the fundamentals of civilization. That is primarily what makes lynching so great a blot on a society that professes high ideals and that has in fact served as a beacon to the world.

            When the monograph from which this essay is abstracted discusses the relationship of lynching and law to justice, however, it observes that there is much more to it. Lynching's flaunting of law and justice was far less than is usually assumed; and the commitment to justice by established legal institutions often departs greatly from the ideal. Instead of two poles with lynching at one end and legal institutions at the other, there is a complex continuum. Legal institutions must themselves be scrutinized on an on-going basis to see whether they even roughly approximate the ideal. Such an understanding won't vindicate lynching, but it will again help put lynching into perspective.  
 

                                    ENDNOTES

The references included here are to the source-books as a whole. Detailed page references can be found in the monograph from which this essay is abstracted.

1. James Elbert Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969).

2. Frank Shay, Judge Lynch: His First Hundred Years (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1938; reprint in 1969).

3. Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).

4. John W. Caughey, Their Majesties the Mob (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

5. Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).

6. Thomas D. Clark and Albert D. Kirwan, The South Since Appomattox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

7. George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky 1865-1940 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

8. Mary Hartman and Elmo Ingenthron, Bald Knobbers: Vigilantes on the Ozarks Frontier (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1988).

9. Dennis B. Downey and Raymond M. Hyser, No Crooked Death (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

10. David Weisburd, Jewish Settler Violence: Deviance as Social Reaction (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).

11. Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1933).

12. E. Merton Coulter, A History of the South: Vol. III, The South During Reconstruction 1865-1877 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1947).

13. Donald L. Grant, The Anti-Lynching Movement: 1883-1932 (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1975).

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