Lynching

American Mob Murder in Global Perspective

Robert W. Thurston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409409083
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317102960
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Addressing one of the most controversial and emotive issues of American history, this book presents a thorough reexamination of the background, dynamics, and decline of American lynching. It argues that collective homicide in the US can only be partly understood through a discussion of the unsettled southern political situation after 1865, but must also be seen in the context of a global conversation about changing cultural meanings of 'race'. A deeper comprehension of the course of mob murder and the dynamics that drove it emerges through comparing the situation in the US with violence that was and still is happening around the world. Drawing on a variety of approaches - historical, anthropological and literary - the study shows how concepts of imperialism, gender, sexuality, and civilization profoundly affected the course of mob murder in the US. Lynching provides thought-provoking analyses of cases where race was - and was not - a factor. The book is constructed as a series of case studies grouped into three thematic sections. Part I, Understanding Lynching, starts with accounts of mob murder around the world. Part II, Lynching and Cultural Change, examines shifting concepts of race, gender, and sexuality by drawing first on the romantic travel and adventure fiction of the era 1880-1920, from authors such as H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Changing images of black and white bodies form another major focus of this section. Part III, Blood, Debate, and Redemption in Georgia, follows the story of American collective murder and growing opposition to it in Georgia, a key site of lynching, in the early twentieth century. By situating American mob murder in a wide international context, and viewing the phenomenon as more than simply a tool of racial control, this book presents a reappraisal of one of the most unpleasant, yet important periods of America's history, one that remains crucial for understanding race relations and collective violence around the world.

PART I
What is Lynching?

Chapter 1
The Processes of Lynching Around the World

Lynching in many countries has often been carried out in similar ways, although the factors behind mob violence, the color or race of the victims, and society’s responses have differed widely. This chapter describes the dynamics of lynching, revealing patterns that say much about what provokes mob murder and what it is supposed to accomplish, besides killing the person in the mob’s hands. The background of collective murder in America and abroad will be explored in Chapters 2 and 3. Lynching outside the US has typically involved murderers and victims of the same race; therefore examining the processes of collective murder both here and abroad is a start toward sorting out how much American lynching was due to racism and how much to other kinds of circumstances, social, economic, and political.

During the 1870s and 1880s, Russian peasants sometimes formed lethal groups. For example, villagers in Novgorod province, southeast of St Petersburg, dealt savagely with a local woman accused of witchcraft:

Because of the number of misfortunes attributed to her, the peasants of the village of Vrachev decided in 1879 to burn a woman of the community, Grushka … the villagers reached an agreement among themselves, took some nails, and set off to ‘seal’ Grushka, as they put it … . First a pole was set into the entranceway [of her hut] and nailed in place. Next they nailed a plank against the larger window and sealed off two small windows with logs, so that all exits were completely blocked. At about five p.m. they set fires to a bundle of straw and rope in the entrance shed, and the hut burned to the ground while nearly 200 people from Vrachev and a neighboring village looked on. Though certain they had done the right thing to protect their village, the peasants nevertheless sent the local constable 22 rubles so he would forget the case, but he declined their offer. Those most guilty in the burning of Grushka – sixteen persons – were brought before the circuit court, where three confessed their guilt and were sentenced to church penitence, while the others went free.1

Russian peasant “self-courts” (samosudy), usually a gathering of all adult males, decided the fate of other alleged sorcerers or of horse thieves in the late nineteenth century.2 Such criminals were treated especially roughly in many cases. When dealing with a suspected thief in a district of Kostroma province, according to one report, peasants would “drive the handle of a whip into his rectum and shake up everything there. After this the peasant weakens and dies.” A jagged stick might also be used, or nails would be driven into the head.3

In a Nigerian tragedy of the 1970s, the victim of a lynching was caught by a mob as he tried to plead for his life with local leaders. He

stood in the middle of the clearing facing the elders while the crush of people pressed around them. In the center of this sacred space, the sole elder to stand up and call for tolerance was booed and pelted with rotten fruit. He sat down quickly and turned his face away. I was sure that the man was about to be lynched. How could the crowd ignore the elder’s intervention? And why didn’t the other elders speak out?

The mob was oddly silent; its loud breathing filled the space. The accused man began to beg, but people were too busy picking up stones and tree branches, anything that could be used as a weapon. A young man broke through the crowd carrying an old rubber tire and a metal can. He hung the tire from the accused’s neck. This singular action ended the man’s pleas for mercy. Resigned, he sobbed softly, mumbling inaudibly, but he didn’t move as the young man emptied the contents of the can onto him. The young man smiled and talked as he went about his task: ‘You see why crime doesn’t pay? I am doing this for you, you know. If you burn here, you won’t burn in hell. God is reasonable.’

Finishing, he held up a box of matches. The crowd roared. The elder who had tried intervening spoke again, but nobody listened. Someone called out, ‘Bring the children forward so that they can learn.’ My aunt hustled me to the front. Next to me stood a girl[…] ‘Watch,’ my aunt said as I tried to turn away from the writhing figure.

As the man burned, people began to file past him in an orderly manner like the offertory line in the Catholic church I attended. As they walked past, they spat on the incandescent figure. My aunt spat. I looked away, hand held over my nose at the smell of burning flesh, horrified that it reminded me of kebabs. ‘Spit,’ she snapped, rapping me on the head with her knuckles. I spat.

This murder occurred in a Nigerian marketplace; it was reported much later by the boy who spat on the victim. The burned man had allegedly stolen something from a vendor’s stall.4 The boy found the similarity between the smell of charred flesh and of kebabs revolting,5 a point worth remembering.

In a remote area of southwestern Kenya, members of the Gusii ethnic group formed mobs that attacked other Gusii people in 1992–94, beating and burning to death 57 “suspected witches.” The region had never

witnessed a purge of such magnitude and ferocity where mobs rounded up and ‘arrested’ suspects in their houses at night or chased and caught them like prey by day, bound their hands and feet with sisal ropes, doused them in pre-bought gasoline, closed them in polythene bags to ensure their total extinction, dragged these bagged victims into their own grass-thatched houses … [or into] an open space – sprinkled gasoline on the bags, torched them, and then drew back to enjoy the specter of the groaning victims as these agonized and perished in the flames.6

More fiery lynchings of suspected witches occurred in the spring of 2009 in southwestern Kenya. The witches “must be punished, every one,” a local youth told a reporter. “We are very angry and that’s why we end up punishing these people and even killing them.” Several of his friends agreed.7

Figure 1.1 Henry Smith about to be tortured and burned, Paris, Texas, 1893

Smith was accused of raping and murdering “Little Myrtle Vance,” four years old. The photo was originally entitled “View Showing the Crowd of Witnesses”; from an anonymous pamphlet, The Facts in the Case of the Horrible Murder of Little Myrtle Vance, and Its Fearful Expiation, at Paris, Texas, February 1, 1893.8

Source: Library of Congress.

During the South African “necklacing” incidents of 1986–94, crowds killed by placing tires soaked in gasoline around their victims’ bodies, then setting everything on fire. More than 500 such deaths are reported; some were caused, it appears, by agents recruited to serve the white government. However, most were carried out within black communities. Victims were suspected thieves, rapists, murderers, and hirelings of the whites. Not only did crowds incinerate living people, bodies were sometimes dug up and burned. The intent was “to damage and stigmatize the surviving family”; necklacing represented “the most extreme expression of disrespect, contempt, loathing and even hatred.”9 In the South African cases, as well as in Indonesian, Guatemalan, and other recent burnings to be discussed later, mobs have engaged in ritual acts that inflicted horrendous pain upon the victims and utter shame on their memories.10

In the United States, lynching sometimes entailed equal ferocity. At one extreme, a mob took much time and trouble to kill Henry Smith in Paris, Texas in 1893. Smith, a black man accused of raping and murdering a young white girl, was repeatedly burned with a hot poker. Relatives of the dead girl first thrust the metal rod into his eyes, then elsewhere into his flesh.11

Figure 1.2 The body of Jesse Washington, Waco, Texas, 1916

Source: Library of Congress.

Jesse Washington’s fate in Waco, Texas in 1916 was every bit as grim. Convicted in a court of law at top speed, then rushed outside for a lengthy execution by a mob, his death must be counted as a lynching. Washington was burned to death.12

This figure has intentionally been removed for copyright reasons. To view this image, please refer to the printed version of this book

Figure 1.3 The body of Ab Young, Slayden, Mississippi, March 13, 1935

The back of the photo has a notation from a wire service: “Accused of killing 45 year old state highway worker.”

Source: Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection.

But at other times, American lynching was quick and devoid of any torture. For what was seen as the straightforward murder of a middle-aged white man in Mississippi in 1935, the African American Ab Young died by hanging. This manner of execution was horrible enough, although it appears that his body was not mutilated in any way. Here was rough or popular justice, but far neater than scores of killings in Africa, Latin America, India, or Russia. A Georgia newspaper announced its approval of quick mob death in 1877: “When they lynch a negro in Texas, they do it well. An unfortunate darkey confined in a Houston jail was visited by twenty Regulators,” who put 200 shots into him.13 The difference between the way Jesse Washington died on the one hand, and on the other the hanging of Ab Young and the Houston shooting, provides a crucial key to understanding lynching.

The considerable variations in the ways mobs have behaved in the US and abroad must alert us to look for different kinds of thinking among group killers. Although the Nigerian victim was accused merely of stealing a small item, and similar seemingly petty crimes have provided the immediate spark for Guatemalan lynchings,14 American mobs often tailored their actions to the kind of crime they accused their captives of committing. The alleged rape and murder of a four-year-old girl deserved a different kind of action, in the eyes of the mob, than the murder of a 45-year-old man.

Given the range of treatment that lynchers have meted out to their victims, how can lynching itself be defined? It would be useful, to say the least, to have a simple, agreed-upon definition. There is none. In America, “lynching” used to refer to any kind of collective violence, from a beating which the victim survived to mob murder. But after 1882, when the Chicago Tribune started to print an annual list of lynchings around the United States, the word has generally been applied only to cases resulting in death. While a dead body with evident marks of struggle is final proof of extreme violence, it is often impossible to demonstrate that a non-lethal beating actually took place. Dead is d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I What is Lynching?
• Part II Lynching and Cultural Change: Images of Sex, Savages, and Women
• Part III Blood, Debate, and Redemption in Georgia: The Path toward Reform
• Conclusion: The Difficulty of Seeing Lynching
• Index