Racial Terrorism

A Rhetorical Investigation of Lynching

Marouf A. Hasian, Nicholas S. Paliewicz

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496831781
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

In December 2018, the United States Senate unanimously passed the nation's first antilynching act, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. For the first time in US history, legislators, representing the American people, classified lynching as a federal hate crime. While lynching histories and memories have received attention among communication scholars and some interdisciplinary studies of traditional civil rights memorials exist, contemporary studies often fail to examine the politicized nature of the spaces. This volume represents the first investigation of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum, both of which strategically make clear the various links between America's history of racial terror and contemporary mass incarceration conditions, the mistreatment of juveniles, and capital punishment. Racial Terrorism: A Rhetorical Investigation of Lynching focuses on several key social agents and organizations that played vital roles in the public and legal consciousness raising that finally led to the passage of the act. Marouf A. Hasian Jr. and Nicholas S. Paliewicz argue that the advocacy of attorney Bryan Stevenson, the work of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and the efforts of curators at Montgomery's new Legacy Museum all contributed to the formation of a rhetorical culture that set the stage at last for this hallmark lynching legislation. The authors examine how the EJI uses spaces of remembrance to confront audiences with race-conscious messages and measure to what extent those messages are successful.

CHAPTER 1

“The Blood of Lynching Victims Is in the Soil”

Reconstruction Horrors and Post-Reconstruction Peonage

PREVIOUS GENERATIONS HAVE DEBATED WHETHER THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD should be remembered as a “dark and bloody” era that involved the foisting of Radical Republican ideals onto a prostrate and innocent South,¹ or whether this interventionism by Union troops was an enlightened experiment that aided the cause of those who wished to provide rights to former slaves. While the Dunning School of historiography produced generations of historians who complained about Northern “aggression” and unnecessary interference in Southern affairs, “revisionists” like Eric Foner rebutted these assumptions. In 1982, Foner averred that imperfect Reconstruction efforts, and the legacy of those efforts, deserved to “survive as an aspiration to those Americans, black and white alike, who insist that the nation live up to the professed ideals of its political culture.”²

How we remember those post–Civil War efforts is not just a matter of knowledge retrieval. As Ron Eyerman has noted, there was a “distinctive gap” between the “collective memory of a reconstructed minority group and the equally reconstructed dominant group” who managed to control “the resources and had the power to fashion public memory.”³

The archival inheritance of these conflicting historiographies ensured that by 2018 historian Michael Pfeifer, a specialist in lynching studies, could argue that “Reconstruction remains contested in local memory, and efforts to remember the achievements of Reconstruction are cancelled out by the seeming failure of the period to achieve lasting change.”⁴

Critical genealogical readings of Reconstruction military reports, photographs, newspaper accounts, journal articles, and other rhetorical artifacts document some of the violence of this period. In 1868, for example, when African Americans tried to vote, or when they tried to openly show their support for Radical Republican allies who traveled south to places like Opelousas, Louisiana, they were met by hundreds of local whites who argued that a black rebellion was underway. When a small group of armed African Americans assembled to try to free one Republican reporter, they were accosted by an armed group of white men, who took 29 blacks to the local prison, where “27 of them were summarily executed.”⁵

The lynching archives contain few systematic tallies of these unlawful acts of violence before the 1890s records of Gilded Age violence and Progressive Era lynchings (see chapter 2), but there is plenty of historical evidence that many Southern whites of various classes were convinced that Unionist post–Civil War support for former slaves was a costly venture, a zero-sum game whereby helping impoverished and disenfranchised blacks naturally meant taking power away from poor and middle-class whites. No doubt part of the animus that was directed at the Unionists by former Confederates and impoverished Southerners had to do with the fact that the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 “also granted voting rights to African American men while disenfranchising former Confederates, drastically altering the political landscape of the South and ushering in” what some EJI workers would call a “period of progress.”⁶

As various nineteenth-century American communities debated about Northern “aggression” during the Reconstruction years, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan,⁷ and the recognition of African American civil, social, and political rights, they came up with inventive ways of redefining the post–Civil War Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments so that most of those who benefited from these legislative reforms were whites and not people of color. These communities considered the meanings of these “rights” in labor, voting, land, and other contexts, producing competing historical fragments, epistemes, and racialized discourse/knowledge formations that could be configured in diverse ideological ways.

Twenty-first-century EJI workers have been able to chronicle some of the violent resistance to the Reconstruction, quoting materials from the archival volumes that were collected by congressional workers in the early 1870s who were trying to destroy the power of the Ku Klux Klan.⁸ Other archival materials on post-Reconstruction violence appeared in the form of oral history reports on victims of lynchings that were collected from witnesses who were interviewed by New Deal employees during the Great Depression.

As we shall see elsewhere in this book, the EJI has done an admirable job of pointing out the petty, arbitrary, capricious, or horrific justifications that white supremacists contrived to legitimate so many lynchings or near-lynchings in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years. The EJI’s study of lynching pasts shows how people of color could be lynched for “minor violations of the racial caste system,” like “failing to step off a sidewalk to make way for a white person.”⁹ As Bryan Stevenson told young readers of Teen Vogue:

The 13th Amendment ends involuntary servitude and forced labor but it doesn’t say anything about the narratives of racial difference or white supremacy…. People would sometimes come to these lynchings, bring their children, bring their snacks, sip lemonade, eat deviled eggs, and create a carnival atmosphere while black men and women were being tortured and burned alive sometimes literally on the courthouse lawn.¹⁰

Stevenson’s strategic historical (re)framing of these affairs jumps quickly from the passage of the civil rights amendments to summaries of some public lynchings that took place during the 1880s and 1890s, and all of this is then used to convey the magnitude and evolutionary nature of racial terrorism. Elsewhere, Stevenson explains that the “blood of lynching victims is in the soil.”¹¹

A decoding of the EJI’s arguments about lynching pasts and contemporary mass incarceration shows that Bryan Stevenson and his supporters, in their strategic narrations of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction events, often use a blend of secular and sacred arguments that resonate with those who are skeptical about the exaggerated claims of neoliberal civil rights success stories. This strand of skeptical argumentation was passed down to later generations by those who faced daily abuse or even death during the nineteenth century when they tried to buy land, or vote, or marry someone of a different race.

Our critical analyses of the rhetorical fragments that circulated during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years has convinced us that many social agents—including Unionists, members of the KKK, Southern Democrats, and others—played key roles in the shaping the contours of “Lost Cause” narratives. It was the coproduction of this thick dispositif that created so many difficulties for generations of African Americans before the rise of the EJI.¹²

The disempowered who had to face a variety of oppressive, post–Civil War social formations may have had their own “weapons of the weak,”¹³ and they may have produced what Ann Stoler calls “dissensus” archives,¹⁴ but those who want to read “against the grain” must simultaneously pay attention to the hegemonic materials that must be read “along the grain.” If we are going to interrogate EJI claims about nineteenth-century “racial terror,” then we need to keep an eye on the hegemonic tactics that were used by those who produced their own Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction narratives and other figurations.¹⁵

We begin our critique of some of the genealogical origins of the EJI’s racial terrorism claims about Reconstruction legacies by explaining how talk of “Judge Lynch” entered American rhetorical framings of some post–Civil War violence.

Remembrances of “Judge Lynch,” the Civil War, and Contested Histories of the Reconstruction Years

Many case studies and books that have been written on lynching contend that the word “lynching” comes from remembrances of the work of Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter and veteran of the American Revolutionary War. When Lynch was put in charge of an ad hoc court that was used to try and punish “loyalist” supporters through hangings, this was characterized as “lynch law.” Since that time, many different communities in all parts of the United States before the 1950s disagreed about whether historical lynchings were legal or illegal forms of vigilante justice.¹⁶

Here we must note that we agree with Robyn Wiegman’s assessment that in “the circuit of relationships that governs lynching in the United States, the law as legal discourse and disciplinary practice subtends the symbolic area.”¹⁷ We will show that the very drawing of a mythic line between “legal” and “illegal” lynchings was a rhetorical act that had portentous consequences.

For many of those who lived through the halcyon Civil War years, one’s reaction to talk of freedom for former slaves or to the violence associated with lynching had everything to do with how one defined the ideograph “redemption.” While Northerners viewed their reconstruction efforts as redemptive, even spiritual acts that justified the sacrifices of the white and black soldiers who gave their lives during the bloody Civil War, many Southerners had different ideas with respect to the word “redemption.” For them, redeemers were those who proudly wished to revive memories of romanticized antebellum ways of life. “Redemption,” Carole Emberton opined, “should not be understood as a perversion of true Christian or democratic values” but as a word that signified how white Southerners were “ambivalent” about the violence that lingered after the carnage of the Civil War.¹⁸

Much of that ambivalence had to do with the experiences, and the memories, of those who had to witness the Union’s occupation of the South, which began during the latter stages of the Civil War. The Radical Republicans, who worried about both the revenge that might be exacted by former slaves as well as the reactions of returning Confederate soldiers who had lost their possessions and their status, sent in Union troops to help redeem the South through Reconstruction efforts.

As we studied the discursive and pictorial representations of these lynching and Reconstruction archives, we were shocked to find the magnitude and scope of the violence that was witnessed during the Reconstruction years. Many black soldiers who had fought during the Civil War, who perhaps thought that they would be congratulated and thanked for their sacrifices, were not granted immediate citizenship for their efforts. Often, riots broke out in Southern districts that were occupied by victorious Northern troops. For example, Northern troops had been occupying areas in and around Memphis since 1862, and for years the city was a “magnet for runaway slaves.”¹⁹ It would also become the site of both physical and ideological warfare as various strategic, often temporary, alliances were formed between whites of different classes, who argued among themselves that they knew best how to cope with the rising power of former slaves.

Those of us today who read the short lines that appear in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments may have a difficult time understanding how Southerners often associated those few words with the alleged horrors that they believed victimized the losers of the Civil War. Critical rhetorical analysis of some of the rhetorical fragments that circulated after 1866 shows that some former Confederate soldiers and civilians contemplated the possibility that the Radical Republicans who pushed through post–Civil War amendments seemed intent on fueling what they regarded as a “race war” in the South. What was called the “hard war” (the Civil War) was supposedly followed by a period when foreign Carpetbaggers and local Scalawags helped Northern courts impose their will on recalcitrant Southerners.

While the Northerners who supported the Radical Republicans were convinced that the South had to accept their Reconstruction policies for free persons of color—especially black male citizens—many “unreconstructed” Southerners responded by attacking the very notion of “civil,” “political,” or “social” equality between the “races.” The existence of these competitive worldviews made it difficult for organizations like the Freedmen’s Bureau to help the Department of War carry out the mission of providing for the needs of emancipated blacks.

Lynchings were microaggressive acts that could be undertaken by returning Confederate soldiers and others who were convinced that the Radical Republicans were trying to punish the South for secessionism.

All sorts of political rationales could be found for Southern intransigence in the wake of occupation, but there were also other factors that impacted how one viewed these retaliatory measures. “During the Reconstruction era,” noted Martha Hodes, “black male sexuality first became a major theme in white Southern politics, thereby commencing an era of terrorism and lynching.”²⁰ To Ersula Ore, the sexuality of black men, particularly in relation to white women, was how lynching emerged as a constitutive form of “civic belonging” for whites that “reaffirmed communal spirit in the face of major social change.”²¹ Lynching was the “performative corollary” of white discourses of sexuality that dehumanized black men.²²

It would be a mistake to argue that the Radical Republicans or other Unionists were egalitarians who viewed blacks as their equals. As many critical scholars have noted, racism appears in many shades, and former slaves were confronted by many different ideological figurations that rationalized their supposed inferiority. While Northerners treated images of beaten blacks, raped women, and “terrorized bodies” as “objects of pity,”²³ Southerners focused on their own post–Civil War problems and viewed the Unionists as interlopers.

Union generals like Clinton Fisk and Oliver Howard were put in charge of some of the Reconstruction districts, and they, along with many Northern preachers who supported the Radical Republicans in Congress, circulated texts about former slaves that conveyed a mixture of self-righteousness, genuine care for fellow human beings, and fear of those who might seek revenge in the absence of a Union military presence. As Emberton explained, popular publications like Harper’s Magazine tried to elicit Northern sympathy for blacks living in the South, but in doing so they often cultivated the “political commodification of black bodies in pain.”²⁴ These spectral, often voyeuristic visualities perhaps unintentionally contributed to the dehumanization of African American victims of systematic violence.

Many different societies and organizations were formed by white supremacists in the South after the Civil War, but it was the Ku Klux Klan that occupied the attention of the Radical Republicans. Later, in the years preceding World War I, national discussion of lynching and other forms of violence would be “voluminous,” but some claimed that during Reconstruction, “southern whites had often tried to ignore” or “simply refused to acknowledge” the “existence of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations.”²⁵

Supporters of the Radical Republicans tried to counter this Southern indifference. They constantly quarreled with the Southern Democrats in Congress, and they tried to render visible the attempts of the KKK to intimidate, or kill, former slaves. Political adversaries in Congress and disputants in broader American rhetorical cultures quarreled about whether the activities of the KKK actually represented the desires of the average Southerner after the Civil War.

Many of those in the North seemed to be convinced that white Southerners were unwilling to carry out the redeeming or reconstructive acts that were needed to help preserve the Union and afford citizenship rights to former slaves. After collecting many months of testimony about the KKK, congressional investigators who looked into the affairs of the “late insurrectionary states” filed a majority report concluding that “we see from Maryland to Mexico, the same general spirit of spite against the freedman, and determination to keep him down and use his labor without compensation.”²⁶ Witness after witness explained to congressional leaders ho...