Under Sentence of Death

Lynching in the South

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807846360, 9780807823262
• eBook ISBN: 9780807866559
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From the assembled work of fifteen leading scholars emerges a complex and provocative portrait of lynching in the American South. With subjects ranging in time from the late antebellum period to the early twentieth century, and in place from the border states to the Deep South, this collection of essays provides a rich comparative context in which to study the troubling history of lynching. Covering a broad spectrum of methodologies, these essays further expand the study of lynching by exploring such topics as same-race lynchings, black resistance to white violence, and the political motivations for lynching. In addressing both the history and the legacy of lynching, the book raises important questions about Southern history, race relations, and the nature of American violence. Though focused on events in the South, these essays speak to patterns of violence, injustice, and racism that have plagued the entire nation. The contributors are Bruce E. Baker, E. M. Beck, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Joan E. Cashin, Paula Clark, Thomas G. Dyer, Terence Finnegan, Larry J. Griffin, Nancy MacLean, William S. McFeely, Joanne C. Sandberg, Patricia A. Schechter, Roberta Senechal de la Roche, Stewart E. Tolnay, and George C. Wright.

Part I Approaches to Racial Violence and Lynching

More than three decades ago, sociologist Neil Smelser asked, “What determines whether an episode of collective behavior of any sort will occur? What determines whether one type rather than another will occur?”¹ Roberta Senechal de la Roche and Larry J. Griffin, Paula Clark, and Joanne C. Sandberg ask similar questions of collective violence, and in particular lynching. The “repertoires” of collective violence, to borrow Charles Tilly’s phrase, have long been the focus of scholarly interest, and these two essays both draw upon and contribute to that rich tradition. They are excellent examples of the continuing value of theoretical innovation in the study of lynching. Both essays seek to explain variation in violence at the level of the case or individual incident of violent conflict.

Griffin, Clark, and Sandberg explore the importance of temporal order, sequence, and contingency in lynchings. Their essay, which has implications for students of all social events, demonstrates the advantages of the methodological approach of “event-narrative analysis” by carefully reconstructing the sequence of events in a lynching in Mississippi. Griffin, Clark, and Sandberg, like Senechal de la Roche, reveal a nuanced understanding of the importance of the circumstances specific to each lynching. But they, to a far greater extent than Senechal de la Roche, are interested in developing a methodology that takes into account the temporal sequence of collective actions such as lynchings. Rather than approaching lynchings as historical facts, they look at them as events that might have turned out differently. Simply put, they insist that each lynching is a narrative and that theories which seek to explain lynchings should avoid mechanistic models of the unfolding of lynchings and instead should take into account the inherently open-ended, contingent nature in any narrative event-the novel twists, turns, and unexpected happenings that shape what actually happened.

Among the implications of Griffin, Clark, and Sandberg’s approach is the vitally important point that mob violence was not random; it appeared so only because the circumstances that could culminate in mob violence were so commonplace. In addition, their analysis demonstrates that any understanding of the origins and unfolding of lynching will remain incomplete unless attempted lynchings, no less than accomplished lynchings, are taken into account. Historians and social scientists understandably have concentrated on race riots and lynchings, the most visible and dramatic instances of racial violence, but have paid far less attention to much more frequent minor racial disturbances and attempted lynchings. But as long as historians interested in mob violence concentrate only on accomplished lynchings, they risk ignoring suggestive evidence of circumstances that either impeded or even thwarted lynchers. Given the frequency of and widespread support for mob violence in the South, the fact that many lynching attempts were frustrated begs for explanation. Close scrutiny of the flow of events in Bolivar County, Mississippi, in 1930 and elsewhere demonstrates that each incident of mob violence was contingent upon a range of possibilities and constraints, which themselves were shaped by circumstances, place, and prior actions, no less than the South’s social structure and racial mores.

Senechal de la Roche encourages us to understand southern lynching in the context of a broader and more general theory of collective behavior. Implicit in her argument is that lynching in the South varied according to principles that also apply to group violence across the world and in different historical periods. Her essay, which establishes with new clarity and precision the social conditions that predict and explain variations in the likelihood and severity of lynching, provides some answers to knotty questions that historians and social scientists have long overlooked. Why, for the same alleged offense, did southerners lynch in one situation and not in another? Why might lynchers kill one alleged offender in one case and multiple victims in another? What accounts for the variation in the severity seen from one lynching to another?

Senechal de la Roche’s theory is new in that it seeks to explain collective violence such as lynching without regard to psychological or motivational factors (e.g., frustration caused by economic hardship or repressed sexuality) or broad, shared social values (e.g., racism or the southern code of honor). Instead, she draws upon the paradigm and concepts of sociologist Donald Black and treats lynching as a means of social control–one of many ways humans handle the misconduct of others. Following Black, and taking the single case of conflict as the unit of analysis, she offers propositions that predict and explain the likelihood and severity of lynching in the postbellum South. Her formulations draw attention to the vital importance of “the social structure of the case of conflict,” which is determined by the degree of intimacy, cultural similarity, interdependence, and inequality between the parties in the conflict. The theory informs us that for any instance of collective violence to occur, a variety of necessary conditions must be fulfilled. Moreover, its propositions underscore that no incident of collective violence can be adequately explained by a single “cause” or variable. Her propositions are testable: the theory is falsifiable. Because it addresses only observable behavior, the theory yields statements for which, in principle, contrary evidence may be adduced. Unlike most historians, who often are unclear about concepts, who offer variables that are not directly observable or measurable, and who seldom offer testable statements about how changes in one factor predict changes in the likelihood of another, Senechal de la Roche offers a theory that can and undoubtedly will be tested and applied to lynchings and other forms of collective violence.

These two essays should encourage future scholars to wring more analytical significance out of the important details of each lynching, details that may explain much about the different forms of racial violence. These essays also reveal the vigor of the new burst of methodological innovation in the study of lynching, which promises greatly to enrich our understanding of both collective and racial violence.

NOTE

1. Neil Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 12.

Narrative and Event

Lynching and Historical Sociology

Larry J. Griffin, Paula Clark, and Joanne C. Sandberg

Sociologists study southern lynching in ways that are strikingly different from the approaches taken by most historians. By design, they generally explore aggregate lynching rates, most often with statistical techniques and equipped with theories of social organization, group relations, and social control which emphasize the structural impetus to, and support for, lynching-its roots in the economics and politics of cotton and oppressive Jim Crow laws. Their findings have proven invaluable in systematically documenting the socially determined nature of lynchings and in forging causal generalizations of broad theoretical and comparative potential. But because their structural emphasis and aggregate/statistical research designs often require sociologists to freeze history, strip lynchings of their historical specificity, and relegate context and narrative to the void of “background,” “data,” and “illustration,” we seldom see what actually happened as lynchings unfolded, why they happened as they did, and how, once under way, they might have been stopped. We perceive the powerful and anonymous or not-so-anonymous forces at work behind the backs of southerners but not enough of their own moral and causative agency and thus too little of what racial violence reveals about the makeup and subtle operation of white supremacy.

By narrating richly detailed, fluid accounts of lynchings squarely situated in their cultural contexts and centered on the behavior of real people, historians generally do better here. Agency is depicted in motion, and possibilities cunningly realized, blundered upon, or permitted to seep away are often insightfully examined to show how threatened lynchings were expedited or stymied. Lynchings are windows to the soul of white supremacy and African American life in the South, and historians more readily than sociologists exploit the prismatic nature of incidents of racial violence or near violence, seemingly relishing the intricacies of the Jim Crow South refracted there. But the assumptions and reasoning behind the analyses of historians, particularly those in the case study tradition, often remain untheorized, implicitly contained in and swept along by the dramatic flow of actions and events. Although historians’ inferences are usually illuminating, how they reached and empirically verified them is sometimes unclear, as are the generalizability and theoretical implications of their conclusions.

Useful disciplinary conventions, then, entail costs, occasionally unacceptably high costs. Racial violence and its implications about the South and the region’s relationship to the nation, its economic and political structures, and its norms and cultural constructions (of race, gender, class, and justice, among others) are too important to sustain an artificially neat division of intellectual labor that unfortunately misses as much about the dynamics of lynchings as it clarifies. Sociologists and historians have much to learn from each other, not just facts or how to write compelling narrative, on the one hand, or theories and techniques, on the other, but also fundamental ways of thinking about and analyzing lynchings.

By synthesizing important strengths of each approach, we attempt in this essay to bridge partially these methodological and substantive differences. Our synthesis joins the concreteness and contingency of historical case studies to the analytic explicitness and comparative grounding of sociological analyses.¹ We canvass a wide variety of incidents of real or incipient racial violence that demonstrate that the actions and reactions of southerners were conflicted and thus surprisingly rich and nuanced; use this empirical generalization to make several methodological points about threatened lynchings as historical happenings; and then apply both the comparative and theoretical insights to the analysis of a single lynching that occurred in Mississippi in 1930.

COMPLEXITIES, CONTRADICTIONS, PUZZLES

White supremacy did not unalterably script or encode what southerners would do when confronted by racial conflict or potentially lethal racial situations. Consider what happened in two nearly adjacent West Tennessee counties in an eighteen-hour period in 1931. In Obion County, a white mob stormed the jail, “overpowered” the sheriff and his deputy, and lynched George Smith, an African American prisoner, while in Carroll County white vigilantes were stopped by the wife of the sheriff. She misled the mob about her husband’s absence and, referring to the mob’s intent to take the prisoner, told them, “You couldn’t run anything like that over me.” Ultimately, the black man, Henry Mauford (also named Joe Wauford and Henry Wanford in the newspapers), was moved to four different jails to protect him from various lynch mobs. These are not isolated incidents. A year earlier, in 1930, a police officer in Kemper County, Mississippi, reportedly leaked to potential lynchers crucial information about the time and route of transporting two black prisoners, an act that, if true, resulted in a double lynching, while the sheriff in the adjacent Mississippi hill county, Neshoba–a county equally poor and equally white supremacist–spirited his prisoner away, thereby saving his life.²

The essential unpredictability of both action and the resolution of action seen in these racial episodes was widely replicated throughout the Jim Crow South. Two episodes from Adams County (Natchez), Mississippi, in the 1930s indicate that possible lynchings could be short-circuited even before they got started. In the first, a white woman accused an African American male of striking her in an argument over property lines and had him arrested. The judge threw the case out of court after the man, a black professional, claimed that he had merely knocked a pistol from the woman’s hand. In the second example, a black man, again a respected professional, killed a drunken white man in a traffic accident. Not only was the African American not arrested, but important whites rushed to his defense, labeling him “a great influence for good in the community.”³ Either incident might have led to a lynching or threatened lynching, but neither did. In these cases, African Americans who might have been seen to be in the wrong by prevailing racist standards, and thus vulnerable to mob violence, were almost entirely excluded from punishment by “Judge Lynch’s law” because of how whites constructed and understood the incidents.

As we have already seen from what happened in West Tennessee and the Mississippi hill country, even after mobs were organized and, smelling blood, had begun to move, threatened lynchings could be–and often were–prevented by the actions of white southern law enforcement officials. Estimates of the number of prevented lynchings range from 648 during the years 1915–32 (Arthur Raper) to 762 for the 1915–42 period (Jessie Daniel Ames). If only suggestive of the exact number, these data nonetheless indicate that between one-half and two-thirds of threatened lynchings failed, largely because of the active intercession of the authorities.⁴ What white authorities did vis-à-vis both African American prisoners or fugitives and fellow whites in the lynch mob thus was often critical to whether an attempted lynching became a lynching in fact. An archetypic expression of a firm antilynching stance comes from a smalltown Louisiana jailer, who reportedly averted a lynching in 1926 by telling five vigilantes, “Y...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Approaches to Racial Violence and Lynching
• Part II. Lynching in the Local and Regional Context
• Part III. The Cultural Context of Lynching
• Part IV. Black Responses and the Legacy of Lynching
• Afterword
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index