Lynched

The Victims of Southern Mob Violence

Amy Kate Bailey, Stewart E. Tolnay

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781469620879
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469620886
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

On July 9, 1883, twenty men stormed the jail in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, kidnapped Henderson Lee, a black man charged with larceny, and hanged him. Events like this occurred thousands of times across the American South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet we know scarcely more about any of these other victims than we do about Henderson Lee. Drawing on new sources to provide the most comprehensive portrait of the men and women lynched in the American South, Amy Bailey and Stewart Tolnay’s revealing profiles and careful analysis begin to restore the identities of — and lend dignity to — hundreds of lynching victims about whom we have known little more than their names and alleged offenses.

Comparing victims' characteristics to those of African American men who were not lynched, Bailey and Tolnay identify the factors that made them more vulnerable to being targeted by mobs, including how old they were; what work they did; their marital status, place of birth, and literacy; and whether they lived in the margins of their communities or possessed higher social status. Assessing these factors in the context of current scholarship on mob violence and reports on the little-studied women and white men who were murdered in similar circumstances, this monumental work brings unprecedented clarity to our understanding of lynching and its victims.

Chapter One: The Scholarship on Southern Lynching

On the evening of July 9, 1883, a black man named Henderson Lee was taken from police custody, five miles outside the town of Bastrop, in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana. Mr. Lee had been convicted of larceny and was being moved to Monroe, in Ouachita Parish. He and his police escorts had stopped for the night when a group of roughly twenty men broke into their lodging. The mob took Mr. Lee from the authorities and hanged him (Daily Picayune [New Orleans], July 10, 1883). We can only imagine the traumatizing effect that the ruthless murder of Henderson Lee had on his family, his friends, and his community. From the vantage point of more than a century and a quarter in the future, we know virtually nothing about who Henderson Lee was as a man or what sequence of events brought him to the attention of this particular mob, making him the target of such brutality. Given that scenarios like this one—in which black men were denied the rights to both police protection and due process of law—were repeated thousands of times across the American South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we could wonder about many men like Henderson Lee. Who were the individuals subjected to this vicious crime? Did they possess specific characteristics that put them at risk, other than being black and male? Were certain “kinds” of men more likely to be targeted in specific “kinds” of communities? For example, did the local context—agricultural economy, political atmosphere, or religious organization—influence the individual profile of lynch victims? This book asks, and answers, some of these questions using newly available information about the victims of southern lynching.

In searching for those answers, this book takes us in a direction that departs significantly from our prior work on the history of southern mob violence. That work, like all comparative studies of lynching, relied on the detection of relationships between aggregate characteristics—for instance, the association between racial composition, economic structures, patterns of religious membership, and the intensity of mob violence in local areas, or variation in these relationships over time (see, for example, Bailey and Snedker 2011; Tolnay and Beck 1995; Tolnay et al. 1996). Local context remains an important part of the story that unfolds in the following chapters. With all comparative studies of lynching—whether they have compared time periods or geographic areas like counties or states—the nature of spatial or temporal contexts is most important. In this book, those factors yield the spotlight to the characteristics of individual lynch victims themselves. That shift in focus is necessary in order to answer the foundational questions we have posed. And it is a shift in focus that was impossible for researchers to make before we were able to give fuller identities to several hundred lynch victims by locating their records in the U.S. Census enumerators’ manuscripts. We will return to the data that we used in our research later in this chapter and more fully in chapter 2.

During the last thirty years, historians and social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to a shameful era of American history when it was nearly a weekly occurrence for someone to be lynched.¹ This time period of frequent mob violence, which has been dubbed by some as the “lynching era,” runs roughly from the early 1880s through the early 1930s, although many lynchings certainly occurred before and after those dates.² Because the vast majority of lynchings took place in the South, scholarly attention to lynching has focused disproportionately on that region and on its most frequent victims, African American men. To be sure, not all lynch victims were southern, black, and male (Gonzalez-Day 2006; Leonard 2002; Pfeifer 2004). Other racial and ethnic minorities, especially Mexicans, American Indians, and Chinese, were victimized elsewhere in the country (Gonzales-Day 2006; Pfeifer 2013), as were some whites and a few women. Still, vastly more research has been devoted to trying to document and understand the typical lynching rather than the typical victim. That is the relatively unexplored path that we will take in the following chapters as we concentrate primarily, but not exclusively, on black male lynch victims in the American South. But before we embark on that journey, it is important to establish a minimum foundation about the phenomenon of lynching and a basic understanding of what previous studies of lynching have been able to tell us about the lynching era and what remains unknown.

What Is a Lynching?

Most scholars of lynching agree upon a general definition of the lethal practice, drawing from a consensus that was reached during a meeting convened by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that took place at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama on December 11, 1940 (Ames 1942). In addition to the NAACP, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), the International Labor Defense, and members of the press corps participated in the conference. According to the definition that was produced in this meeting, an incident was considered a “lynching” if

1. there was evidence that a person was killed,

2. the person was killed illegally,

3. a group of at least three individuals was responsible for the death, and

4. the group acted under the pretext of service to justice or tradition.

Although working toward the same general goal—the eradication of southern lynching—the NAACP and the ASWPL had slightly different motivations in arriving at a definition. On the one hand, the NAACP desired to be exhaustive in the enumeration of mob-related deaths of African Americans in order to further its antilynching mobilization efforts. On the other hand, the ASWPL wanted to point to a smaller number of incidents as evidence of the effectiveness of its crusade against lynching (Ames 1942). Reaching some agreement about what constituted a lynching was a necessary prerequisite for the missions of both groups.³

Whatever the organizational strategizing and maneuvering that led to this definition, it has facilitated the systematic study of lynching by social scientists and historians and shaped the contours of such scholarship for three-quarters of a century. By focusing on a death, the definition excludes nonlethal forms of violence such as flogging, beating, castration, and tarring and feathering, which were also common but vastly more difficult to document and verify. By requiring that the death be “illegal,” it excludes fatal encounters with police, sheriffs, and officially appointed posses, although a substantial body of evidence suggests that law enforcement officials were often complicit in incidents of lynching. In the case of Henderson Lee’s murder, for example, it is possible that the police officers charged with his safe transport cooperated with the group of men who ultimately killed him. By requiring that a group of people be involved in the killing and that they be motivated by a concern for justice or tradition, the definition excludes simple homicides, even those that might have been racially motivated.

Although useful, this definition of lynching is devilish for its details. For example, in some cases it is impossible to know the exact number of perpetrators who participated in the killing. The legality of “posses” that pursued wanted individuals is often ambiguous, based on the surviving evidence. In many cases the motives of the mob are unknown and must be inferred from limited information about the incident or the mob. For example, consider the following case that was reported in the Montgomery Advertiser on April 13, 1894. On April 12 the bullet-riddled body of William Lewis, a black man, was found near Lamison, Alabama. It was known that Lewis had hit another man named “Shields” in the head with an ax. Presumably Lewis had been killed in retaliation for the assault on Shields. But based on the limited information contained in the newspaper article, how can we tell whether there were at least three people involved or what the real motives of the killers were?

Or consider the following case that was reported in the Atlanta Constitution on June 19, 1911. A white man named Lawrence Cranford had been accused of raping a young woman in Monticello, Jasper County, Georgia. It was reported by the newspaper that Cranford had been abducted by a “posse” of angered friends and relatives of the female victim and that he would be “summarily dealt with.” However, Cranford’s body was never found, so it is impossible to know with certainty that he was ultimately killed by the mob.⁴

Fortunately for social scientists and historians interested in studying lynching, problematic accounts such as these are a minority of all incidents. Most scholars recognize the limitations to the consensus definition of lynching that has guided empirical research on the topic. But they are comfortable considering these limitations to be sources of measurement error and not an insurmountable obstacle to systematic evidence-based inquiry into the history of southern mob violence.

How Many Lynchings Occurred?

Armed with a working definition of lynching, social scientists and historians have sought to determine how common they were, why they happened, and why they stopped. The task of providing an accounting of the frequency of lynching might seem like a relatively straightforward undertaking—in principle, yes; in practice, no. Even a simple count of the number of incidents or victims depends on the time period considered, the geographic area encompassed, the racial or ethnic groups included, and the evidentiary requirements imposed. Three primary sources have been used to provide scholars with a sense of the scale of mob violence in the United States after Reconstruction. The Tuskegee Institute in Alabama documented more than 4,700 lynchings nationwide between 1882 and 1964. An inventory compiled by the NAACP includes victims from 1889 through the 1950s, with the first three decades of information published in 1919 in the NAACP’s report Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, and subsequent incidents contained in the association’s annual reports. A macabre tradition practiced by the Chicago Tribune newspaper has served as the third source for information about lynching incidents. Between 1882 and 1918, near the end of each year, the newspaper devoted one page to an inventory of deaths of different kinds, including legal executions, lynchings, and sporting fatalities. While it is clear that these three sources are not independent, the exact relationship among them remains somewhat cloudy.

Errors and inconsistencies in the Tuskegee, NAACP, and Chicago Tribune sources prompted E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay (2010) to attempt to confirm the incidents contained in these three inventories and to reconcile the inconsistencies for ten southern states⁵ for the time period 1882–1930. Each of the lynching incidents included in the Beck-Tolnay inventory met the requirements of the NAACP definition and was confirmed by a newspaper article reporting the killing. Their inventory documents a total of 2,805 victims in these ten southern states between 1882 and 1930—a geographic area and time period that correspond quite well with the spatial and temporal concentration of the “lynching era.”

We use the Beck-Tolnay inventory as the starting point for our empirical evidence reported in the following chapters.⁶ Regardless of which source of lynching information is used, however, it is impossible to know with certainty exactly how many people were lynched in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many lynchings escaped notice of the press and of the observers upon whom the NAACP, Tuskegee, and Chicago Tribune compilers relied for their lists. New evidence of previously undocumented lynchings continues to emerge, so any inventory of victims must be considered incomplete and evolving.

What Were Lynchings Like?

Among the thousands of documented lynchings, it is the more spectacular cases that have received disproportionate attention in historical and popular treatments of the phenomenon (Wood 2009). These are lynchings that match the four definitional criteria without any doubt. They involved hundreds, if not thousands, of mob members and onlookers. In some cases the lynching was advertised well in advance of the actual killing of the victim, allowing interested folks to travel to the location, sometimes from quite far away, by foot, horse, automobile, or even train. Many times the victim was subjected to prolonged torture and mutilation while still alive, and the corpse was plundered for souvenirs in the form of severed body parts. Occasionally photographs were taken of the proceedings and made into postcards. In the overwhelming majority of these spectacular lynchings, the victims were black.⁷ A commonly cited example of the “spectacle lynching” is the killing of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, in 1899. The following excerpt from the New York Times (April 24, 1899) provides the grisly details of Hose’s death on the previous day:

Sam Hose, the negro murderer and assailant of Mr. and Mrs. Cranford was burned at the stake, in the presence of 2,000 people, near this town this afternoon. Before his death, Hose’s body was mutilated with knives, and the torture endured for half an hour.… The clothes were torn from the wretch in an instant. A heavy chain was produced and wound around the body of the terrified negro, clasped by a new lock which dangled at Hose’s neck.… A hand grasping a knife shot out and one of the negro’s ears dropped into a hand ready to receive it. Hose pleaded pitifully for mercy and begged his tormentors to let him die. His cries were unheeded. The second ear went the way of the other. Hardly had he been deprived of his organs of hearing than his fingers, one by one, were taken from his hands and passed among the members of the yelling and now thoroughly maddened crowd.… The torch was applied about 2:30, and at 3 o’clock the body of Sam Hose was limp and lifeless, his head hanging to one side. The body was not cut down. It was cut to pieces.

Sadly, many victims of southern lynching suffered similarly horrendous deaths. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that most lynchings were spectacles like the gruesome murder of Sam Hose. In fact, relatively few lynching incidents took the form of the Hose lynching, with very large mobs and massive audiences. It is our impression, based on the examination of thousands of historical newspaper reports of southern lynchings, that most lynch victims were not tortured or mutilated before death and that relatively few incidents were photographed or commemorated with souvenir body parts or postcards.⁸ The “typical lynching,” if we can claim such a thing, was a less elaborate affair. In one version of the typical lynching, a small mob killed the victim in the presence of no additional onlookers. In some of these cases, but not all, the mob members attempted to clothe their actions with the vestiges of legal proceedings. For instance, the mob might attempt to extract a confession from the victim for whatever alleged offense he was accused of. In others, especially those that involved alleged sexual assaults by black men on white women, the accused was taken before the alleged victim to be identified before being killed. The execution itself in such lynchings was generally conducted in a secluded location by hanging or gunshots.

It was common for local newspapers to express approval for such “orderly” lynchings. Occasionally the press would opine that such incidents were “unfortunate” but would then proceed to explain that they performed an important function in southern society by punishing criminals more efficiently and severely than was possible in the formal criminal justice system. The following case reported in the Memphis Appeal Avalanche on August 6, 1893, is an example in which the press clearly approved of the mob’s actions as a service to southern society. Will McClendon, a black man from Fair Oaks, Arkansas, was accused of murdering a constable while resisting arrest for burglary. While being transported by the sheriff to the jail in Newport, Arkansas, McClendon was taken by a mob. According to the newspaper account, “The infuriated crowd were quick about their work. No large tree being convenient, McClendon, the murderer, was hanged to a sapling, whose bark was tender and whose years of experience are few. Yet that sapling served as well as a nobler tree and did its country service.”

Another version of the typical lynching saw the mob intervening in the criminal justice process itself. Many victims, like Mr. McClendon and Henderson Lee, whose lynching was described at the beginning of this chapter, were snatched from the custody of sheriffs or posses as they were being transported to jail, between jails, or between the jail and the courthouse. Other victims were taken from jails or courthouses before, during, or after a trial. Even individuals who were tried and convicted of their alleged offenses were not immune to mob violence. In these cases, the victim was likely to be carried to a nearby public place and executed, again generally by hanging or gunshots. A prominent place in the black section of town was a popular location for lynchings or the public display of the corpse, most likely to emphasize the threatening message and the lesson that the mob intended for the African American community. Indeed, in some cases, messages of warning were written on paper that was pinned to the victim’s body. Generally there were witnesses to such lynchings, in addition to the members of the mob, but the proceedings were not drawn out for entertainment purposes like the spectacle lynching of Sam Hose, nor was torture or mutilation typically involved. The lynching of three men in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1894 illustrates this type of incident. Three black men, Fayette Delaney, Emmet Delaney, and Ed Felton, were accused of being the ringleaders of a “barn burning gang.” They were arrested and jailed in Tuscumbia on April 22, 1894. As reported by the Montgomery Advertiser the next day, the “three negroes were taken from the jail last night at Tuscumbia and lynched by an orderly mob of about 75 armed men for burning a gin at Leighton [Alabama] a year ago last March. They were hanged and riddled with bullets.”

What proportion of lynchings can be allocated to spectacle events and what proportion to what we refer to as the more typical forms? Unfortunately, it is impossible to know. We still lack a systematic taxonomy of all known lynchings by the nature of their execution. Some insights can be gained by W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s typology of lynchings that occurred in Georgia and Virginia between 1880 and 1930. According to Brundage (1993, 18–19), lynchings can be sorted into five different types based on their “size, organization, motivation, and the extent of ritual”: mass mobs, posse, terroristic, private, and unknown. Brundage describes these types of lynchings as follows: “Small mobs, numbering fewer than fifty participants, may be separated into two types. They were either terrorist mobs that made no pretense of upholding the law or private mobs that exacted vengeance for a wide variety of alleged offenses. Posses … ranged in size from a few to hundreds of participants and often overstepped their quasi-legal function and were themselves responsible for mob violence. Finally, mass mobs, numbering from more than fifty to hundreds and even thousands of members, punished alleged criminals with extraordinary ferocity and, on occasion, great ceremony” (1993, 19). Brundage estimates that roughly 44 percent of all lynching incidents in Georgia and Virginia between 1880 and 1930 were conducted by “mass mobs” (1993, appendix, Table 1). Only a small fraction of the lynchings carried out by mass mobs would have matched the size, brutality, and publicity of the Sam Hose lynching.

Still, the typical lynching was no less reprehensible just because it did not include the number of people or the same level of torture and mutilation as the spectacle lynching. Both types of lynching resulted in the death of a victim who had not had the benefit of a trial or, if tried and convicted, was punished outside of the formal criminal justice system. In most cases, guilt was not established with nearly the same level of rigor guaranteed to the vast majority of whites who were accused of crimes, and the punishment of death was often more extreme than would have been administered to a convicted white offender. And, as poignantly noted by Arthur Raper in his classic book on the subje...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter One: The Scholarship on Southern Lynching
• Chapter Two: Resurrecting the Identities of Lynch Victims
• Chapter Three: The Characteristics of Black Male Lynch Victims
• Chapter Four: Victims as Marginal Men?
• Chapter Five: Targeted Because of Their Success?
• Chapter Six: Vulnerability in Economic, Political, and Religious Context
• Chapter Seven: Atypical Victims: Females and White Males
• Chapter Eight: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index