“Don’t you make any mistake about it; if you will have it that I killed the boy, then you’ve killed him as much as I.”
In sincerity of feeling and openness of statement, these words went far beyond anything that had ever been said in this home, kept up on the wages of a secret industry eked out by the sale of more or less secret wares: the poor expedients devised by a mediocre mankind for preserving an imperfect society from the dangers of moral and physical corruption, both secret, too, of their kind.
—Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
GIVEN THAT THIRTEEN PEOPLE were murdered over the course of four days in and around a town that had probably at most two hundred residents, we know shockingly little about what happed at St. Charles in southeastern Arkansas in the spring of 1904. As the historian Vincent Vinikas writes, “Circumstances surrounding the event are untraceable in the public record, and, apart from the facts conveyed in a very limited number of sources, the available material provides only a few other clues for historians. The evidence is so flawed and scanty that it is hard to reconstruct a sequence of events: questions of who, what, when, and how are virtually unanswerable, and any suggestion of why is wild conjecture.”1 However, what occurred may have been, depending upon the definition of lynching employed, one of the deadliest lynchings in the United States.
As Vinikas has reconstructed from a variety of sources, the mass lynching in St. Charles in late March 1904 apparently had its genesis in a round of drinking and gaming that turned into an argument down on the docks of the White River. A Black man, surnamed Griffin, delivered a blow to the head of a white man named Jim Searcy. The officer who arrested Griffin apparently indicated that Griffin might possibly be lynched, which frightened the captive so much that he struck the officer, stole his gun, and ran for his life. Newspapers, of course, told a slightly different story. According to the Arkansas Gazette, for example, “the difficulty occurred over a trivial matter . . . between a white man by the name of Searcy and two negroes by the names of Henry and Walker Griffin.” One of the Griffins threatened “to knock Searcy in the head with a beer bottle” but apparently did not. Then, on Monday, March 21, the two Griffins met Searcy and his brother in a store, whereupon one of the Griffins “struck both of the Searcy boys over the head with a table leg, rendering them unconscious and fracturing their skulls.” A deputy sheriff was also knocked down.
The Gazette report contains an odd few lines describing the deeds of various actors after this affair: “The negroes then gathered and defied the officers, declaring ‘no white man could arrest them.’ Their demonstrations aroused the fears of the citizens of St. Charles, and they phoned to this place [the county seat of DeWitt] for a posse to come out and protect the town.” According to the Gazette’s own reporting, the fight between the Griffins and the Searcys took place on Monday, but a deputy sheriff did not set out from DeWitt to St. Charles “to protect the town” until Wednesday morning, which fact perhaps suggests that locals did not consider whatever happened that Monday to be of too great an importance until time and rumor allowed a growing panic to build—a lull of this sort often precedes the actual violence. Whatever the case, when this deputy sheriff led a posse of five men to St. Charles on March 23, they encountered three armed African American men. The posse asked these men the location of Griffin but then shot them dead when the three reportedly “attempted to draw their pistols.”
Large mobs of white men began to pour in from DeWitt, Clarendon, and other towns surrounding St. Charles. On March 24, a sheriff killed one Black man who supposedly shot at his posse. In addition, white authorities in St. Charles arrested five African Americans on unspecified charges, the Gazette reporting only that they “had defied the officers.” That night, “a crowd of men took them away from the guards and shot them to death.” By the end of the week, the Gazette headline blared, “Eleven Negroes Victims of Mob,” although its summary of events does little to illuminate the nature of the violence. For example, this is the full report on one of the casualties covered: “Kellis Johnson, the last of the gang of negroes that caused the trouble, was shot to death this morning in the northeastern part of the county.”2 What is one to make of that? In his analysis of this event, Vinikas admits: “The lynchers in Saint Charles left a trail that cannot be mapped in even its basic directions. Because of the magnitude of inconsistency, error, and omission in the evidentiary base upon which researchers must rely, when or where or why particular killings occurred can only be deduced, inferred, or guessed. The path of the terror is lost in time and place.”3 The Griffins were apparently killed later, bringing the total dead to thirteen.
Most reports on what happened at St. Charles describe it as a lynching, but as Vinikas writes, “The word lynch is seriously flawed. When the term is employed to denote a specific category of human experience, it is not only imprecise, as one soon discovers; it is also . . . too clean.”4 Especially as employed in the American context, the term lynching can evoke either the “rough justice” of the American West dished out to outlaws or an explicitly racialized form of violence that, despite being couched in terms of justice or righteous vengeance, was often employed symbolically against entire communities. The term grew out of a practice, and that practice evolved depending upon time and place, thus creating a challenge for the continued application of our terminology. In addition, as Vinikas notes, “Regardless of its definition, when violence turns into a killing spree—as occurred in Saint Charles over the course of several days in the spring of 1904—isolating and defining the discrete historical event is difficult but statistically significant. Does the rampage count as one incident or several?”5 But his question has more than simple statistical applicability, for it raises other questions as to the nature of the violence practiced. Do we regard what happened at St. Charles as violence against a collection of individuals, or do we define it as violence against a group or community? And if the latter, how many individuals must be targeted for violence before we treat this as a case of group violence—or can one such killing be considered a case of group violence, especially in the times and places where lynching was the order of the day?
These issues have long troubled those studying the practice. As historian Christopher Waldrep has written, “There is no single behavior that can be called ‘lynching.’ Any attempt to impose a definition on such a diverse, subtle, and complex reality will inevitably miss the point.”6 American studies professor Ashraf H. A. Rushdy identifies three main problems with the term lynching. First, it is “a term more evocative than descriptive,” connoting, depending upon time and place, “quite different historical acts among the population.” Second, “this same term has been used to designate acts that demonstrate a wide range of diverse motives, strategies, technologies, and meanings,” including both lethal and nonlethal violence, as well both “acts of rough justice in frontier societies lacking the apparatus of state judiciaries as well as acts of direct defiance of those state judiciaries in more established societies.” Finally, lynching “is a politically encumbered term” that has, through its history, both implied “popular sovereignty and Southern honor” and the failure of civilization.7
However, since the practice began attracting scholarly analysis in the early twentieth century, most definitions created to describe the phenomenon have emphasized the communal nature of the perpetrators. Economist James Cutler, who published the first scholarly analysis of lynching in 1905, emphasized the popular support enjoyed by vigilantism when he defined lynching as “an illegal and summary execution at the hands of a mob, or a number of persons, who have in some degree the public opinion of the community behind them.”8 In 1940, delegates at a conference attended by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), and the International Labor Defense (ILD) developed a definition of lynching composed of four specific components: “(1) there must be evidence that a person was killed, (2) the person must have met his death illegally, (3) three or more persons must have participated in the killing, [and] (4) the group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice or tradition.”9 In other words, as historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes, “a degree of community approval and complicity, whether expressed in popular acclaim for the mob’s actions or in the failure of law enforcement either to prevent lynching or to prosecute lynchers, was present in most lynchings.”10 Rushdy himself, despite the problems he acknowledges inhering to any definition of lynching, offers the following capacious definition: “A lynching is an act of extralegal collective violence by a group alleging pursuit of summary justice.”11
What these various definitions have in common is their emphasis upon lynching as violence carried out either by a group or, at the very least, on behalf of a group. In this respect, we can describe lynching as a form of collective violence, but this falls somewhat short of the reality of lynching, which should be better understood as a form of group violence. As sociologists James Hawdon and John Ryan define it, “group violence is broader than what is typically covered in works on collective violence because it includes violence committed by collectives or groups as well as violence committed against groups.”12 And group violence is not merely violence against multiple people but implies something about the relationship assumed between those targeted. “Crimes against humanity do not target humanity, but groups of human beings,” writes philosopher Paul Dumouchel.13
This dynamic comes to the fore especially with a case such as that of St. Charles in 1904, for the kind of violence exhibited there easily bleeds over into what is typically called a “race riot.” Although there are debates about what, if anything, differentiates a race riot from a lynching, economist Gunnar Myrdal, for one, regarded such riots as “magnified, or mass, lynchings,” saying that the ultimate effect of the riot was the same as the lynching.14 The historian Gilles Vandal, however, makes the following distinction: “Lynching is habitually the killing of one or more persons who is/are seized and illegally executed for an alleged crime, while a riot usually involves the haphazard killing of people at random by a mob under strong excitement.”15 For political scientist Donald L. Horowitz, the race riot (or, to use his term, the deadly ethnic riot) can be defined as “an intense, sudden, though not wholly unplanned, lethal attack by civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic group, the victims chosen because of their group membership.”16
Such a riot consists of four components:
1. “rumors of aggression inflicted by the target group,” often employed “in setting a crowd on a course of mass violence against the target group”;
2. a momentary lull that “occurs mainly in cases where the last precipitant comes on suddenly and the question is what to make of it”;
3. a period of preparation during which would-be rioters begin to arm themselves; and
4. the atrocity killing, the riot itself.17
According to political scientist Ann V. Collins, race riots are “rational, extralegal, relatively short eruptions of white-on-black violence aimed at influencing social change.”18 Such riots only occur when three specific preconditions are met: “certain structural factors—primarily demographic, economic, labor, political, legal, social, and institutional features; cultural framing, or actions and discourse by both whites and blacks to further their own causes; and a precipitating event, the immediate spark that ignites the violence.”19
Vinikas himself regularly uses the term massacre to describe the events at St. Charles, and although the term has not been as thoroughly explored as has lynching, there is a growing body of scholarship working to analyze massacres independent of a genocidal or wartime context. Historians Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, for example, define a massacre as
the killing by one group of people by another group of people, regardless of whether the victims are helpless or not, regardless of age or sex, race, religion and language, and regardless of political, cultural, racial, religious or economic motives for the killing. The killing can be either driven by official state policy or can occur as a result of the state’s lack of control over those groups or collectives on the ground. Massacres, in other words, can occur with or without official state sanctions although the state, especially in the colonial context, often turns a blind eye to the killing of indigenous peoples by groups of settler-colonizers that are geographically removed from the centre of power and over which it has little or no control. The massacre is limited in time, that is, it takes place over hours or days, not months and years, and is generally confined in one geographical place.20
A massacre is typically “a brutal but short event, aimed at intimidating the survivors,” a quality important as we discuss the effects of terror below.21 In addition, massacres are most often driven by the local context, especially in terms of longstanding grievances, but depend for their success (and for perpetrators’ future freedom from punishment) upon “a higher authority to either approve or to turn a blind eye to the killings.”22 In such a context, as Alex J. Bellamy, a professor of peace and conflict studies, notes, perpetrators might credibly “calculate that the risk of potential punishment is outweighed by the utility of mass killing. This, in turn, suggests that they believe they can secure sufficient legitimacy and avoid punishment.”23 They can secure this sufficient legitimacy because a massacre, like a lynching, is often justified by reference to tradition or to the state of public opinion.
Obviously, race riots and massacres meet James Hawdon and John Ryan’s definition of group violence, including both violence by a group and against a group. And we can easily describe a lynching as group violence when it entails the deaths of so many people—in fact, when it does, these three categories start to blend together. However, lynching most often manifested as the murder of a single individual, not a group of people. So how can we speak of lynching as group violence in the same sense when only one person has been targeted for murder?
To speak about violence perpetrated by or against a group, we must first develop an idea of what constitutes a group. This may seem like an exercise in the obvious, but a group, philosophically speaking, is not simply any collection of individuals, and we cannot explore the idea of group violence without setting some framework for identifying perpetrators and victims as part of some unique collectivity. Here it will be interesting to start with philosopher Larry May’s nominalist account, which he first presented in his 1987 book The Morality of Groups and later developed further in his 2010 Genocide: A Normative Account. For May, groups are:
1. composed of individual human persons;
2. who are related to each other by organizational structure, solidarity, or common interests;
3. and who are identifiable both to the members, and to those who observe the members, by characteristic features.
Expanding upon this, May insists that “there must be an especially strong relationship among the members that allows for individuals to act together, namely, that allows for joint action” before we can consider the group as an agent. Too, for a recognized group to exist, there must be “in-group recognition as well as out-group recognition.”24 Or as he restates it later, “It is my contention that when both the perpetrators (out-group) and the victims (in-group) recognize the existence of a group that is being attacked, then this is sufficient for the group to ‘exist’ and be the subject of the sorts of harms that characterize genocide, namely, the intent to destroy the group.”25
May’s nominalism has attracted its share of criticism, perhaps most notably from philosopher Berel Lang, who asserts that May “explicitly denies not only intrinsic but even historical differences in the roles of different group structures, asserting that no particular groups are more important than any others.”26 For example, in some contexts, people may varyingly value their respective ethnic, racial, religious, or national identities above others; in fact, these various identities can come into conflict in certain situations, requiring that their relative ranking be reevaluated. For instance, individuals might choose to downgrade their linguistic identities in order to assimilate better in a new society, or they might upgrade their religious identities after experiencing, or seeing others experience, persecution for belonging to the same groups. Moreover, May’s definition, according to Lang, ignores the fact that group identity often precedes, or at least heavily informs, individual identity, and thus “if individual identity is even minimally dependent on group relations, the latter would have a measure of reality that the individual alone does not.”27 The fact that language is only acquired in a group setting—and that language is typically acquired before our long-term memories start consolidating, and thus before we begin to possess a fully developed sense of individuality—speaks to how group identity can precede the individual. Finally, May’s nominalism fails to account for the continual challenge any group identity faces, such as what literary theorist Patrick Colm Hogan terms “practical alienation” and “situational identification.” Practical alienation constitutes a challenge to “the categorical identification on which we based our initial expectations of shared practical identity,” such as encountering linguistic differences among those with whom we share a national bond.28 Situational identification entails a disruption to categorical identity due to a smooth interaction with a person or persons from a definite out-group, which “leads us to question our difference from members of the out-group defined by that category.29 In other words, group identity, when the group becomes sufficiently big, experiences perpetual challenges at the individual or subgroup level as to the ultimate relevance of that identity, which raises questions about May’s third point regarding group identity, that members are easily identifiable to other members.
It should also be noted that May’s nominalist account does not, in fact, account for the social reality (or unreality) of racial groups—something vitally important for any exploration of lynching as group violence. Sure, racial groups are composed of individuals, but those individuals are not necessarily united by any sort of organizational structure, sense of solidarity, or common interests. Moreover, as strange as it might sound, they are not necessarily, as May put it, “identifiable both to the members, and to those who observe the members, by characteristic features.” Race, according to historian Ariela J. Gross, “was created and re-created every day through the workings of community institutions and individuals in daily life.”30 Nowhere does this fact shine most brightly than in antebellum freedom suits, in which a slave sued for freedom on the basis of being white, such as the successful freedom suit of Abby Guy in Arkansas in the 1850s. The physical attributes of Guy and others in her situation did not stop them from being enslaved; the group identity attributed to such individuals—that they were Black and thus slaves—was practically tautological, for would they be enslaved if they were not Black? Maybe the existence of a trail of paperwork helped to reinforce a belief that the object of purchase had sufficient African “blood” to be a slave, but paperwork alone was never enough to stifle the neurosis that was built up around issues of racial identity. As Gross writes,
White Northerners may have been horrified by the idea of enslaved whites, but white Southerners were more concerned about the opposite possibility: What if people of African descent were lurking unknown in their midst, enjoying all the privileges of whiteness despite their hidden Black essence? Worse, what if race were simply unknowable? How many people of “negro blood” might even now be passing as white, turning those who accepted them into fools?31
And as Mark Twain demonstrates in his 1892 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which a slave woman exchanges her child with the child of her owner, one’s racial identity (as defined by law and society) could remain unknown even to the individual. This creates a case in which we have legal definitions of group identity (in this case race) that violate May’s nominalism, for that identity can remain unknown to both self and other. Despite such individuals successfully performing one particular racial identity for their entire lives, a slight change in circumstance can demand, according to the rules of society and law, a fundamental change in that person’s station. Thus does philosopher Paul C. Taylor insist that races are social constructs, “things that we humans create in the transactions that define social life. Specifically, they are the probabilistically defined populations that result from the white supremacist determination to link appearance and ancestry to social location and life chances.”32 And race, as an oppressive construct, cannot be the property of any one individual but must be the property of the group, for oppression, according to philosopher David Livingstone Smith, is “an intrinsically political concept, because it pertains to the distribution and deployment of power among whole groups rather than between individuals. People are never oppressed as individuals. They’re oppressed because of their real or imagined group identity (race, gender, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or any number of other things).”33
Philosopher Claudia Card also raises a challenge to May’s nominalism by exploring the possibility that group identity can remain invisible to an individual from the dominant group until it is revealed through a challenge to prevailing hierarchies. As she writes:
Suppose those who benefit rather than lose from a practice have less motivation to notice the benefit until it is jeopardized. Suppose also that those who are harmed have more motivation to notice and eventually reflect on sources. It would not be surprising, then, if men were not motivated to identify themselves in terms of their sex or gender except when there was a danger of being perceived or treated as women. It would be easier for most men not to be aware of their conditioning by sexual divisions of labor and compulsory heterosexuality, which, of course, limit their options, too, but in ways that tend to benefit their development or autonomy. Not noticing, one takes the status quo to be natural, normal, and defends it against attack.34
In other words, a group may not be aware of itself as a group until its status stands at risk, for status cannot be shared without diminishing its importance, its relevance. As James Hawdon writes, “The inexpansible nature of status makes preserving the group’s integrity paramount; thus, efforts to clearly mark and protect group boundaries intensify. To fail to do so risks diluting the importance of membership; it risks inflation. Because status is expansible, if others gain it, those with it lose it. Thus, those of higher status fight to maintain the status hierarchy that provides them with privileges.”35 This will tie in directly to our application of René Girard’s mimetic theory to the phenomenon of lynching in chapter 5; for the moment, it will suffice to cite theologian Wolfgang Palaver’s observation that “the disappearance of difference—physical or metaphysical—results in an increase in the frequency and intensity of conflict between the groups. Conflicts between equals have the greatest risk of turning violent, because the social limitations that normally prevent or channel mimetic desire are missing.”36
In the sense that it produces the possibility of violence, group identity can be regarded as conflictual and dialectic. A group consciousness emerges among a people through a shared sense of oppression or persecution, and their resistance to that, in turn, causes the advantaged group to feel its status jeopardized, thus producing a shared group identity as they endeavor to maintain traditional privileges. In the American context, Blackness is defined against whiteness as much as whiteness is defined against Blackness. Or as historian Patrick Wolfe puts it, race “is a process, not an ontology, its varying modalities so many dialectical symptoms of the ever-shifting hegemonic balance between those with a will to colonise and those with a will to be free, severally racialised in relation to each other.”37
Group identity exists dialectically, and acts of violence may well be part of that dialect. But can we speak of lynching as an act of group violence in both senses that Hawdon and Ryan specify—violence both by a group and against a group? Author Jan Voogd notes the similarities between large-scale riots and lynchings, writing, “Both lynching mobs and rioting mobs used precipitating events as excuses to try to justify their violence, and in both cases these excuses were usually an alleged crime of social trespass of some sort of black individual.” However, he differentiates between them in terms of their intended targets: “The direct target of a lynching was the individual(s), and the community was targeted indirectly. By contrast, a riot targeted the community directly.”38 But this distinction assumes that the mob makes such a distinction itself. According to the philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen, “There is no identity to be had for the single individual apart from that bestowed and secured by a given community and, in times of upheaval and conflict, endangered by some given other community.”39 And Lang argues that even when an act of violence is directed toward a specific individual, we can still see that act as an example of group violence if said individual “is attacked not for anything he himself is or does, but for his relation to a group, a relation over which he has no control; the reason for the attack is not personal interest, gain, or inclination, but the principle that membership in the group itself suffices to exclude him from the domain of humanity.”40
And indeed, we will follow Lang’s line of argument, for lynching often did not simply entail the murder of an individual—rather, it encompassed a range of activities that very specifically targeted Black communities as a whole. As the journalist Ziya Us Salam observes regarding lynching in twenty-first-century India, “It strikes at the very identity of the community. It is far more demoralizing than the traditional communal violence, but serves the same purpose as riots did in the years gone by: to engender a climate of distrust and fear.”41 To say that a lynching was accomplished the moment the victim stopped breathing constitutes a tremendous distortion of the historical record. Let us turn to a few examples.
On March 11, 1894, a group of African Americans were traveling from the community of Marche back to their homes in nearby Little Rock when “they found the decayed body of a mulatto woman probably about 30 years of age suspended from the limb of a tree.” Upon closer inspection, the woman seemed to have been dead for several days, and on her chest was a placard bearing the words, “If anybody cuts this body down they will share the same fate.” As the Arkansas Gazette reported, “The woman is supposed to have been lynched, but when, by whom, and for what reason no one is able to state.”42
That fact can make this particular murder perhaps a greater source of terror than a more public lynching. After all, lynchings were publicly justified as a response to particular misdeeds—murder, rape, theft, and so forth—and although the reality was that lynch mobs could attack individuals not associated with the crime at all, or that sometimes people were lynched to eliminate competition rather than serve the cause of justice, at least the reference to criminality gave those in the targeted communities a baseline of expected behavior. In other words, the mob meant lynching to be pedagogical, to be instructive to those witnessing it, or even simply reading about it or hearing about it in the days and years to come. But what “lesson” can this 1894 lynching provide? The identity of the woman, the identity of the perpetrators, the reason for the murder—all of these remain unknown. Were the victim a man, certain assumptions might be made about whom he wronged or “outraged,” but the fact that it was a dead woman at the end of the rope makes it more difficult to relate to the typical motivations for lynching. So all that remains is the terrible awareness that maybe nothing at all can prevent the mob or posse from showing up at your door, protected by absolute impunity; that such a murder can occur for no good reason whatsoever but, rather, strikes like lightning from a clear blue sky. That is the nature of terror. And this lesson is for everybody.
More often, the mob was not so oblique about its threat to the entire Black community. On the night of Saturday, December 18, 1909, a Black man named George Bailey reportedly entered a saloon near the Prairie County town of Biscoe in southeastern Arkansas, where he asked bartender Matt Todd for a gallon of whiskey on credit. Todd “told the negro that he would have to see the proprietor of the place” about the request, after which Bailey went outside and shot at Todd through the window, hitting him in the arm and “shattering the bone just below the elbow.” Bailey escaped but was arrested the next day and brought to the jail at nearby DeValls Bluff. According to the Arkansas Gazette, “public feeling” against Black people had already been “greatly aroused” the previous week after an African American broke into a boxcar and “made a murderous attack upon a sleeping white man, nearly cutting the latters [sic] throat in an attempt to rob him.” In fact, a mob had been gathered to lynch this unnamed person, “but cooler counsel prevailed.”43
Bailey’s alleged assault, however, “stirred up new feeling” among those who “evidently decided that they would take no chances on having their plans thwarted again.” A lynch mob broke into the jail that Sunday evening and fired into Bailey’s body fifteen times. Despite all of this shooting, the Gazette reported, somewhat incredulously, that the murder of Bailey “was accomplished so quietly that persons sleeping a block away were not awakened.” The sheriff was even said to have had “no intimation of the affair” until he opened up the jail and discovered the body.44
But Bailey’s murder was not just the occasion to exact vengeance upon an individual miscreant. After the murder, rumors circulated “that the negroes had held secret meetings during the day.” In response to these rumors, “bands of armed white citizens patrolled the streets . . . firing occasional shots by way of warning. Rope nooses were placed over the doors of negro residences.” In other words, a campaign of terror was unleashed—and it apparently worked. As the Gazette noted: “The blacks, if they had any intentions of starting trouble, appear to have been awed by these measures. Hardly a negro is to be seen upon the streets tonight. Many of them left town during the day. Others have disappeared and are supposed to be hiding in the nearby country. It is not believed that there will be further trouble.”45
In 1916, when an armed posse lynched Will Warren in rural Garland County in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas, they did not confine themselves to outrages upon his body alone. Reports are vague on the exact nature of Warren’s alleged crime, with the Hot Springs New Era explaining that the man “became engaged in a quarrel with some white boys,” which was then “taken up by the parents of the boys.” During the course of this conflict, Warren apparently locked himself in his house, but the armed posse fired through the doors and windows to kill him. However, the feelings of the mob spilled over onto the predominantly Black settlement, located between the communities of Buckville and Cedar Glades, where Warren lived. As the Arkansas Gazette reported, Warren “was one of the leading negroes at the settlement. His alleged insult toward the white boys caused a general ill feeling against the settlement and in an attempt to ‘get even’ the white men burned the negro church after killing Warren and burning his house.”46
When the activist organization Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) of Montgomery, Alabama, released the first edition of their report Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, in 2015, they described lynching as “violent and public acts of torture that traumatized Black people throughout the country,” acts that were “largely tolerated by state and federal officials.”47 The terminology employed by EJI, “terror lynchings,” is not one broadly accepted by scholars, and their description of lynching as an explicitly public activity ignores the fact that many such murders were often perpetrated quietly, in the dead of night, by a small, private mob, and that the display of the body or public performance of the murder was not necessary to inspire terror in the Black population at large. Often, disappearances could be just as frightening. After all, Emmett Till’s body was never meant to be found, and many local African Americans—and whites—spoke in 1955 of the Tallahatchie River, where his corpse was located, as being full of Black bodies that had been dumped there discreetly.
However, EJI’s approach does reveal a reality about lynching that earlier scholarly definitions often overlooked, those that emphasized the support of the community or the pretext of service to tradition. Such an emphasis may function within a more capacious definition of lynching, one that attempts to encompass all its manifestations, from frontier justice to racial terror. But white-on-Black lynching had the support only of the white community and was perpetrated on the pretext of very specific traditions of segregation and oppression. What can we say about the effect upon the Black community, especially when the act of lynching exceeded the “punishment” of the individual targeted? According to the EJI report, “The practice of terrorizing an entire African American community after lynching one alleged ‘wrongdoer’ demonstrates that Southern lynching during this era was not to attain ‘popular justice’ or retaliation for crime. Rather, these lynchings were designed for broad impact—to send a message of domination, to instill fear, and sometimes to drive African Americans from the community altogether.”48 These lynchings, moreover, constituted but part of a broader tapestry of objective, or structural, violence; this will be explored more fully in chapter 2, but it will be sufficient for now to note that this entailed the use of terrorism “to relegate African Americans to a state of second-class citizenship and economic disadvantage that would last for generations after emancipation and create far-reaching consequences.”49
How does terror serve the function of relegating whole Black populations to second-class status? According to anthropologists Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, terror is
based on an interlocking feedback between memory and anticipation, the same nexus that makes possible continuity in human interaction generally. Here, however, the feedback is based on a sense of rupture. Terror consists precisely in intrusions into expectations about security, making moot the mundane processes on which social life otherwise depends. Repeated ruptures shift people’s perceptions and render them progressively more anxious and vulnerable to disturbance.50
For example, an abused child may flinch at the raising of a hand or clenching of a fist precisely because he does not know whether a strike is forthcoming; the pattern of abuse has ruptured that feedback between memory and anticipation. A slap, a hit, may be possible at any moment, and so one needs to observe the signs constantly and never become comfortable. Many abusers revel in their ability to strike terror in their charges with just the slightest twitch of a hand.51 Terror, according to Strathern and Stewart, does not merely rest upon the initial act of violence; “it rests also on the great multiplication of reactions to these acts and the fears that these acts arouse in people’s imaginations.”52 Or as anthropologist Veena Das writes:
It is not only violence experienced on one’s body in these cases but also the sense that one’s access to context is lost that constitutes a sense of being violated. The fragility of the social becomes embedded in a temporality of anticipation since one ceases to trust that context is in place. The effect produced on the registers of the virtual and the potential, of fear that is real but not necessarily actualized in events, comes to constitute the ecology of fear in everyday life. Potentiality here does not have the sense of something that is waiting at the door of reality to make an appearance as it were, but rather as that which is already present.53
For Claudia Card, a form of terrorism like lynching, in mirroring how abuse functions, “creates an atmosphere of grave uncertainty and insecurity in the face of what could be imminent danger. Uncertainty and insecurity can make fears reasonable.”54 After all, there was no one thing, one specific act, for which mobs lynched people. Mobs often justified their actions by reference to the “outrage” perpetrated upon a white woman, by which they meant rape, but mobs just as easily lynched men for carrying out acknowledged consensual relationships, as we will explore in chapter 5. Moreover, a misunderstood word could be taken as an insult, an act of self-defense could be interpreted as “insolence” or a potential “uprising,” or a man walking home at night could be mistaken for the criminal everyone is seeking. All of this served to create a collective rupture in the feedback loop between memory and anticipation, a rupture that facilitated the intimidation of whole Black communities. Vinikas emphasizes this point when he writes, “The southern strain of mob murder was not just antilegal, it was often acausal as well. That was the essence of its terror. To argue that a southern lynching was predictable—the logical outcome of perceived transgression—is to miss the essential didactic message of the phenomenon in maintaining white supremacy.”55 This is what makes terror such a potent tool in the hands of the ruling castes and classes, and is why terror has often been the first and last resort of regimes seeking to sideline any challenge to their rule. As historian Thomas C. Wright observes, “The intent of terrorism by the state is to eliminate some or all of the people who are considered actual or potential enemies of the regime, and to marginalize those not eliminated through the fear that terrorism instills.”56 But the fear fostered by the regular rupture inflicted by regimes of terror exists at an extreme, according to Card: “It tends to be incapacitating, makes us less able to resist, focuses our energies non-productively, interferes with the ability to think and plan. In these ways it undermines competence.”57
Probably the most notorious use of lynching as a means to threaten the entire Black community occurred on May 4, 1927, in Little Rock. And the person whom the mob lynched likely had nothing whatsoever to do with any crime committed.
On April 30, the body of an eleven-year-old white girl, Floella McDonald, was found in the belfry of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Little Rock by the church’s Black janitor, Frank Dixon. Police immediately began questioning Dixon, as well as his teenage son Lonnie, grilling them for hours, in addition to rounding up some of their known associates. The following day, the police announced that they had an oral confession to the murder from Lonnie, though, as historian Stephanie Harp notes, this was obtained only “after between sixteen and twenty-four hours of questioning, most of it endured while standing and without food or legal counsel.”58 According to this confession, Lonnie lured the young Floella into the belfry with a promise of gifts, raped her, and then hit her on the head with a brick; however, he repudiated his confession the next day, perhaps returning to his senses after a respite from the relentless interrogation.
Once news was released that Lonnie had confessed, a mob numbering in the thousands formed outside city hall, demanding the blood of both Dixons, but the police chief managed to sneak the two away in separate cars for safekeeping in separate jails far from Little Rock. The mob also broke into the state penitentiary to search for the Dixons but, when they heard that the father and son had been successfully spirited away from Little Rock, broke up to drive to nearby communities in an attempt to search their jails. The mob spirit generated by the police investigation into Floella McDonald’s death would serve as the catalyst for the lynching of a man wholly unconnected to this affair, a man named John Carter.
What exactly happened on the morning of May 4, 1927, will likely never be known. All that is known of the precipitating affair is that two white women, Mrs. B. E. Stewart and her daughter Glennie, were driving a wagon into Little Rock from southwest of the city when they encountered an African American man walking along the road. As Harp writes:
Greatly varying reports said that he asked them the location of a bridge, or whether they were going to town, or if they had any whiskey; that he ran and caught the wagon, jumped in, and grabbed the reins; that either he threatened to kill the women or he beat them with an iron bar; that Glennie fought back with a whip, that he knocked both of them out of the wagon or that they fell or jumped, and that Mrs. Stewart broke her arm; that he threw rocks at them, or chased one or both, and caught up with Glennie—or her mother—and attacked with a tree limb, and beat the mother unconscious.59
And those are just the variations of the story within the white-owned press; a body of oral history from Little Rock’s Black community paints an even more diverse picture, often of a man attempting to help the women regain the control of their cart. Either way, though, a Black man was found in the presence of screaming white women and fled. Word spread. The sheriff showed up with four carloads of deputies to begin the search, and soon some fifteen hundred volunteers from Little Rock were beating the bushes in search of their prey.
Eventually, the mob captured a man later identified as John Carter and sent for Glennie Stewart to identify him. When she did, the “volunteers” seized Carter, taking him from the officers assembled there, and hanged him from a telephone pole for about two minutes before firing about two hundred or three hundred shots into his body. The crowd dispersed at the urging of the sheriff (who later claimed he arrived after the deed was done, although witnesses placed him there the entire time) but later reassembled and voted to take the body into Little Rock and burn it there. The procession of cars dragged Carter’s body, unchallenged, through the main thoroughfares of Little Rock—even driving by the county courthouse, city hall, and police headquarters—before finally stopping at the intersection of Ninth and Broadway in what was then the heart of the Black business district, home to the national headquarters of the Mosaic Templars of America, a Black fraternal organization. “There,” Harp writes, “they placed Carter’s body at the intersection of two streetcar lines, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire, using pews from nearby Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Little Rock’s largest African American church.”60 The mob, estimated at between four thousand and seven thousand, went riot for hours until the National Guard was called out to restore order. While all of this was going on, most of the police were apparently hiding in the basement of their headquarters, although some sources reported seeing officers mingling with the mob without attempting to stop the violence at all.61 In many stories of lynching, the role of the police is ambiguous—often does a guard or deputy claim, after the fact, to have been overpowered by a mob; often does a sheriff disappear as rumors of impending violence hit the air; often do the collective law enforcement agencies completely fail to investigate a lynching at all. But it would be a mistake to write this off as the aggregate result of bad actors; as political scientist Santana Khanikar observes, a focus upon corrupt or even evil individual police personnel means that “the institutional structures and ideologies of the organization are not questioned.”62
As we will discuss in chapter 3, the site chosen for a lynching often bears significance for the mob. In this case, the mob killed Carter near where he was found but then decided to extend the narrative, to showcase the body and its destruction for a particular audience—the city’s most successful African Americans. Why? They were not responsible for Carter’s actions in any way, at least objectively. However, mob violence operates under a different dynamic, namely what Vetlesen calls “the logic of generic attribution,” which reduces each individual to a member of a group and thus holds the group responsible for the actions of the individual. As he explains:
What generic attribution does is to collectivize agency and its various properties and dimensions, be they moral, legal, or spatiotemporal. . . . When human agency is thoroughly collectivized, in-group differences evaporate and inter-group differences are polarized in the extreme. Once collectivized, human agency is conceived in such a way that the individual is compelled to answer for everything “his” group does, has done, or is said to be about to do; conversely, the group is made to answer for everything a single individual member of it has done, does, or is said to contemplate doing. . . . The guilt of one group and the victimhood of the other are both eternalized. . . . Such eternalization of victimhood goes hand in hand with the essentialization of identity that is a salient feature of genocidal ideologies.63
The neighborhood of West Ninth Street in Little Rock was the center of Black middle-class life, complete with entertainment venues, fraternal organizations, law offices, and more.64 Therefore, in many ways, it compounded the insult to burn John Carter’s body there, to signify a lack of recognition of the class differences between this man and those who lived and labored at West Ninth.
While Carter’s body was taken to a Black neighborhood for ritual degradation, to serve as a warning to all African Americans, other mobs had previously conducted, with great deliberation, lynchings in Black neighborhoods, even if the victim had no connection with the people who lived there. A noteworthy case of this, which occurred in the community of Stuttgart in 1916, will be explored further in chapter 3, but that same year, a man named Frank Dodd was lynched in DeWitt in southeastern Arkansas, in a manner that speaks of Vetlesen’s “logic of generic attribution.” According to the Arkansas Gazette, Dodd encountered two white women riding a wagon to DeWitt and asked for a ride. Once installed in the wagon, he “began to talk insultingly” to one of the women and refused their demands that he leave until a local farmer, John Lacotts, succeeded in driving him off. However, Dodd “followed until Lacotts had gone and then continued to annoy the young women.” According to the Arkansas Democrat, however, Dodd stood accused of “attempting to assault” a single woman driving alone and following her for half a mile “before her cries attracted attention of persons, who frightened the negro.” Dodd was swiftly arrested and jailed in DeWitt, but as stories spread about the incident, “the officers hid the negro because of fear of mob violence.” Thinking that the community had calmed down enough, the officers returned Dodd to the jail, but they had apparently been watched, for a mob quickly formed and forced the jailer at gunpoint to deliver Dodd to them. As the Gazette reported, “The negro was taken quietly to the negro section of town and hanged to a tree. Several dozen bullets were fired into the body, but few white residents were aroused by the noise. . . . Negroes in town were greatly excited this morning, but the town was quiet tonight.”65
Let us return to the thirteen lynched in St. Charles. Although the Arkansas Gazette, in its reporting on the affair, was vague about the questions of where, when, how, and why the violence occurred, the newspaper rather interestingly made sure to list every Black victim by name: Abe Bailey, Mack Baldwin, Will Baldwin, Garrett Flood, Randall Flood, Aaron Hinton, Will Madison, Charley Smith, Jim Smith, Perry Carter, Kellis Johnson, Henry Griffin, and Walker Griffin. This might give the impression that it was only individuals who were sought out for extermination. But notice how many of those men share last names: Baldwin, Flood, Smith, and Griffin. Now, it is no longer simply individuals who are the targets of violence but, instead, possible families, and a family would meet any definition of a group. But even if the Gazette wanted to emphasize in its reporting that only individuals were targeted, a later editorial on the subject, once the shooting had subsided, should serve to erase all doubt as to the nature of the violence employed in this corner of southeastern Arkansas:
For the sake of the good name of the state of Arkansas, let us hope that the race war between whites and blacks in Arkansas county is at an end.
The last reports received said that thirteen negroes had been killed since the trouble began, but it was thought that peace had been restored.
The negroes threw down the gauntlet to the authorities and the whites promptly took it up. Wherever the negroes take the position that they won’t submit to arrest, that their weight of numbers gives them the right or the power to do as they please, a conflict between the two races is inevitable.
But it should be remembered that a race war in which thirteen men are killed on one side is a perfect feast for the big newspapers all over the United States, especially for certain ones north of the Mason and Dixon line that seem to delight to feature something that paints Southern life in a bad way.66
The “negroes threw down the gauntlet” and the whites “took it up,” creating “a conflict between the two races.” The editorial even dispenses with the usual rhetoric about specific “bad negroes” and, instead, assumes a wholly dualistic worldview that essentializes the two groups and presumes an ongoing relationship of conflict between them. The editorial writer even fails to appreciate the irony of African Americans believing that “their weight of numbers gives them the right or the power to do as they please” in the face of reporting about how a white mob kidnapped five Black men from a jail where they had been securely held, unarmed, and subsequently butchered them without fear of arrest themselves. But then, as we have seen, that sense of mob impunity was a standard feature of every lynching, whether it was ravenous posses roaming the woods around St. Charles or a smaller group of vigilantes quietly murdering a young woman in the dead of night and leaving her body to hang and rot as a warning to all.