But the truth is that if division and violence define war, the world has always been at war and always will be . . .
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity1
ON MAY 17, 1909, Governor George Washington Donaghey of Arkansas signed into law Act 258, titled “An Act to Prevent Mob Violence or Lynching within the State of Arkansas.” Although it was occasionally described in the newspapers of the era as an anti-lynching law, Act 258 was nothing of the kind. Instead, it required that, “whenever the crime of rape, attempt to commit rape, murder or any other crime, calculated to arouse the passions of the people to an extent that the sheriff of the county believes that mob violence will be committed,” the sheriff was to notify the district or circuit judge in order to request “a special term of court in order that the person or persons charged with such crime or crimes may be brought to immediate trial.” If the judge in question found that “the apprehensions and belief of the sheriff are well founded,” it was his responsibility to arrange for an immediate trial, to take place in no fewer than ten days from the receipt of such notice. If the circuit judge was ill or absent, then the lawyers practicing in his circuit could elect a special judge to perform the necessary duties for this particular trial. Citizens numbering at least seven could, in the face of the sheriff’s refusal to issue such a request to the local judge, demand that he do so in writing, and if he then failed to do his duty, said sheriff could be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor and fined between $200 and $1,000. Of course, there was no such fine for any sheriff who let his prisoner be taken by the mob, nor any mechanism established for better prosecuting members of any lynch mob. All this bill did was expedite a trial during the narrow time frame when the atmosphere of mob justice still prevailed. This was no anti-lynching law.2
Act 258 was originally written by Father John Michael Lucey of Pine Bluff and was introduced in the Arkansas Senate on January 25, 1909, by Senator Hardin K. Toney. Lucey, who was described by the Arkansas Gazette rather sympathetically as “one of the best known of the Catholic clergy of the South, and an ex-Confederate soldier,” appeared before the Judiciary Committee the following month to speak up for his bill. One member of the committee did note that calling a grand jury, indicting a person, and then holding a trial while local sentiment was still inflamed seemed a questionable legal practice, while another member, apparently less sympathetic to the right of those on trial, observed that nothing “could be enacted into law constitutionally that would prevent a defendant in a criminal proceeding from taking a change of venue to another part of the judicial district.”3
Lucey wrote to the Gazette a few days later to defend his bill against the first charge, not by defending the ability of a circuit court to hold a genuinely fair trial so close in time to the alleged criminal deed, but instead by insisting that the immediate enaction of legal measures would be the best means to prevent a lynching: “Is there a better chance for the ends of justice to be served by a mob, who will decide the whole matter in a few hours, than by a court of justice that would be allowed ten days, with all the forms of Grand Jury, Petit Jury, lawyers for defense and for prosecution, and a learned judge presiding?” He also implied that the (white) citizenry only performed lynchings due to the perceived necessity of action and found no pleasure in the deed at all: “On the contrary, it is as repulsive a piece of business as can be conceived for men of high character to imbrue their hands in the blood of a negro brute. They are impelled to do this ugly work solely because there is no other means at hand of meting out proper justice. They would be rejoiced if the judiciary of the state would relieve them of the fearful alternative.”4
To back up his point, Lucey referenced a recent case in which, he claimed, a lynching was averted in the Arkansas community of Hampton by promise of a speedy trial. The previous December, two African Americans, brothers Henry and Wilson Pickett, had fled Calhoun County in south central Arkansas following the murder of local planter Charles Abbott and the shooting of his brother, county treasurer F. M. Abbott. The Pickett brothers were arrested in Monroe, Louisiana, in early 1909 and returned to Arkansas, but authorities had to spirit them away from Hampton on January 20, 1909, after a mob of some hundred people gathered due to rumors (later proven true) that the defense attorney was seeking a change of venue. The Pickett brothers were scheduled to go on trial on March 29 in El Dorado, located in neighboring Union County, which abuts the Louisiana state line. However, on the day of the trial, a mob of seventy-five men left Hampton for El Dorado, intending to storm the jail and lynch the brothers. Local authorities in El Dorado, hearing of the coming mob, contacted Governor Donaghey, and the governor dispatched twenty members of the state guard to the city. The troops were posted around the jail, and the mob lingered until the evening before returning home, not willing to take a chance against trained troops. (Rumors that the pair were lynched, however, did make it into the Arkansas Gazette.) A few days later, the Pickett brothers were put on trial and sentenced to twenty-one years in the state penitentiary.5 For Lucey to claim that this sequence of events justified his faith in expedited trials was a stretch, to say the least.
The Lucey bill passed the Senate on April 8, 1909; it passed the House on May 12 by a vote of 54 to 24 and went to the governor’s desk for his signature.6 On the same day the bill passed the House, the Arkansas Gazette reported that one Abe Green, “a negro, 35 years of age,” had narrowly escaped a lynching. Green had been arrested on May 10 in the community of Formosa, located in north central Arkansas, “on a charge of committing an assault upon the 13-year-old daughter of a prominent farmer in that section.” He was subsequently positively identified by the reported victim, Ura Webb, daughter of J. M. Webb, and taken to Clinton, the county seat. Given that the people of Formosa “were greatly aroused,” officers removed Green to the jail in Marshall, located in Searcy County, two counties to the west, in order to prevent a lynching. Sure enough, despite being apprised of Green’s relocation, several residents of Formosa travelled to Clinton “to make an investigation,” and the Gazette reported: “There is no doubt that Green would have been lynched if he had been kept in the jail” at Clinton. The initial report ended thusly: “Efforts are being made to get into communication with Judge B. B. Hudgins and it is probable that a special term of court will be held.” Green went on trial in early June, and his jury debated forty minutes before sentencing him to die by hanging on July 9.7 However, on appeal, the Arkansas Supreme Court issued a writ of error and, just days before the scheduled hanging, granted a stay of execution as they heard his appeal. In October, the court reduced his sentence to twenty-one years in prison, ruling that “the facts did not warrant a conviction on any charge more serious than attempted criminal assault.”8
Both the Pickett and the Green cases demonstrate that authorities had the means to prevent lynchings without promising expedited trials, contrary to Lucey’s assertions. In Green’s case, the removal of the suspect from the area where the alleged crime was committed seems to have played a significant role. In the Pickett case, a relocation combined with a show of state authority helped to preserve the life, if not the liberty, of the defendant.
But Lucey’s 1909 bill was, arguably, intended less to prevent lynchings than it was to prevent more radical legislation, such as that introduced into the Arkansas General Assembly two years prior by State Senator Kie Oldham of Pulaski County. Senator Oldham described his as a “drastic bill” when he introduced it on January 22, 1907, and the Arkansas Gazette, the state’s largest newspaper, agreed with the description. The bill required that any sheriff or other law enforcement officer, “having in his possession a man charged with a crime, and against whom the sentiment of the community is inflamed,” protect said person from the mob or face, at minimum, a $1,000 fine and six-month sentence in the state penitentiary—although an exemption was made in cases where said officer was wounded. But the potential responsibility extended also to members of the general public, for the bill provided officers the right to summon help to defend prisoners and, likewise, applied the same potential penalties to those individuals. Oldham had also offered a bill earlier that session requiring expedited trials, to take place within ten days, for those persons “against whom the wrath of any community was aroused.” During the subsequent debate in the Arkansas Senate Judiciary Committee of this measure to suppress mob violence, Oldham reiterated that his bill was indeed “drastic” but asked the committee “whether we had rather have this kind of legislation or lynchings in Arkansas.” In response, Senator Howard Robb of Desha County (located in southeastern Arkansas and described by the Gazette as “one of those ‘black’ counties”) insisted that “while he had never participated in a mob or advocated mob law, yet there were instances in which it was to be condoned when the fair women of the commonwealth were made the victims of a black brute’s fiendish desire.”9
The Judiciary Committee advanced Oldham’s bill to expedite trials for those “against whom the community is aroused,” which required a sheriff or other official in charge of such a prisoner to notify the circuit court judge, who would then be authorized to convene a special session.10 This bill was ultimately defeated in the Arkansas House of Representatives on the charge “that it was revolutionary and would place the sheriff or any county in an attitude of dictating to the judiciary.”11 However, prior to the bill’s defeat, Father Lucey wrote the Gazette to endorse the first of Oldham’s two bills, the one demanding expedited trials as a means of reducing mob violence, while insisting that, regarding the second bill, “I am not yet qualified to pass judgment upon it, not having weighed the matter as I would like.” He went on to state (and it is worth quoting at length):
I sympathize very deeply with Senator Robb and a few others who may oppose the bill to which I refer, but I cannot agree with them that there will arise instances in which lynching is justifiable. An instance may arise when it will be allowable to rise up against the government, but that is revolution. There is no instance where it is contemplated that men shall willfully and overtly break a law of the land and still remain immune under the law. It is a matter of great surprise that a man can take his place as a lawmaker in a legislative chamber in soberness and sincerity while believing in his heart that men are not obliged to obey any laws there enacted. Such sentiments might possibly be entertained outside of a legislature, but they should not be tolerated within it.
For the life of me I cannot understand what our civil government is for if not to afford citizens security of home and protection in the ordinary pursuits of life. The state of Arkansas makes these promises to her citizens and yet when the Supreme moment arrives when a horrible monster invades the home and deflowers its fairest possessions, the civil government stands listlessly by and declares that it should do nothing. There is nothing in the world that is so grateful to a family in dire distress as to know that they have the fullest sympathy of friends and neighbors. Why should they not also have the fullest sympathy of that paternal government which receives their taxes and talks so glibly when elections are at hand and has so many judges and officers in high places. If the people fully knew that they had the fullest sympathy of the civil government in their hour of terrible sorrow and that the officers of that government would make every sacrifice that any human power could make to vindicate justice and afford relief, they would apply to that government as readily as they now apply to friends and neighbors and they would not imbrue their hands and involve their dearest friends in the sinful and gross procedure of barbarous times and savage peoples, that of burning at the stake or hanging a human creature.12
The reader will notice that Lucey, despite his plea for legal protections covering those who would otherwise be lynched, nonetheless depicts potential victims of lynching in the exact same manner as do those who support lethal vigilantism. Or as rhetorician Ersula J. Ore has written, “Such discourse rhetorically situating lynchings as a consequence of black debauchery worked to combat accusations of white barbarity by casting blacks as morally unfit for society.”13 Lucey describes a potential victim of lynching as “a horrible monster” who “invades the home and deflowers its fairest possessions,” evoking the “Black beast rapist” myth used to justify so many lynchings. His plea of security for citizens does not extend to the potential victims of lynching because he does not conceive them as citizens. Instead, it is those who experience such home invasions at the hands of a “horrible monster” who are accorded the “fullest sympathy” of the government to whom they pay taxes. Moreover, this “paternal government” is the best authority to “vindicate justice and afford relief,” and if people could accept that, then they would not need to resort to lynching, because the government would, essentially, take the burden upon themselves to avenge its suffering citizens.
Lucey, apparently, cannot imagine—or does not intend—such a government affording the potential lynching victim an adequate defense and, horror of horrors, even finding him innocent based upon the evidence at hand. As historian Michael J. Pfeifer has written, legislators across the nation “reshaped the death penalty in the early twentieth century to make capital punishment more efficient and more racial, achieving a compromise between the observations of legal forms long emphasized by due process advocates and the lethal, ritualized retribution long sought by rough justice supporters.”14 Moreover, Lucey’s bill and the rhetoric he employed to defend it essentially conceded that the “passions” of the people were justified when inflamed in response to certain crimes. This rhetoric applies to the “negro,” to the “horrible monster,” what literary theorist Patrick Colm Hogan has dubbed an “attribution of absolute moral culpability,” one that frees the citizenry to respond with what butchery it will. That is, the first act of violence “was a free and purely immoral choice, while the response was, in some sense, not free but compelled by the initiating act. Thus, the apparent immorality of the response does not taint the group responding, but accrues to the immorality of the initiating act.”15 Or as researcher Sonja Schillings states, “Whoever claims legitimate violence marks something as worthy of protection—say, a community—and simultaneously formulates the expectation that even those who are (potentially) the target of violence accept this community’s basic worthiness of protection. In this sense, an act of legitimate violence does not begin but ends the conflict; it simply reacts to a violent attack that transgresses a boundary and everything ‘behind’ it.”16
Four lynchings were recorded in Arkansas in the year 1909—two of them occurring in the weeks following the passage of Act 258. The first victim, Lovett Davis, was arrested in Pine Bluff for breaking into the home of Knowlton Padgett and choking his sixteen-year-old niece, Amy Holmes, on the morning of May 23. Likely to prevent a lynching, the officers responding to the assault did not circulate the story to the press until the suspect had been captured, and upon capture, Davis “admitted choking the girl, but says that he did not attempt to assault her: that he had entered the house for the purpose of robbing it and that when she awoke he choked her to prevent her from giving the alarm.”17
The events of the following day would seem to prove wrong Lucey’s assertion that a community promised the speedy trial of a “negro brute” would allow state justice to take its course. Worried that a lynching was likely, Sheriff C. M. Philpot stood guard around the jail with a number of deputies and other officers, and at midnight, when a mob of some two hundred people showed up, “drew his revolver and declared that the man who attempted to enter the jail would die.” This held the mob in check for a few minutes before its leaders rushed the sheriff and forced their way into the jail. Hearing of this, the local circuit judge, A. B. Grace, made his way to the jail and implored the mob to cease its actions, telling them, “If you will go home and let the negro remain in jail I will order a special Grand Jury at once, and the case will go to trial at the earliest possible moment,” all in accordance with Act 258. He even threatened the mob with sanction, insisting that he would work to bring them to justice if they lynched Davis, but the mob disregarded him and dragged the prisoner from the jail. They hanged Davis at the corner of Second and Main streets in downtown Pine Bluff, “just in front of the Progress clothing store,” but on their first attempt, the rope broke, and Davis, “yet alive struck the ground with a thud that made the spectators shudder with horror.” So members of the mob adjusted the noose and made a second, more successful attempt at the hanging. As the Arkansas Gazette reported, “At the corner where the lynching took place a cluster of 500 incandescent electric lights have bene [sic] arranged for the Arkansas Travelers convention next month. When the mob gathered these, in common with all others in the city, were dark, but as the body of the negro swung into space the second time, and it was certain that the rope would hold, these 500 lights flashed out, the current turned on in some mysterious manner, the glare of the hundreds of bulbs added ghastliness to the scene.”18
As promised, Judge Grace did convene a grand jury following the lynching, and at the coroner’s inquest, Sheriff Philpot admitted to recognizing several members of the mob, none of whom wore any sort of mask. As the Arkansas Democrat reported, however, public sentiment greatly favored the lynching party, “and it is not thought that they will be convicted even if indicted.”19 Even in his charge to the grand jury, insisting that “the law must reign supreme,” Grace echoed the rhetoric of Lucey as to the inherently criminal nature of African Americans, saying, “The women of today don’t fear murder, but the white women of the south live in a constant fear of terror that some black brute might attack them. The crime of assault is not a white man’s vice. It seems to be principally among the illiterate negroes.” He later added, “The white man’s blood boils when the honor of our women is attacked.”20 Nothing ultimately appears to have come from the grand jury investigation.
The promise of an expedited trial failed to stop the lynching of Lovett Davis, and the next lynching to follow the passage of Act 258 did not even target the person who allegedly perpetrated the precipitating criminal act. The matter started in late May 1909 when Bud Harper, a white farmer living near Portland in southern Arkansas, killed a dog belonging to a Black man, Sam Blakely. According to reports, Sam and his brother, Joe, went to Harper’s house to confront him over the matter, and while Joe held a gun on Harper, Sam beat the farmer repeatedly. Deputy Sheriff Walter Cain went to Sam’s house to arrest the two men but, after forcing open the door, was immediately shot and killed. Sam Blakely, the apparent culprit, hopped a northbound train and eventually ended up in Mississippi before being captured and returned to Arkansas the following month (his exact fate remains unclear). Meanwhile, Joe Blakely was arrested as an accessory to the murder and ended up lynched on May 29, although not for anything to do with the murder of Deputy Cain. Instead, as the Gazette reported, “The lynching grew from threats that Joe made while under arrest as an accessory before the crime. He is charged with having said he only wanted a chance to kill Bud Harper.” The identity or composition of the lynch mob was described with the label of “a posse of citizens.”21
Act 258 would occasionally be referenced regretfully as an alternative to a lynching that had recently occurred. For example, on June 19, 1913, a Black man named Will Norman was lynched on a prominent downtown square in the spa resort of Hot Springs for allegedly having murdered the daughter of his employer. Following the lynching, Circuit Judge Calvin T. Cotham issued a statement in which he insisted, “A trial could have been had in 24 hours after the negro had been incarcerated in jail,” adding, “It would have been a much better lesson had he been executed after a fair trial, not by self-appointed executioners who had neither legal nor moral right to take away his life.”22
However, one has to ask—was there much difference, essentially, between a lynching and the successful execution of the law according to Act 258? Likely the most well-known implementation of Act 258 occurred in the wake of the Catcher Race Riot in the Arkansas River bottoms near the Oklahoma state line. On December 28, 1923, a white woman named Effie Latimer, aged twenty-five, was found by a neighbor mortally wounded in her house, having apparently been shot in the back with a shotgun, as well as beaten and cut all over her body. Before she died, she reportedly gave a description of her attacker, and on the basis of this description, authorities arrested a thirty-two-year-old Black man named William “Son” Bettis, who went peacefully along with the sheriff despite a claim of having been picking cotton when the crime occurred. The next day, police arrested two more Black men, the twenty-six-year-old Charles Spurgeon Ruck and fourteen-year-old John Henry Clay. As rumors spread, some two hundred men gathered on the courthouse lawn in Van Buren, the county seat, leading authorities to take their prisoners across the river to Fort Smith for safekeeping. Learning this, more than five hundred people congregated around the county jail in Fort Smith, forcing authorities to evacuate two of the men down to the state capital in Little Rock. Being unable to lynch these prisoners, the mob ran rampant through the primarily Black community of Catcher, murdering Ruck’s father and reportedly burning down Black-owned homes and desecrating the cemetery. In response to a group of African American men barricading themselves, armed, in a log cabin for protection, authorities called out the National Guard, which arrived with a machine gun and secured the surrender and arrest of the men.
It was in this environment that the first trial, of Bettis and Ruck, began on January 4–5, 1924, but a week after the initial crime, in accordance with Act 258. Echoing the rhetoric employed by Father Lucey in his defense of the law, local newspapers made no pretentions about the possibility of innocence for the men, reporting on the event under the headline “Brutal Black Murderers on Trial for Most Inhuman Act.” In the one-day trial of Ruck, the jury deliberated for just ten minutes before rendering a guilty verdict and sentencing him to die, and Bettis was similarly condemned the following day. Clay, who had testified against the other two men (and was, according to some accounts, subjected to torture to extract such testimony), was put on trial in March and sentenced to hard labor, though he later died in prison. Shortly after the trials of Ruck and Bettis, notices began circulating around Catcher demanding that all Black residents pack up and leave or face the consequences.23
Can one imagine a genuinely fair trial occurring in such circumstances? Of course not. The point, it would seem, is rather to have the “necessary” violence—such as the execution of Bettis and Ruck later that year—performed by representatives of the state acting in an official capacity rather than by the citizenry. This is the basis of the classical social contract, summarized thusly by philosopher Paul Dumouchel: “By renouncing our right to violence (and vengeance), we give the state the monopoly over violence. What we transfer is what we have ‘renounced,’ in other words, our violence. The unanimous transfer transforms the violence: it makes it legitimate. Thus, the state’s coercive power no longer seems to be real violence, exactly, or rather, it becomes good violence, the purpose of which is peace, in opposition to bad violence, which creates disorder.”24
So Act 258 could be seen as an attempt, no matter how ineffective, to transform illegitimate violence into legitimate, bad violence into good. It also transformed subjective violence into objective violence—or, perhaps more accurately, showed that lynching was but the subjective manifestation of already extant systems of objective violence. These terms, borrowed from the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, will require a modicum of explication. Subjective violence, simply put, has a subject. If I suddenly strike you, you can easily identify me as the perpetrator of violence and you as its victim, its subject. As Žižek writes, “Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things.” However, objective violence is “invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”25 It is the good violence of peace, as Dumouchel put it.
Another way of differentiating these is to distinguish between the violence of killing, and the violence of “letting die.” As geographer James Tyner writes, “The determination of violence, especially criminal violence, is neither neutral nor objective.” He adds, “What if, for the moment, we consider violence to be any action or inaction that results in injury, maldevelopment, or death? In other words, what if we moved beyond an individually oriented and biologically premised understanding of violence to consider how certain policies, practices, and programs may have the same consequences for human survivability?”26 This notion builds upon the foundational work of sociologist Johan Galtung, who defined violence as “present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.” Violence, in other words, is “the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual.”27 Galtung described violence committed by an actor as personal or direct, while violence lacking an actor he termed structural or indirect, the latter being violence that “is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently unequal life chances.”28
This may seem a bit abstract at present, so let us consider the following example. Popular culture, from novels like Goldfinger to the movie Batman Begins, is rife with the trope of some terrorist agent or evil mastermind poisoning a municipal water supply. We recognize this action as violence, and if some individual or organization did actually introduce poison into a local water source, our government would have no problem justifying the arrest, trial, and punishment of the perpetrators—even if they only attempted the deed but failed, they would still be found culpable of criminal misdeeds. But what if the water supply was contaminated not by shady terrorists but, instead, by a city council who voted to draw water from a source known or suspected to contain toxins? This happened most notably in Flint, Michigan, but hundreds and thousands of municipalities across the United States are subject to similar contamination, if not necessarily due to the deliberate acts of city councils, then due to aging and failing water infrastructure not being repaired or replaced, despite an awareness of the long-term effects of contaminated drinking water. These policies and practices have much the same result, in terms of injury, but are typically not regarded as violent due to (1) matters of intent, such as simply saving money versus hoping to kill or maim; (2) the distribution of responsibility from one individual or organization to allegedly democratically elected councils (and, by extension, to the entire population of voters); and (3) and the perceived moral difference between action and inaction. However, as philosopher Claudia Card writes, “Those who neglect or bring about others’ poverty can be as morally reprehensible as terrorists.”29
With Act 258, we see the state of Arkansas working to transform the subjective, personal violence of lynching into the objective or structural violence of the judicial system. Granted, the judicial and political system already functioned alongside vigilante violence as a mechanism of oppression for men and women, especially African Americans. As sociologist Mattias Smångs has observed, the removal of African Americans from political and social spheres during the so-called Jim Crow period did not diminish mob violence but, instead, increased it, as disfranchisement and lynching “complemented each other in promoting and enacting white group unity and power.”30 No accident, then, that the 1890s in Arkansas witnessed the culmination of efforts to deprive African Americans of the vote—first, with an election law in 1891 that consolidated control of the voting process in the hands of the state, ruled at this time by the Democratic Party, and then the following year with a constitutional amendment requiring payment of a poll tax to vote—as well as the greatest number of lynchings in the state for any decade.31
Political disfranchisement went hand in hand with economic marginalization, for without a political voice, those very same people who were most often targeted by lynch mobs could not hope to rein in the regimes of economic oppression inflicted upon them. As historian John William Graves has observed, following the Civil War on up through the early twentieth century, “poverty and inequality were widespread in the rural South,” where “opportunities for economic and social mobility for plantation workers were greatly restricted and limited.”32 The sharecropping system worked to keep Black laborers in perpetual debt to their employers, and education was often forbidden, or limited, for poor African Americans. For example, William Pickens, whose family migrated from South Carolina to Arkansas in the late 1880s, recalled that, during their first year in the state, the children of the family could not go to school but had to work the fields in order to pay off their immediate debt to the landlord; after the first year, however, his father “came home with sad, far-away eyes, having been told that we were deeper in debt than on the day of our arrival. And who could deny it? The white man did all the reckoning. The Negro did all the work.”33 At the same time that Black Arkansans were being disfranchised from the political sphere and oppressed in the economic, they were also increasingly subjected to segregated social spaces through laws such as the Separate Coach Law of 1891, which mandated separate railway cars for Black and white passengers, and the Streetcar Segregation Act of 1903, which assigned Black and white passengers segregated sections of city streetcars.34 Too, as will be discussed in the final chapter, anti-miscegenation laws outlawed interracial cohabitation, thus segregating the most personal of spaces.
This, of course, does not even scratch the surface of the oppression faced by certain populations in Arkansas and beyond—all of it the result of policies, and all of these policies reinforcing each other, as segregation laws, for example, increased the social distance between Black and white Arkansans and thus decreased the potential for cross-racial solidarity. As anthropologist Akhil Gupta writes, “What makes this violence structural is that these unfortunate outcomes result from the deliberate actions of social agents. We have to keep in mind that certain classes of people have a stake in perpetuating a social order in which such extreme suffering is not only tolerated but also taken as normal.”35
And one of the means for perpetuating that social order was lynching. White mobs regularly attacked educators and those who resisted being forced into the regime of plantation labor. In June 1897, for example, a mob attacked a Black school in Lonoke County in central Arkansas and beat the local teacher, D. T. Watson. As one national newspaper report recounted, mob leaders “told the negroes that they wanted them to chop cotton; that they had education enough.” Watson soon went missing, his body later being discovered hanging from a tree and bearing the sign, “A warning to ‘nigger’ schoolteachers. We want none of this kind of people in this country; others beware.”36 Likewise, in June 1919, Clyde Ellison of Star City in southeastern Arkansas was lynched for reportedly refusing to work for a white farmer, Dave Bennett, for the sum of eighty-five cents a day. In response to this impertinence, Bennett had his daughter, Idelle, manufacture a charge of assault against Ellison, with hopes that this would scare him into working, but still he refused. Finally Ellison was seized, carried to a bridge, and hanged, with the mob later tacking to his body a sign reading, “This is how we treat lazy niggers.”37 In addition, white vigilantes drove many Black settlers away from their homesteads and many Black laborers away from emerging industries, such as mining and timber, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, given that whites often viewed industrial work as their own, especially since it paid better than a sharecropper’s (often nonexistent) earnings.38
Objective violence made the subjective possible, but subjective violence can constitute a problem for modernizing states. And Arkansas was attempting to become more modern under Governor Donaghey, who had, in April 1909, signed into law Act 100, which created four regional agricultural schools that would, in the coming years, all become major universities. Donaghey would lead other major Progressive programs, such as the adoption of ballot initiatives and referenda, and the creation of a state board of health.39 So it is no accident that he actively worked to prevent a lynching in early 1909 by sending the state guard to El Dorado, nor that he signed into law Act 258, because a modernizing state is a state that can brook no competitors for ultimate authority, for legitimacy—and lynching, ultimately, constitutes such a contention. As Dumouchel writes, “We can define as political all violence that legitimizes itself. Violence that is legitimate because the person who exercises it is a representative of the state’s (legitimate) authority is either military or legal violence. Violence that fails to legitimize itself is criminal. Political violence is violence that becomes legitimate through the simple fact that it occurs.”40 Through its failure to prevent lynching and punish its perpetrators, the state made lynching legitimate violence—all the more so because such violence, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became increasingly racialized, targeting African Americans almost exclusively and thus lining up with official state policies of white supremacy. Act 258 can, in this light, be regarded less as an actual attempt to reduce lynching but, rather, to strip the mob of its veneer of authority—to reiterate the state’s claim to possess a monopoly on legitimate violence.
As noted, Governor Donaghey called out the state guard in 1909 to protect two men from being lynched in El Dorado. As it happens, the following year, on September 2, 1910, he called out troops again—but this time, to ensure that a Black teenager would be hanged. The young man in question, Harry Poe, allegedly raped (or attempted to assault) a white girl named Lena Adams in Hot Springs in early January 1910, and it was a wonder he was not lynched then. A posse, numbering about one hundred, went in search for Poe armed with Winchester rifles, and as the Arkansas Gazette reported, “there is an unspoken understanding among the citizens and should the fugitive be located, little doubt is expressed but that he will be shot by members of the posse.”41 However, Poe was arrested on January 26 and quickly taken to the state penitentiary at Little Rock.42 During Poe’s trial, Governor Donaghey ordered state troops to Hot Springs to prevent “any demonstration of violence,” and Poe was quickly convicted on March 1 and sentenced to die a month later, though the Arkansas Supreme Court issued a stay of execution to allow for an appeal.43 In May, the court upheld the death sentence.44
This is where the case takes an unexpected turn, with Poe’s attorney filing a petition for a rehearing, based partly upon the support of a “delegation of society women from Hot Springs.”45 Two of these white women from Hot Springs even visited Governor Donaghey to petition him for clemency, insisting that Poe had been elsewhere at the time of the alleged attack upon Lena Adams. Donaghey refused to get involved in the matter, and the state Supreme Court denied the petition for a rehearing.46 However, as the time drew near for the execution, local authorities began to worry that “sympathizers” might try to interfere with the hanging, and so the governor ordered a company of troops to the city of Hot Springs in order to ensure that the execution went through, in addition to turning down one last appeal for clemency.47 Poe was executed at noon.
Such executions as that of Harry Poe—and even of the aforementioned Ruck and Bettis in 1924—are often called “legal lynchings.” As criminal justice expert Margaret Vandiver has observed, those crimes typically referenced to justify lynching, such as murder and rape, that were the subject of Act 258, were the same ones that often earned a penalty of death, Too, as she states, “Often the same arguments were made to justify lynching and capital punishment, indicating that the practices may have served similar functions. Crime prevention was a primary justification for both forms of lethal punishment. . . . In addition both were considered necessary as a means of retribution for crimes the community would not tolerate.”48 In other words, these “legal lynchings” could be said to constitute the objective equivalent of subjective violence—the term does not make sense otherwise.
As we noted, subjective violence is political. But what about objective violence? Can objective violence be political? With an expansive view of the political, the question is practically tautological, given that objective violence arises from policies, and official policies are typically generated collectively—even if they are generated by one solitary person, an absolute dictator, they are nonetheless carried out by countless others whose obeisance lends those policies legitimacy. In other words, objective violence implicates more than just an easily defined perpetrator, bystander, or beneficiary of wrongdoing. The literary theorist Michael Rothberg has coined the term implicated subject to describe those who “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without themselves being direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. An implicated subject is neither a victim not a perpetrator, but rather a participant in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles.”49 Objective violence implicates more than perpetrators and bystanders—it implicates those who support, even if only monetarily (e.g., through taxes or purchases), the structure through which objective violence is made manifest. As Card has written, “An evil or an injustice is most apt to be explicitly called ‘structural’ when the responsible structure is not self-consciously created or administered, when there is not a conspicuous tyrant or tyrannical group, or when the practice comes over time to be interconnected with other practices in ways not specifically intended and then, owing to those connections, has consequences not specifically intended.”50
Probably the most eloquent and evasive expression of the idea of the implicated subject, and the possibilities for structural violence, in Arkansas history was the conclusion of the Pulaski County grand jury investigation into the March 5, 1959, fire at the Negro Boys Industrial School, a juvenile work farm and reformatory for Black teenagers in Wrightsville. At the time the fire ignited for unknown reasons early that morning, the dormitory doors were locked from the outside, as was practice, and so the boys had to find their way through the smoke and flames to the windows and then bash through the screens to get outside. Forty-eight children survived; twenty-one died. State officials expressed horror at the deaths but had never once expressed interest in the lives confined therein, and those lives were rough. As Grif Stockley, historian of the fire, has written, “Though slavery was officially dead, the prison farm atmosphere eerily mimicked some of its most degrading and brutal features. In significant ways, the job of superintendent and staff roughly corresponded to that of plantation overseers and slave drivers.”51 The industrial education promised at the “school” consisted mostly of farm labor, runaways were whipped upon return, the boys often had only rags for clothes and lacked bedding and bathwater, and the buildings were regularly in grievous need of repair—which fact likely caused the fire. By the time its investigation wrapped up the following year, the Pulaski County grand jury wrote:
The blame can be placed on lots of shoulders for the tragedy: the Board of Directors, to a certain extent, who might have pointed out through newspaper and other publicity the extreme hazards and plight of the school; the Superintendent and his staff, who perhaps continued to do the best they could in a resigned fashion when they had nothing to do with [it]; the State Administration, one right after another through the past years, who allowed conditions to become so disreputable; the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas, who should have been so ashamed of conditions that they would have previously allowed sufficient money to have these conditions corrected; and finally on the people of Arkansas, who did nothing about it.52
It is certainly possible to read such a conclusion in a cynical manner. After all, when everyone is responsible, no one is functionally responsible, even for a death toll that in other circumstances would have been labeled a massacre. But is this not the same approach taken by so many to lynching? After all, in promoting his bill, Father Lucey said that (white) men were “impelled to do this ugly work solely because there is no other means at hand of meting out proper justice.” And Judge Grace, investigating that lynching in Pine Bluff, acknowledged, “The white man’s blood boils when the honor of our women is attacked.” Newspapers often went further, however, portraying lynching as not only necessary, in a regretful and unfortunate sense, but even natural. On December 31, 1904, the citizens of Newport in northeastern Arkansas lynched a white man named Louis Allwhite who, together with his son Newton, was accused of raping and murdering two women outside of town on Christmas Day. The Arkansas Gazette asserted, a few days after the lynching, that “the best and most effective deterrent from crime is competent and remorseless courts,” but added that the confession Newton Allwhite had provided authorities was “enough to make the lynching spirit burn hot in the blood of even a law-abiding people.”53 Even more forcefully, following the 1913 lynching of the African American Will Norman in Hot Springs, the Gazette editorialized: “But everybody knows that there may come times when the anger of a community cannot be controlled and when the people cannot be restrained from wreaking vengeance on the meanest and lowest of mankind. Every community should pray that it may escape one of the awful crimes that have so often caused the forming of a lynching mob. But unfortunately such a crime cannot be guarded against any more than can the lightning stroke be held back in the heavens.”54
As philosopher Mikkel Thorup has noted regarding such framing of violent deeds, “The other is violence incarnate, while I am only violent incidental. This leads to the utmost important conclusion: the violence of the other perpetuates and perhaps even universalizes violence, whereas my violence promises an end to violence.”55 Even the blood of a law-abiding people might burn hot, and their vengeance cannot be constrained. Just as the grand jury report implicated the entire population of Arkansas for the conditions at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School that produced the fire that killed twenty-one young men, so, too, did the newspapers of an earlier era implicate all humanity in the public butchery of lynching. To flip the script—if no one was responsible, then everyone was responsible. The anger of a community cannot be controlled.
Of course, it was not anger that resulted in the deaths of those twenty-one boys at Wrightsville—it was policy. Unlike lynching, there need not have been any specific racial animus in the development of the various policies that produced the deaths of those boys. As legal expert Michelle Alexander has written, the way we understand typical racism (and violence) has been “shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.”56 Such “structural racism” has been the subject of a growing body of scholarship and can be defined, according to sociologist Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, as “inter-institutional interactions across time and space that reproduce racial inequality.”57 Because of the structural, institutional nature of racism and its attendant violence, we have a real difficulty in recognizing those deaths in Wrightsville as anything other than “tragic.” As Tyner writes, “Our a priori abstractions of violence mask certain actions—and most inactions—as violent. In turn, our ability to see (certain) actions and inactions will affect our ensuring constitution of criminal behavior.”58 We can see the actions of lynching as criminal behavior, but it is more difficult for us to recognize exactly how lynching arose from larger-scale actions and inactions, what Žižek describes as “the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.”59 This is because lynching was also policy, even if the state did occasionally make noise about the distastefulness of vigilante violence. After all, it was policy that kept African Americans an impoverished and immobile workforce, and the lynching of people like Clyde Ellison, for refusing to work for a poor wage, helped to reinforce that policy by making an example of him. Every lynching was a message, a warning to stay in line with the policies that made life unbearable. In other words: “This is how we treat lazy niggers.”
Let us go back, in closing, to Act 258. As Tyner has written, “What we may understand (and potentially criminalize) as violence is itself the outcome of political practice—practice that is conditioned by any given social formation. The constitution of violence, in other words, is internal to the social relations of any given society.”60 But Act 258 did not understand or even potentially criminalize lynching as violence—the social relations in the state of Arkansas at the time militated against such a conclusion. Even the author of the bill, Father Lucey, seemed to regard lynching as something distasteful, like the processing of meat, that was probably best left to the experts, to the system, there being no need for “men of high character to imbrue their hands in the blood of a negro brute.”
Recall Dumouchel’s view of political violence as that which legitimates itself. He expounds upon this idea further:
Political violence is violence in which people other than those who originally commit it see themselves and are ready to participate. The political dimension of violence does not depend on any specific feature of the action, but is based on the transfer to those who commit the violent action of the violence of (some among) those who do not commit it. If this transfer does not occur, the violence is only a crime that requires redress. All political violence is an exercise in shifting the violence of some onto acceptable targets, sacrificable victims.61
Those who did not participate in the actual act of lynching readily identified with it. As we have seen, and will see again in numerous examples, the ostensible best and brightest of society regularly embraced lynching as a necessary measure for punishing those (especially Black men) who committed “infamous” crimes. Even when people like Father Lucey opposed the form of lynching, they nonetheless publicly expressed sympathies with the people who found themselves sufficiently aroused by circumstance to commit such atrocities. And by so doing, such ostensible opponents of lynching lent the practice legitimacy: “The more people identify with the violence,” writes Dumouchel, “the greater its political worth will be, and the more it becomes legitimate.”62 Father Lucey may have thought that by trying to meet the mob halfway with expressions of understanding, he could convince them to lay aside their butchery, but by so doing, he ceded the entire argument to the lynchers. Moreover, he ensured that his precious law would be nothing more than lynching by another name.