. . . as in Arkansas once, a man proved guilty by law, of murder, but whose condemnation was deemed unjust by the people, so that they rescued him to try him themselves; whereupon, they, as it turned out, found him even guiltier than the court had done, and forthwith proceeded to execution; so that the gallows presented the truly warning spectacle of a man hanged by his friends.
—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man
WERE WE TO ATTEMPT to rank the various lynchings in Arkansas by the rather subjective category of the brutality on display—acknowledging that each lynching was a uniquely brutal display of violence its own right, irrespective of the identity of the person butchered or his supposed crime—we would likely have to put the 1921 killing of Henry Lowery near the top.
Lowery was a laborer on the plantation of O. T. Craig, a seventy-year-old landowner in Mississippi County in the northeastern corner of Arkansas. This was cotton country; the flat Delta land was made rich by the river that gave the county its name, while the people who owned the land were made rich by systems of exploitation such as sharecropping and debt peonage. Lowery was one of those exploited people, having worked about two years for Craig before that fatal Christmas Day of 1920. That was the day Lowery went to the Craig house to demand a cash settlement for his work. As historian Karlos Hill writes, “Within the plantation economy, asking for a payment settlement was considered a subversive act that directly threatened the façade of debt upon which sharecropping was premised.”1 White newspapers liked to report that Lowery was drunk when he arrived at the Craig plantation house, in keeping with well-worn tropes of the “worthless negro,” but a man like Lowery might well need a stiff drink before taking such a radical step as to demand payment rather than submit to the endless drudgery, the bare life he was afforded by the system. And this, according to some reports, was not the first time Lowery had dared to press for a settlement.
When he showed up at the Craig house on Christmas Day, Craig apparently attacked him. Lowery retreated, only to have Craig’s son Richard shoot him as he fled. In response, Lowery returned fire, and his aim was better—he wounded two of Craig’s sons, and killed Craig’s daughter and Craig himself.
Ten years before this, another Black sharecropper, Steve Green, in neighboring Crittenden County, had fled to Chicago after killing his employer, William Malcolm Sidle, in self-defense, and after his arrest barely escaped extradition to Arkansas.2 Lowery went in the opposite direction, down to El Paso, Texas, but a letter back to his family in Arkansas was intercepted and led authorities to his location on January 19, 1921. Upon his arrest, Lowery reportedly begged his captors to kill him or provide him a razor to do it himself, knowing the fate that awaited him. “The fact that Lowery preferred suicide,” writes Hill, “is not surprising, particularly given the brutality he likely imagined would be exacted upon his body during a lynching.”3 Police, however, are not typically given to accommodating such requests, although Governor Thomas McRae of Arkansas did agree to hold Lowery at the state penitentiary in Little Rock for safekeeping to prevent an outbreak of mob violence.
The deputies from Arkansas did not concern themselves with the governor’s orders to transport their prisoner directly from El Paso to Little Rock. Instead, they took a circuitous route through New Orleans and then Sardis, Mississippi; as Hill writes, the route taken by these deputies “suggests that Arkansas authorities more than likely colluded with mob leaders, establishing the Sardis train station as the prearranged rendezvous point for handing over Lowery to them. In fact, approximately thirty minutes before the train carrying Lowery arrived at the Sardis station, a mob of fifteen to twenty men was waiting for its arrival in a hotel lobby.”4 The mob took possession of Lowery without any resistance from his appointed guardians and proceeded to return to the scene of the crime, although not before purchasing rope and having lunch in Millington, Tennessee, all without the slightest interference from the police in any of the three states they traversed that fateful day.
The care with which Lowery was slowly and painfully murdered on January 26, 1921, reveals some important, and often unrecognized, characteristics of the practice of lynching. First, there was the care devoted to Lowery’s comfort before the lynching. As the Arkansas Gazette and other newspapers reported, Lowery was allowed to make requests of his captors: “The negro was asked if there was anything he wanted before punishment was inflicted. He said he would like to have food. This was given him. Then he asked to be permitted to say good-by to his wife and children, and they were summoned. However, they left before the torch was applied.”5 As will be discussed in chapter 5, this is the sort of care we can expect to accord with mimetic theory. As the theologian Wolfgang Palaver writes, “The executed victims, perceived by the community as guilty criminals, represent in obvious fashion the initial negative transference. We see elements of the positive transference, too, however, in the veneration shown even to criminals awaiting execution. Very weakened forms of this veneration can be observed even in our contemporary age. One considers the French custom in which the prisoner sentenced to death was permitted a cigarette and a glass of rum, or the ritual of the ‘last meal’ for death-row inmates on the day of their execution.”6
Then there was the care devoted to ensuring his agony as the process of lynching went under way. The same Gazette report emphasizes that the mob “went about the lynching in a quiet and orderly manner,” choosing “a spot well concealed from the public road by a heavy clump of bushes, just across the levee from Nodena and within sight of the Craig plantation home.” There, the report went, “the negro was chained to a log. A pile of brush was placed around him and a match applied.” But this particular death by burning was intended to be as painful as possible. As Hill writes, “Reports emphasized that Lowery’s body burned for thirty or forty minutes before he died. Apparently, as Lowery’s body was burning, he attempted to inhale smoke from the fire to hasten his death, but a mob participant intervened to prevent this.”7
Why the torture? This was not torture as practiced in the classical and medieval worlds: to elicit a confession or to save someone’s soul ultimately from the fires of hell. Regarding the Spanish Inquisition, that archetypal agency of atrocity, historian Henry Kamen writes, “Torture was employed exclusively to elicit information or a confession, and never used as a punishment.”8 But this was torture precisely as punishment, although not corrective punishment, since the torturers in question had no intention of letting Lowery survive his agony, and neither did they care for his immortal soul. No doubt the torture was intended as a warning to others about the dangers of defiance. As the philosopher Claudia Card has observed, “Torture was widely used in the twentieth century in Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere to intimidate others who were not in custody.”9 As we discussed regarding the production of terror in chapter 1, the slow roasting of Lowery would serve a similar purpose—namely, to stem a possible tide of resistance to planter rule in the Delta. Perhaps the memory of Steve Green still circulated among planters, and so, when confronted with the opportunity to make Lowery pay with his life, they made the most of it.
Such violence is typically regarded as the result of a long campaign and culture of dehumanization, resulting in a fundamental lack of empathy for the person or persons targeted for torture, murder, expulsion, or other evils. Human rights scholar Kjell Anderson has noted that “when perpetrators receive relentless messages from trusted sources dehumanizing the victim group, it is likely that this will alter or erode their previously held views.”10 “Violence is prepared through rhetorical excess,” writes philosopher Mikkel Thorup. “The language of violence prepares and enables the practice of violence.”11 Part of that rhetorical excess is a powerful binary of purity versus impurity, as applied to entire populations, so common to oppressive and even genocidal regimes. As historian Eric D. Wietz notes, “Those who were considered unclean were an active source of pollution that threatened to contaminate the clean and the pure. Hence they had to be at least quarantined and, in the most extreme cases, eradicated altogether.”12 In the American South, this binary broke down along racial and gender lines that warped social interaction between racial groups in such a way as to justify lynching for a range of behaviors due to the fundamental threat of pollution that was offered; or as historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall writes, “The ‘false chivalry’ of lynching cast [white] women as Christ-like symbols of racial purity and regional identity and translated every sign of Black self-assertion into a metaphor for rape—black over white, a world turned upside down.”13
In Arkansas during the period when lynching was most common, newspapers remained the most trusted and widespread sources of information available to the general public, and as historian Randy Finley has found, the words that the most popular state newspaper of the time applied to African American lynching victims explicitly removed them from the realm of humanity: “The terms of choice used by the Arkansas Gazette to describe those lynched for sexual crimes were ravager, fiend, and brute. . . . By calling those accused and lynched ‘brutes,’ the ‘responsible’ citizens of a community, now murderers, rationalized their behavior.”14 Not only that—according to Fritz Breithaupt, such propaganda can help to diminish any empathy one might feel toward a person’s suffering by interpreting it as just: “Most of us feel less empathetic when we think someone deserves punishment. The attribution of guilt, therefore, could serve as a catalyst for the blocking of empathy.”15 Or as the philosopher Kate Manne notes, the altruism we often assume to lie at the core of humanity is perpetually “mediated by political ideologies, hierarchies, and the associated sense of entitlement—and hence subsequent needs and aggression when those needs are thwarted.”16 This means that, when it comes to matters of “us” and “them,” our self-identification may not be with “human beings writ large; it may be human beings in a particular social position or who occupy a certain rank in one of many potential intra-human hierarchies (including those that have their basis in supposed moral values).”17
Even when discussing Black Arkansans not accused of horrible misdeeds, dehumanization was at play in the media of the day, as African Americans were typically depicted as lazy, filthy, ignorant—all without a thought on the part of writers as to why they might manifest these apparent traits. As Anderson has written, “Dehumanization is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, as perpetrators consign their victims to situations in which they will manifest the desired characteristics.”18 In other words, African Americans were dehumanized by means of the structural violence, outlined in the previous chapter, that constituted life in Arkansas for so many. And this gets to the core of the issue, for oppression need not necessarily arise as the consequence of dehumanization but, rather, can be the means of perfecting that process, of rendering an individual or an entire population as less than human. According to the philosopher David Livingstone Smith, “The desire to harm others leads to their dehumanization, rather than the other way around. It liberates antagonisms that are already there, simmering in the background and just waiting to burst out, or ratchets up the violence already being done.”19 As philosopher Berel Lang writes, “The process of systematic dehumanization requires a conscious affirmation of the wrong involved in it—that is, that someone who is human should be made to seem, to become, and in any event to be treated as less than that.”20 Such a process constitutes one of the under-appreciated facets of the Holocaust, to give one example:
But neither during that time nor subsequently was there any doubt about the systematic brutality and degradation which figured in Nazi policy and which itself, by a cruel inversion, testified more strongly even than extermination itself to the essentially human status accorded the Jews to begin with. In the face of alleged danger, a justification for violence based on the right of self-defense can plausibly be invoked. But a systematic pattern of torture and degradation is only intelligible on the premise that the victims are not essentially dissimilar from the perpetrators and that something much more morally complex than self-defense is at issue.21
A very popular quotation, attributed to US Army psychologist Captain G. M. Gilbert, who was assigned to observe defendants at the Nuremburg trials, insists that evil is the absence of empathy, “a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.” This statement holds with the general thesis that perpetrators of atrocity had dehumanized those against whom they directed violence. But what if the lynching of Lowery, and other cases of racial violence, stemmed not so much from dehumanization but, rather, a recognition of the humanity of the victim—and a desire to destroy that humanity? What if empathy was not the missing ingredient in these social relationships but, instead, the most dangerous?
The exact connection between evil and empathy has been questioned in recent years by scholars, among them the aforementioned Breithaupt, who writes, “Sometimes we commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy.”22 This may sound absurd, but one should note that most conflicts that arise are not limited to an individual self and an individual other but rather have a group component, either a group against an individual or groups against each other, and so there are multiple parties to consider. As Breithaupt writes, “Among the most significant catalyst for empathizing is the dynamic of side-taking: when the observer is witness to two parties in conflict and decides to support one.”23 In an environment in which racial differences had been heavily naturalized through propaganda of all sorts, it is perhaps not surprising that people who had no connection at all to the events that drove the lynching of Henry Lowery—or any lynching at all—would be so quick to take sides. Many white elites of the day, knowing themselves precariously positioned atop a pyramid of white supremacy that could not help but drive resentment, would immediately identify with the slain planter, as he was one of them, while middle-and lower-class whites, who had long been trained to see association with their economic and social betters as the tickets to their own success, or at least saw those people as models to be emulated, would be more inclined to identify with elites with whom they at least shared a racial heritage. Empathy could drive them to be a part of the mob. “And while the side-taker,” writes Breithaupt, “may not fully understand the side they are taking, share the feelings of the person whose position they have selected or perceive their intentions, the decision, we assume, is based on their recognition of a tendency in their chosen side that is derived from perceivable actions and inclinations.”24
Far from ameliorating conflicts, empathy can actually serve to exacerbate them; terrorists, for example, “can act out of empathy for those in whose name they kill; ethnic, religious, and political conflicts can arise and escalate because of empathy for the victims of oppression or injustice, whether real or imagined.”25 Remember that mainstream propaganda regularly depicted African Americans not simply as brutes and fiends but also, in their less violent manifestations, as lazy, shifty, devious—as people who are constantly looking to shirk their duties, probably so that they can go get drunk somewhere. Everyday life in a capitalist society was already an ongoing conflict against the nature of Black people.
Moreover, an expansive sense of empathy may well fuel the sort of sadism on evidence in the lynching of Lowery. According to Breithaupt:
Punishing others provides an emotional reward. Anger and the chance to quench it through retribution seem to offer the necessary drive to punish. In this sense, the punisher is not acting altruistically [in the sense of doing something for the community at personal risk] but rather out of self-interest. Sadistic empathy, the pleasure of the pain of others who are punished, could have emerged in an evolutionary context as an impetus for punishing antisocial acts because it serves a function for the species as a whole. Seen this way, sadistic empathy makes sense, as it would have a selection advantage for the community.26
Such sadistic empathy in the form of punishment often exhibits a theatrical component, as we can see with the various “spectacle” lynchings that take place before massive crowds on the courthouse square. “Once a mass mob had captured its victim, the selection of the site of execution, the act of execution, and the immediate aftermath of the lynching unfolded in a highly ritualized choreography,” writes historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage.27 The choice of site, in particular, was of great symbolic value, with many such mobs, as occurred in the case of Henry Lowery, choosing a site close to the original crime. “The scene of punishment,” writes Breithaupt, “evokes and repeats the scene of the original wrongdoing. It perpetuates the presence of the past, and its ritualization allows the original act of violation to be repeated, like a film. Empathy with the victim of the prior violation,” in this case O. T. Craig, “scripts how the subsequent punishment is observed.”28
Our tendency to see acts like lynching as an aberration to normal human concourse finds reflection in how we view hatred as the antithesis of more sociable emotions like love (never mind that shared hatred can often serve as the basis of social cohesion). However, as psychologists Robert J. and Karin Sternberg declare rather bluntly, “hate is very closely related psychologically to love.”29 In fact, the Sternbergs identify three components to love—intimacy, passion, and commitment—two of which are present in hate, with the third, intimacy, being replaced by its negation. This forms what they call the triangular theory of the structure of hate. Love and hate both entail passion, or “sources of motivational and other forms of arousal,” as well as commitment, or a determination to maintain a relationship, but where love requires intimacy, a feeling of closeness and connectedness, hate entails the opposite, an “emotional distance” from an individual who “arouses repulsion and disgust.”30 As the Sternbergs write:
Negation of intimacy may arise when there were no particular feelings beforehand. An individual may come to be hated because he or she has, or is perceived to have, committed a crime against one’s person. In the case of a sexual crime, a reaction of disgust and revulsion is common. Negation of intimacy comes to be felt toward someone who previously had been unknown in one’s life. The crime may be real or imagined. And the feelings may result not just in the victim of the crime, but in third parties who hear of the (alleged) crime and feel disgust or revulsion toward the (alleged) perpetrator.31
This can explain why white Southern paternalism, in which white elites regarded themselves as the beneficent protectors of Black Southerners, especially those whom they knew personally and regarded as the better exemplars “of their race,” could so easily and quickly produce vigilante violence against the same population—and sometimes against the same people who were previously (comparatively) well regarded. The triadic relationship did not need to be built from scratch; all it took was the replacement of intimacy with its negation through allegations of criminal misdeed to transform the gentle Southern paternalist into the screeching mob leader. Far from representing the pinnacle of a process of dehumanization, the violent deeds of a mob or an individual can, in Manne’s words, “often betray the fact that their victims must seem human, all too human, to perpetrators.”32
Indeed, sometimes lynch mobs went out of their way to portray their actions as respectful of the humanity of their victims and, because of that, thus insisted upon the humanity of the mob’s members. Such was the case with the August 9, 1916, lynching of an “unidentified negro,” whose age was given as about twenty or twenty-five, in the southeastern Arkansas town of Stuttgart. On the afternoon of August 7, the unknown man, who was described as having “been loafing about Stuttgart for several days,” reportedly perpetrated “an attack on the 16-year-old daughter of Ernest Wittman, a farmer near Stuttgart.” He approached her while she “was in the field near her home,” and “after asking several questions, attacked her.” Wittman was able to break free and make her way home, but by the time she returned to the site of the attack with her mother, the assailant had fled.
As word spread in town, a posse formed, and the man was captured a few miles off and jailed in Stuttgart. With the threat of mob violence high, “the black was spirited away by the officers, who set out in the direction of Little Rock,” leading to the belief that he had been taken to the state penitentiary, where many whose presence was likely to incite a lynching were temporarily housed through the years. However, the officers in question only took him so far as DeWitt, the county seat. The Wittman daughter was taken there to identify him, and she confirmed that the man was the perpetrator. This news, apparently, “caused the forming of the mob and the lynching of the negro,” as “about 20 men in six automobiles” left Stuttgart for DeWitt, where they overpowered the jailer, secured his keys, and kidnapped the alleged attacker. About 1:00 a.m., the mob returned to Stuttgart, where “the black was taken to the negro section of the city and hanged to a tree in the center of the section. His body was riddled with bullets and the body was left hanging until 9 o’clock this morning, when it was cut down by local officers.”33
Here, we can find tropes that have already appeared in accounts of lynching elsewhere. Most notably, as detailed in chapter 1, this lynching serves as an act of terror. The accounts of the murder in the Arkansas Democrat and the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic specifically state that the man was unknown and that he had said to people that he came from Osceola in northeastern Arkansas. Despite this lack of any affiliation with the local Black population, he was nevertheless hanged by the mob in “the negro section of the city” of Stuttgart, thus reflecting what Arne Johan Vetlesen called the “logic of generic attribution.” (In fact, as noted in chapter 1, about two months later another African American man would be taken from the jail at DeWitt and lynched in the “negro section” of that particular town for allegedly having insulted two white women.34) Too, this line from the Democrat stands out: “He made no efforts to get work, and local officers believed that he was a tramp.” So again, we have further, indirect justification of the lynching by having this particular victim conform to the “lazy negro” stereotype.
However, the most noteworthy aspect of this event is the later appeal to humanism on the part of the mob. Shortly after the lynching, a letter attributed only to “The Committee” was mailed to the Stuttgart Free Press and published on August 11 before being reprinted in the statewide Arkansas Democrat, under the title “Mob Victim Was Extended Every Earned Courtesy,” a few days later. The letter reads as follows:
We, members of the committee that hanged the negro Wednesday morning, have, after listening to the false stories about the affair, concluded that it is due to the public that they be made acquainted with the true facts.
The criminal was taken from the jail at DeWitt, brought to the scene of execution and hanged in as humane a manner as possible.
Quite recently, in England, a man was hanged for high treason. He suffered the tortures of strangulation for nine minutes before he was pronounced dead by the attending physicians. We give you our word that the criminal we “lynched” did not live nine seconds after his feet left the ground, as the shot wounds on his body will prove.
The only request made by the criminal was that he be hanged or shot and not tortured or burned. That his request was granted was self-evident to every one who saw the remains.
We want also to say that the criminal made a full, free and voluntary confession of his guilt before being executed.
For obvious reasons, we must withhold our names, and beg to sign ourselves,
Yours for the proper and unfailing enforcement of the law.
THE COMMITTEE.35
The missive is interesting in how it frames the lynching in the most humanitarian way possible, especially through a comparison to recent proceedings of justice in that eminently more civilized nation of England. The committee is at pains to stress that their victim did not suffer in death and that he admitted to his crimes of his own free will. In addition, they refer to their actions as constituting an execution and even later put the word lynch in quotation marks.
All of this helps to chip away at what Manne calls the “‘humanist’ explanation for interpersonal conduct of the kind that is naturally described as inhumane,” in which “such behavior often stems from people’s failure to recognize some of their fellows as fellow human beings.”36 As she notes, there are significant problems with this particular framework for interpreting interpersonal violence and oppression:
The humanist sense that something is needed by way of a special psychological story here is . . . premised on the idea that it will typically be difficult for an agent to commit acts of violence or otherwise aggress against vulnerable and innocent parties. So something has to be done to alter the agent’s perception of his soon-to-be victim. But this misses the fact that agents in a dominant social position often don’t start out with such a neutral or salutary view of things. They are perpetually mired in certain kinds of delusions about their own social positions relative to other people, and their respective obligations, permissions, and entitlements. So, from the perspective of the dominant, the people they mistreat are often far from innocent. On the contrary, they are often tacitly—and falsely—held to be deeply guilty.37
If we return to the case of Henry Lowery, we can see many of these delusions at work. Craig believed that he was entitled to withhold from Lowery any cash settlement for his work and that Lowery was obligated to continue working for him, without protest, despite never receiving payment. But these were delusions shared by all the planter elite—and, by extension, all of white society. Another delusion was that a man had no right to self-defense if he were Black and his attacker white, and any act of self-preservation by a Black man could and should result in his lynching. These people knew that Lowery was human, and their sense of his humanity was manifest in their treatment of him before his murder. They brought him food and drink and allowed him to visit his wife and children. However, their conception of his humanity was heavily imbricated with a belief either in the innate sinfulness of African Americans or the necessity of keeping a Black workforce exploited and exploitable, or both, and so their sense of his humanity also manifested itself in the fire that consumed his body.
These delusions seem to be the source of the many inconsistencies in reports on lynching, especially when it comes to the motivation behind the violence. Consider the case of Clinton Briggs, lynched near Star City in southeastern Arkansas on September 1, 1919. According to state and local papers, Briggs, a veteran of World War I, was working on the plantation of J. M. Bailey when he encountered his employer’s daughter, Ollie Bailey, “as she was driving some cows to pasture on her father’s place.” He reportedly then “stopped her and made an indecent proposal to her,” upon which she “ran screaming to the house and acquainted the members of her family with the negroe’s [sic] actions.” The report admits a lack of detail regarding the subsequent events, save that Briggs “was held captive all day Monday by a party of about 30 men, and was shot while being taken to a tree to be hanged.”38 By contrast, a report on the lynching from the Chicago newspaper The Whip presents a different sequence of events:
According to reports, Briggs was walking along the sidewalk, when he met a white couple, and as he stepped to one side to let them pass, the white woman brushed into him and said, “Niggers get off of the sidewalk down here.” Briggs replied that this was a free country. No sooner than he had made the remarks, the woman’s escort seized him. As he tussled to get away from his opponent, other whites going along the street quickly ganged around. Briggs was quickly thrust into a passing automobile and was taken about two or three miles out from town, followed by three or four car loads of white hoodlums.
After the hoodlums had reached the edge of town, they found they could not secure a rope to lynch the innocent soldier with, so they took automobile chains and chained him to a tree, after which he was made the target of forty or fifty rifle and revolver bullets.39
Let us assume that the latter account is objectively true. In line with Manne’s insight, the former account, which has Briggs making an indecent proposal to a woman, could be subjectively true for those living under the shared delusion of white supremacy and inherent Black inferiority and criminality. Nothing could be more indecent for a Black man, especially one recently returned from the war, than to assert that this is a free country. Such a statement easily could have provoked her companion into responding with force, and once the affair turned into a physical altercation between a Black man and a white man, the white men in the vicinity who witnessed the struggle knew instantly whom to blame without needing to know who actually threw the first punch.
The specific historical context in this case made an instant determination/delusion of guilt—and thus a lynching—all the more likely, for Black soldiers had returned from the European front with certain expectations for the full recognition of their citizenship. As historian David F. Krugler writes, “For African Americans, Wilson’s call to war offered an opportunity to redress America’s deficiencies. For doing their part to make the world safe for democracy, blacks expected restoration of voting rights in the South, an end to lynching and mob violence, and the dismantling of racial segregation.”40 White planter elites, leery of both empowering African Americans by giving them the chance to serve the military (where they would receive weapons training and have opportunities to use it against white Germans) and sending off to war the people who comprised their exploitable workforce, exerted influence on local draft boards to keep Black laborers where they were. As historian Nan Elizabeth Woodruff writes, “Arkansas in 1917 had to send 40 percent of its [drafteligible] white population in order to meet its draft quota. Delta counties did not have enough white men to send, meaning that other portions of the state had to contribute much more than 40 percent to achieve the overall goal.”41 Too, during the war, whites were prone to imagining that African Americans might, in fact, be plotting against their rule through alliances with America’s stated enemies. As historian Randy Finley writes, “War hysteria peaked in Calhoun County in April 1917 when blacks were arrested in wholesale quantity and ordered to cease holding meetings, whites fearing that Mexican agents had been contacted by Germans and were infiltrating Black organizations with seditious thought.”42 And almost as bad, if not worse, when Black men returned to their homes after their period of service, they expected the world to be different. In the face of these expectations, white planters moved to assert their dominance using three fundamental strategies identified by Woodruff:
One involved the sharecropping system itself, which became even more oppressive and damaging to families. A second line of controls involved law and government, both used traditionally by white people in the American Congo to deny black people their rights and restrict their mobility—through controlling the mail system, overseeing contractual arrangements, enforcing convict labor, and denying them justice in the courts. Finally, they cemented this rule with outright terrorism, through lynching, daily violence, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Remarkably, these measures failed to quash black resistance.43
Thus, in the postwar hotbed of paranoia in which whites were attempting, with greater and greater effort and desperation, to reassert their dominance, a Black man daring to describe the United States as a “free country” could be taken as a challenge to authority that must be resisted at all costs.
Look carefully at what is happening in this historical context, for it fundamentally challenges the idea that perpetrators of racial violence fundamentally fail to regard their targets as fully human. After all, white actions are a direct result of them being able to imagine African Americans as having their own wills and desires. They know that many Black men would welcome the opportunity to escape oppressive labor systems and undertake a service that better accords with their ideas of manhood. Whites can even foresee how such men will undergo an individual and collective change in their attitudes vis-à-vis whites upon their return home and will likely make further demands for economic independence and the right of political participation. Thus, in response to this, whites prepared themselves to employ violence where needed in order to maintain their relative privilege. Their willingness to engage in violence was predicated upon a realistic understanding of Black humanity, upon their ability to imagine how African Americans might act in these circumstances.
Philosophers use the term theory of mind for how human beings, on the basis of sensory input from one another, infer mental states in other humans. In fact, human beings having a theory of mind is what makes societies work, for without the ability to attribute desires, emotions, knowledge sets, and more to other people, combined with the ability to understand the myriad ways in which those mental states may differ from one’s own, we would lack the necessary feedback loop to keep social concourse proceeding (and terror, as we saw in chapter 1, is a disruption of this feedback loop). During interpersonal interactions, we typically adopt what philosopher Daniel C. Dennett calls an intentional stance, in which we treat the other “as an agent, indeed a rational agent, who harbors beliefs and desires and other mental states that exhibit intentionality or ‘aboutness,’ and whose actions can be explained (or predicted) on the basis of the content of those states.”44 But theory of mind goes beyond Dennett’s intentional stance. As psychologists Andrew Whiten and Josef Perner explain, “To arrive at what another individual sees or believes, one puts oneself mentally in his position (‘putting oneself in another person’s shoes’) and estimates what one would see or believe oneself in that situation.”45 A theory of mind is, essentially, based upon one’s own self-awareness as a conscious being and an assumption that others have a similar experience of subjective selfhood, that they “have similar mental states in similar conditions,” although “such differences between individuals as those of age and sex, political or religious belief, for example, are likely to make that assumption flawed.”46
Whites not only possessed a theory of mind when it came to African Americans—they knew that African Americans possessed a theory of mind regarding whites. And this made the humanity of Black people all the more horrifying to whites. As Manne eloquently explicates:
For a fellow human being is not just an intelligible spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague, etc. in relation to you and yours. They are also an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer, etc. Moreover, in being capable of rationality, agency, autonomy, and judgment, they are also someone who could coerce, manipulate, humiliate, or shame you. In being capable of abstract relational thought and congruent moral emotions, they are capable of thinking ill of you and regarding you contemptuously. In being capable of forming complex desires and intentions, they are capable of harboring malice and plotting against you. In being capable of valuing, they may value what you abhor and abhor what you value. They may hence be a threat to all you cherish. And you may be a threat to all they cherish in turn—as you may realize. This provides all the more reason to worry about others’ capacity for cruelty, contempt, malice, and so forth.47
This dynamic underscores the nature of white supremacist violence from the earliest days of slavery onward. After all, whites may have espoused rhetoric about slavery being the natural, preferred state for “negro brutes,” but their actions demonstrated how much better they understood those whom they held in bondage, for they were perpetually on guard for the slightest signs of disobedience and revolt. As historian Kelly Houston Jones has demonstrated, even in Arkansas, a state that witnessed no actual slave revolts, whites stayed informed about such uprisings elsewhere in the United States and remained vigilant about the possibility of subaltern violence at home.48
Moreover, despite the supposed metaphysical difference between the two races, whites were often forced to acknowledge themselves as competitors with Black workers. According to historian Michael Pierce, the Mechanics Institute of Little Rock, one of the state’s first labor unions, organized in 1858 in large part “to rid the city of all types of unfree and degraded labor, including not only slaves who competed with whites but also convicts and free blacks.”49 Among the political proposals supported by the Mechanics was the bill that eventually became Act 151 of 1859, which mandated the expulsion of free Blacks from the state; enslavers also supported this law out of fear that free Blacks proved a bad model for their own human property.50 In post-emancipation Arkansas, whites continued to regard African Americans as rivals for limited resources, especially land and labor, and undertook campaigns of violence against them in ways that mirrored the antebellum dynamic—in part because they wanted such work themselves, and in part because Black laborers at work in industry, or Black homesteaders living independently upon their own land, could prove a bad model to others of their kind, who might desire such opportunities themselves.
The record is extensive on this front. In early 1883, white vigilantes attempted to drive off a Black man, Burrell Lindsay, from his legal homestead in Van Buren County in north central Arkansas. In January 1894, whitecappers in the northeastern town of Black Rock posted notices around town and specifically delivered written and verbal warnings to major employers, demanding that all businesses discharge their Black workers or have their property burned. (Employers could get away with paying Black workers less, which made their labor more attractive in many industries, as well as agriculture.) In Polk County along the western edge of the state in August 1896, white railroad workers (some of them European immigrants) teamed up with local white residents to drive away Black laborers brought in to work on what later became the Kansas City Southern Railroad; later that year, a number of sawmills across southern Arkansas witnessed deadly violence against African Americans. Three years later in the northeastern Arkansas town of Paragould, whitecappers posted notices and stoned residences and businesses in apparent protest of the importation of Black workers; a few years later, vigilantes there burned down the Paragould Cotton Compress specifically because of its employment of African Americans. In 1903, in the northeastern Arkansas counties of Cross and Poinsett, local whites belonging to the lower class of farmers, who often depended upon labor in timber and other industries to make ends meet, tried to drive off Black workers, whom their occasional employers seemed to prefer over white labor. In April 1904, the white citizens of Bonanza, a coal-mining town on the western border of the state, posted notices demanding that all Black workers of the Central Coal and Coke Company leave the area immediately and later rioted in order to effect their departure. In March 1915, in the southeastern Arkansas city of Pine Bluff, vigilantes posted notices in a Black section of town warning residents to leave within two weeks “or suffer the penalty of death,” specifically giving the motivation for the threat as: “We want your jobs.”51 (And this is to say nothing yet of how white men regarded themselves as competing against Black men for yet another finite resource—white women—and how this also motivated lynching violence. That will be covered more extensively in chapter 5, where we explore lynching in the context of mimetic theory.)
“So, when it comes to recognizing someone as a fellow human being,” writes Manne, “the characteristic human capacities that you share don’t just make her relatable; they make her potentially dangerous and threatening in ways only a human being can be—at least relative to your own distinctively human sensibilities.”52 As seen in chapter 1, whites felt threatened by the political potential of African Americans and so disfranchised them and spatially segregated society; they felt threatened by the mental potential of African Americans and so denied them schooling and threatened teachers who did dare educate Black children. And as we can see here, they felt threatened by Black labor potential, and by the eventual inability of Black Southerners to continue to absorb abuse, day after day, year after year, without rising up and ridding themselves of their tormenters. These are not the fears one feels in relation to nonhumans. An eccentric may go into the woods and preach rebellion among the opossums and the deer, openly urging them to rise up and kill humans wherever they can be found, but we would not concern ourselves that such an act bore any real potential for rebellion. But let that person take his sermons wherever oppressed peoples congregate, and the local elites would soon brand his deeds with the label of sedition.
As Manne writes, “This leaves us with an important, albeit confronting, possibility: people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhumane ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness. And yet, under certain social circumstances . . . they may massacre, torture, and rape them en masse regardless.”53 Not only that, but as we will discuss in the next chapter, they will think it a virtue to massacre, to torture, to do all the terrible things that fall under the heading of lynching.