Hear me, sympathetic gods,
pay the debt of past bloodshed
with this just, fresh slaughter.
—Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers1
“WAS LYNCHED FOR ELOPING” ran the headline in the July 7, 1905, issue of the Arkansas Democrat, followed by “Negro Meets Death at Dumas for Running Away with White Girl.” The man in question was apparently named Joe Woodman—or, at least, a letter addressed to one Joe Woodman of Rives, Arkansas, was found in his pocket by the coroner’s jury after the fact. According to the report, suspicions arose when this apparent Woodman, who worked at a sawmill near Rives in Drew County, located in southeastern Arkansas, “disappeared from his home” at the same time as did the sixteen-year-old daughter of a white man, J. S. Small, who lived in the same neighborhood. After investigations were undertaken, authorities heard from several witnesses who had seen the couple “on the northbound local train.” These authorities contacted the sheriff at Pine Bluff, to the north, and he managed to pull the couple off the train at the small town of Tamo and send them back down on the southbound local. As might be imagined, Woodman was met at the depot in Dumas “by a crowd of men, who seemed to be from the vicinity of Rives, bent on trouble.” Law enforcement managed to get him to the jail, but as the Democrat reported, “Every place of business closed early and quiet reigned supreme during the night.” 2
That night, a crowd of men visited the jail and “proceeded to carry out its purpose quietly,” according to the Arkansas Gazette. They broke into the jail, and “the negro was taken out and marched to a point on the railroad track half a mile south of town and there he was hanged from a telegraph pole. There was no disturbance of the slumbers of Dumas’ citizens.” And the report closes with these lines: “The lynching has created no great excitement in this vicinity and no arrests have occurred in connection with the affair. So far as known not a citizen of Dumas was in the crowd nor was connected in any way with the act.”3
This was not the first elopement-related lynching in the state of Arkansas. For example, a brief story in the October 4, 1887, issue of the Gazette reported the lynching of one Oscar Jeffries for the same deed in Sevier County in southwestern Arkansas. According to this report, Jeffries was “a fine looking young colored man from Oswego, N.Y.” who had traveled to that corner of Arkansas “to take charge of a colored academy there.” Following his arrival, he began to pay “considerable attentions” to Ina W. Jones, “daughter of one of the largest plantation owners in the counties”—and a white girl. Jones herself was apparently taken with Jeffries and, “despite the entreaties and threats of her parents” regarding the relationship, told friends that she intended to marry the man. Once her parents heard this, they “locked the girl in her chamber.” As anyone familiar with this trope from romances might well predict, this did not hinder the lovers: “Despite these precautions Jeffries got a ladder and during the night entered the room where Miss Jones was sleeping. He aroused her and they left for an adjoining hamlet, where they were married early next morning.” The girl’s father formed a posse and managed to overtake the couple in the evening, and Jeffries was “riddled with bullets, over thirty balls lodging in his body.” Ina Jones was taken home, and according to the newspaper account, proved “glad Jeffries was killed, as she was infatuated with him, and only awoke to her condition when she found she had actually married a black man.”4 Of course, we readers may wonder about such a statement, since she must have known that the man leading the local “colored academy” was not white, and if the words are her own, what other choice might she have had but to give in?
Of course, many lynchings were justified by reference to the myth of the “Black beast rapist,” and, as will be discussed below, some men lynched due to allegations of rape were likely in consensual relationships with white women. So it rather stands out that Arkansas newspapers openly acknowledged that Jeffries and Woodman were lynched for eloping with white women. In these reports, there is no hint that either man in any way exercised his will over his lover, that they forced them into marriage or did anything more dishonorable, for the time period, other than sneaking away to marry without parental permission. But these men were Black, and that made all the difference. The mob would have punished them for rape had that been an excuse they could have used, but they were just as happy to punish them for love.
The same was likely true for Robert Hicks, an African American man in his early twenties, who was lynched on November 23, 1921, near Lake Village in the southeastern-most corner of Arkansas. His crime, as relayed by the Arkansas Gazette, was thus: “Hicks is said to have written an insulting letter to an 18-year-old Lake Village girl.” The word “insulting” here is ambiguous, but like such words as outrage or assault often employed to describe a range of supposed misdeeds, from simple propositioning to outright rape, the nature of the alleged “insult” can depend rather heavily upon the racial identity of the person delivering the message. After all, Emmett Till was lynched in 1955 for having “insulted a white woman” when he reportedly asked Carolyn Bryant for a date. A compliment delivered by the wrong person could be an insult.
And the further actions of Hicks argue for this interpretation, for after sending his missive, “he appeared at the young woman’s home, and asked her if she had received his letter.” But by then, news of his letter had circulated, and he “was apprehended by several Lake Village men when he appeared at the young woman’s home.” These men took him to a point four miles from town and riddled his body with bullets. It was found the next day, and the coroner’s inquest concluded that “Hicks came to his death at the hands of persons unknown,” as was typical.5
What lies at the center of each of these cases of lynching is a conflict over desire—or, at least, in the case of Hicks, an apparent attribution of desire to the eventual victim. Allegations of interracial rape tended to dominate lynching discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often serving as a cover, as Ida B. Wells discovered, for conflicts personal or economic. However, there is not even the hint that rape or any associated form of violence provided motivation for the lynchings just mentioned. In fact, the state newspapers of the time, which rarely hesitated to provide a more noble reason for the murder of a “negro miscreant” should one be hinted at, were forced to acknowledge that in desire, not any accusation of violence, lay the genesis of these particular crimes.
To say that these lynchings were rooted in desire is not to say that Black men were lynched for desiring white women, for that would invite a corollary statement to the effect that, if Black men wished to cease being lynched, then they should cease desiring white women. In fact, many politicians, preachers, and newspapers said as much during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that it was Black desire for love or lust beyond the bounds of race that drove the fury of the mob. This idea ran so deep that it was often internalized by Black communities themselves. For example, on August 18, 1899, the Central District Baptist Association, a Black Baptist group, passed a resolution “condemning and discountenancing the crime of rape” which specifically linked its efforts to combat rape with its advocacy against lynching, as stated at the end: “Resolved, That we compliment and thank the public press for its most effective work against the crime of lynching and that in turn we feel called upon to rally and work just as effectively to reduce and annihilate the rape record in this country.”6
However, publicly stated efforts to combat sexual crimes would not reduce the frequency with which African American men were associated with those crimes, very often by the media and government officials themselves. As Governor Jeff Davis said during an October 25, 1905, visit to Little Rock by President Theodore Roosevelt, “Charitable and indulgent as we have ever been to an inferior race . . . if the brutal criminals of that race . . . lay unholy hands upon our fair daughters, nature is so riven and shocked that the dire compact produces social cataclysm, often, in its terrific sweep, far beyond the utmost counter efforts of all civil power.” Davis also publicly said that he would prefer to bury his daughter alive than to see her “arm in arm with the best nigger on earth,” so it is not merely violence that invites the cataclysm, but the racial identities of those brought to union (after all, if he would prefer to bury his daughter alive, we can well imagine what he would prefer to do to her suitor).7 At the same time, though, many public thinkers insisted that it was natural for Black people to long for romances with white people, given the superiority exhibited by the white race and the opportunity for Black people, thereby, to produce mixed children and thus “elevate” their own stock. According to this logic, then, Black men were being lynched for exhibiting the characteristics of Black men. But the fear of interracial relationships perhaps went deeper than a concern over the safety of white women. As the historian Philip Dray writes, “Compounding the white man’s certainty that black men desired white women was the gnawing possibility that white women desired black men. This made it necessary not only to despise and criminalize the black male but also to make him subhuman, a monkey man, to desexualize him and remove him altogether from the sphere of the white woman’s sexual choices.”8
Lynching was but one means of removing the Black man from the sphere of white women’s sexual choices, for laws against interracial marriage had been on the books since the earliest days of statehood. For example, in 1837, the year following Arkansas’s transition from territory to state, the legislature passed a law declaring void “all marriages between white persons and Negroes or mulattos,” even if “it did not prescribe a specific punishment for violators,” as historian Charles F. Robinson has written.9 This law did not actually outlaw interracial sex—only marriage. The state also legislated the death penalty for a conviction of rape, and this pertained even to slaves, despite the fact that they were the property of another. However, historian Kelly Houston Jones has reviewed a variety of antebellum Arkansas trials in which a slave stood accused of attempting to rape a white woman, some of which were even appealed to the state Supreme Court, and concluded that even though accusations of attempted rape could trigger a lynching in the post–Civil War period, such charges “did not cause much mob action in antebellum Arkansas,” which demonstrated “relatively uneventful public reaction to rape accusations.”10 And this dynamic was present in other parts of the South. As Dray has written, “In cases of alleged rape, records suggest that antebellum courts, again because of the value of slave property, proceeded with relative restraint, and were even occasionally nuanced enough in their rulings to acknowledge that some black-white sexual relationships were consensual, a finding that would be unthinkable fifty years later.”11 No doubt, the totalitarian control already exercised through the institution of slavery mitigated the need to terrorize those who allegedly transgressed racial boundaries in such a fashion. In fact, according to historian Diane Miller Sommerville, the efficacy of charges of rape against slaves in the antebellum era could depend largely upon the character of the person making the accusation:
Although rape laws unequivocally spelled out harsh penalties for black men who sexually assaulted white females, some white female accusers had an easier time than others in convincing juries of the truthfulness of their claims and seeing their alleged rapists punished to the fullest extent of the law. Poorer females were more likely than wealthier females to face a hostile courtroom and dubious white community. Females without male protectors appear to have been treated more shabbily than those with fathers, husbands, or other male kin acting on their behalf. And women who deviated from accepted sexual codes of behavior could find themselves as much on trial as their alleged attackers.12
The idea of interracial rape (at least, the rape of white women by Black men) as the most frightful crime that could be committed would not emerge until after the Civil War.
While a Unionist government under Isaac Murphy was formed in 1864, during the tail end of the Civil War, conservative Arkansas Democrats were able to regain power in 1866, prior to the advent of Congressional Reconstruction, and among the laws they enacted was a replica of the antebellum law against interracial marriage. With the imposition of Congressional Reconstruction the following year, Arkansans were required once again to develop a new state constitution. During the 1868 constitutional convention, one delegate, John M. Bradley of Bradley County, introduced a resolution calling for the prohibition of marriage between Blacks and whites. As Robinson writes, “Although Bradley’s proposal probably reflected his heartfelt opposition to interracial marriage, his primary objective may have been to fracture the fragile unity that existed between white Republicans of northern and southern origin (the so-called carpetbaggers and scalawags, respectively), the southerners being understood to be more conservative on racial matters.”13 During the debate, William H. Grey, a Black delegate from the cotton-rich Phillips County in eastern Arkansas, rose to say:
I know that such provisions have heretofore more or less obtained; but while the contract has been kept on our part, it has not been kept upon the part of our friends; and I propose, if such an enactment is inserted in the Constitution, to insist, also, that if any white man shall be found cohabitating with a negro woman, the penalty shall be death.14
Grey dared to speak the unspoken truth that white men were much more likely to have sex with Black women (whether consensual or not) than Black men were to have sex with white women. It was a daring speech that acknowledged a truth made invisible by the rhetoric and fear of white Southerners—the real nature of the “mulatto” population. After all, if, as noted above, a Black male slave attempting to rape a white woman during those antebellum years rarely led to a lynching, said slave was nonetheless punished in some way. But not punished were those white masters who, generation after generation, had availed themselves of the bodies of their enslaved women, producing a “mulatto” population that, on the verge of the Civil War, was threatening to become a region-wide scandal—as well as threatening to undermine the nature of racial classification itself (as discussed briefly in chapter 1). As historian Joel Williamson notes:
The increasing mulatto population was a profound indictment of the biracial Southern system. In the South’s ideal world, all slaves were black and all blacks were slaves. Further, the black as slave was locked into place as the perfect complement to the white as free. A rising rage for identity among whites left increasingly little room for a blurring of the color line, and a civilization on the make took great pains to blind itself to the whiteness of its mulatto children. The white world tried to ignore mulattoes, but mulattoes repaid that attempted neglect with an intense scrutiny of the white world and, generally, with that best form of flattery—imitation. Mulattoes usually knew who were their white fathers and mothers, and they were led by their society often to value their lighter color and to relish the culture that it represented.15
So for Grey to refer to the true nature of interracial sex in the South, and then to demand the death penalty for any white man who sought sex across racial boundaries, was quite the challenge to the sensibilities of those attempting to recreate antebellum divisions in Arkansas.
After Radical Republicans voted to shunt a proposal on miscegenation off to a committee for further study, the Arkansas Gazette opined:
The vote was understood to be a test, and the result shows that the radical party of Arkansas favor social equality for the negro and the intermarriage of the races. White men of Arkansas! can you longer affiliate with the advocates of miscegenation and mongrelism? The leader of the radical party in the brindled assemblage says he wants no constitutional provision to prevent a negro from marrying into his family. Do you endorse this? If not, come out from among the champions of mongrelism and join the great white man’s party of Arkansas.16
In the end, all the convention could pass on the subject was a resolution opposing “all amalgamation.” However, as historian Paul C. Palmer has written, the various speeches “lead one to suspect that not everyone in the convention viewed miscegenation as the most heinous of crimes. But even in that revolutionary conclave, no one possessed the temerity to defend it.”17 Although the antebellum ban on interracial marriage technically remained on the books, it seems to have been largely ignored, with the Arkansas Gazette reporting, and census records revealing, a number of interracial marriages from 1868 onward.18
However, as the 1868 constitutional convention exposed, conservatives typically aligned with the Democratic Party were more than willing to use the idea of interracial relationships as a wedge issue to try to separate the Republican leadership from its new body of Black voters while also unifying white Southerners under the banner of race. As noted above, white unity during the antebellum years could be rather loose, with white women in rape trials typically judged on the basis of their class standing. Too, white society was often fractured along the lines of slave ownership, which could breed resentment on the part of those who owned no slaves, as we saw in chapter 3 with the efforts of the Mechanics Institute of Little Rock to limit the types of labor slaves could undertake. After the Civil War, with former slaves enfranchised and the primacy of the Democratic Party no longer a given in the South, the old planter elite sought to quash dissension by rallying the white citizenry around the banner of race—an expansion of the collective racial “self” to ward off the influence of the increasingly racialized “other.” This meant an expansion, too, of the respectability of race; as the sociologist Mattias Smångs notes, “While white women of the elite planter classes had personified the antebellum slave South itself, the conflation of white womanhood with the idea of the white South was in the wake of the Civil War broadened to include all white women.” This broadening invested “the interracial sexual boundary with previously unknown symbolic sacredness that conferred meaning to whites as a racial group.”19 And the sacralization of all white women desacralized all Black men, making of them potential rapists and making any assault upon any white women the worst of crimes that could be committed. What Ashraf H. A. Rushdy calls the “lynching for rape” discourse “allows lynchers and their advocates to claim the high ground of justice, chivalry, and morality”—in other words, to claim the greatest virtues of white manhood. Thus, opposing lynching could be interpreted as “being against chivalry, against family, against the rights of self-defense, against morality, against virtually everything decent.”20
As noted in chapter 2, the 1890s saw the emergence of mandated spatial segregation in Arkansas, combined with efforts at disfranchising African Americans. In 1895, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in Dodson v. State, a case arising from the arrest of an interracial couple in Pulaski County in central Arkansas, that the state’s 1866 marriage law should be considered as still in force. In 1911, the state legislature went even further with Act 320, which banned not simply marriage but also interracial cohabitation. As Robinson notes, state authorities were largely reluctant to enforce state laws against miscegenation, with the state Supreme Court reversing a number of convictions on that count. 21 However, vigilantes would sometimes fill in for the absent state to ensure that the color line was being well patrolled. For example, in late April 1894, Louis White, a Black resident of Brandywine Island on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, was visited by whitecappers Hess Colbert, Will and Babe Jett, and John and Joe Rast, who suspected the Black man of entertaining visits from “a white widow.” Colbert and the Jett brothers entered White’s house, and “White fired on the intruders with a Winchester, killing Colbert.” The woman in question was not found in his company, “and this fact saved White from being lynched.” He was, however, arrested and charged with murder.22
But this newspaper report also frames the interracial relationship as mutual—the white woman was visiting the Black man, and the band of vigilantes showed up at his place expecting to find her. And it bears repeating that, although he murdered one of these vigilantes in self-defense, he would not be lynched because the woman suspected of visiting him, suspected of being in a consensual relationship of some kind with this Black man, was not found on the premises. Joe Woodman, meanwhile, would not be spared, despite his lack of violent resistance, precisely because his white bride-to-be was found with him. In fact, the possible discovery of a relationship between a Black man and white woman may have resulted in what journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells described as one of “the most shocking and repulsive” murders she had ever documented—the lynching of Ed Coy in Texarkana, in the very southwestern corner of Arkansas.23
But before we proceed to that lynching, we need to explore further the linkage between desire and violence beyond the reputed desire of Black men for white women that justified so much legal and extralegal activity, for it is in understanding how desire leads to violence in general that we can begin to comprehend exactly why any hint of romance across racial boundaries constituted such a cataclysmic threat to white society in the American South.
The primary cultural theory locating the origin of violence in desire is René Girard’s mimetic theory, which takes its name from the Greek work mimesis, meaning mimicry or imitation. As theologian Wolfgang Palaver states, mimesis “is a fundamental part of man’s constitution—and not merely an external addition to an essentially autonomous being.”24 This fact can be seen in how children acquire language, for example. But imitation is not limited to “just visual and more tangible realities of shared actions and gestures,” according to psychologist Scott R. Garrels: “In tandem with these physical markers are internal mental states such as desires, beliefs, intentions, goals, which help predict and explain human actions. These internal states are what provide purpose and meaning to our actions in the world and in our social relationships.”25 Or as Girard writes in his groundbreaking volume Violence and the Sacred:
Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plentitude of being. It is not through words, therefore, but by the example of his own desire that the model conveys to the subject the supreme desirability of the object.26
In short, human beings learn what to desire by imitating other people. This, however, can lead to conflict. “Rivalry,” writes Girard, “does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject of the desirability of the object.”27
According to Girard, “In human relationships words like sameness and similarity evoke an image of harmony. If we have the same tastes and like the same things, surely we are bound to get along. But what will happen when we have the same desires?”28 As philosopher Kate Manne writes, “The more similar others are to ourselves, the more one may have to watch out for them, in the case of competing claims or interests.”29 And these competing claims lie at the core of the violence that follows, for the model suddenly finds himself a competitor for the object of his desire; he ends up feeling betrayed by his disciple/rival, who in turn feels betrayed or rejected by the sudden appearance of scorn on the part of the model. In fact, the rival can end up serving as the model of desire as the desires of the two begin to reflect one another’s. This rivalry can lead to violence, and the use of this violence becomes connected mentally with the original desire, so that violence is seen as the means of attaining the ultimate goal.
What Girard calls mimetic desire serves as the source of tremendous social crisis that threatens the entire community. This crisis can come to the fore especially in those situations where intimate human relationships stand at the center. As Palaver writes, “Sexual desire is one of the human passions that can very easily produce situations in which two people fight over an object that cannot be shared.”30 However, there are ways of mitigating effects of mimetic desire. One is a rigid social hierarchy that keeps large numbers of potential rivals rooted in their lower positions, thus reducing the threat of potential equality. “As long as social difference or any other form of differentiation is present to channel mimetic desire, its conflictual dimension remains contained,” writes Palaver.31 Thus, as he notes, social transformations that equalize the relative class or status positions of formerly unequal groups of people can foster conflict by facilitating mimetic rivalry: “As the metaphysical distance between desiring subject and model diminishes—the key component of internal mediation—the potential for rivalry and violence increases. The more negligible this distance becomes, the more probable it is that mimesis will end in rivalry and violence.”32
This was, of course, the situation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Arkansas and in the United States (and world) as a whole, when social transformations were threatening once rigid hierarchies—even without considering the relative position of racial groups. As international security expert Michael Brown writes:
The process of economic development, the advent of industrialization, and the introduction of new technologies, it is said, bring out a wide variety of profound social changes: migration and urbanization disrupt existing family and social systems and undermine traditional political institutions; better education, higher literacy rates, and improved access to growing mass media raise awareness of where different people stand in society. At a minimum, this places strain on existing social and political systems. It also raises economic and political expectations, and can lead to mounting frustration when these expectations are not met. This can be particularly problematic in the political realm, because demands for political participation usually outpace the ability of systems to respond.33
Such post–Civil War transformations would have been enough to disturb residents of the South. Now, add in the fact that the emancipation of slaves—and the enfranchisement of former slaves—decreased the rigidly enforced metaphysical difference between Black and white far more than did the prevalence of “mulattoes,” whose existence, at least, was typically predicated upon patterns of sexual exploitation and thus aligned in spirit with the privileges reserved for those atop the hierarchy. Furthermore, as noted in chapter 3, these former slaves and their descendants could be construed as competition for scarce jobs and resources with those whites who used to be so far above them on the Great Chain of Being. So when they were able, with the end of Reconstruction and the launch of political “Redemption,” Southern whites turned their attention toward campaigns of disfranchisement and segregation, as mentioned in chapter 2. Lynching was a part of this. As religious studies professor Donald G. Mathews argues, “The difference between enslaving, segregating, and disfranchising African Americans and torturing them to death is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.”34 The difference between forbidding interracial cohabitation and/or marriage and lynching the Black husband of a newlywed white woman was, likewise, a difference of degree.
As Girard writes, “Unlike animal rivalries, these imitative or mimetic rivalries can become so intense and contagious that not only do they lead to murder but they spread, mimetically, to entire communities.”35 We have seen how the law can be employed to solve the issue of mimetic desire by enforcing rigid hierarchies and the separation of groups. But lynching also played an important role. The profusion of mimetic rivalries can threaten the very foundations of communal order, and equanimity can only be restored through the focusing of violent desire upon a surrogate victim, a scapegoat, whose elimination or expulsion allows the community to survive. As philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen summarizes:
The atmosphere is such that outbursts of violence seem imminent: there thus arises a need to channel the urge to violence beyond the boundaries of a community, since within it violence is prohibited. So, instead of representing a threat against the group’s future, violence is “recycled” into the chief weapon defending the unity of the group. . . . The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony within the community and to reinforce integration: the group is confirmed as unison and homogenous, the identity of the members is confirmed as unequivocally linked with the group.36
But only certain individuals are useful for purposes of sacrifice or scapegoating. As Girard notes, community members “are less suitable as ritual victims than are nonmembers,” for the purpose is to unify the community around the elimination of an “other.” However, neither can the scapegoat be entirely foreign to the community in question, for then he cannot represent what the community needs to eliminate or expel, being already and always exterior to the group in question. “Rather,” writes Girard, the ideal scapegoat is a “monstrous double”: “He partakes of all possible differences within the community, particularly the difference between within and without; for he passes freely from the interior to the exterior and back again. . . . The victim must be neither too familiar to the community nor too foreign to it.”37 According to Vetlesen:
In order to fulfil its integrative function the candidate surrogate victim needs to appear as possessing a semblance with subversive or erosive elements within the community, a semblance that is of precisely appropriate degree to serve as a warning, thus ensuring that these elements “take the hint” and remain at their proper place within the community. In this way, each and everyone “inside” can prove their belongingness for all to see by joining in the violent ritual sacrifices directed at specific objects outside the community. Since the objects chosen will enjoy no established relationships with the “legitimate” members of the community, the violence can be enacted with impunity and without risk of retaliation.38
Vetlesen, who applies a Girardian analysis to genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia in his 2005 book Evil and Human Agency, concludes that such collective violence “is always seen to be a deliberate action carried out for the sake of protecting some superior yet threatened ‘good’—i.e. the unity and cohesion of the group, especially at times of crisis for the group, a crisis often sensed as—or rather, by group leaders presented as—putting the sheer survival of the group into question.”39 Once the violence has been committed, however, “a feeling of collective reconciliation is engendered throughout the mob,” according to Palaver. “The monstrosity of the preceding crisis is now manifested in one single monster; we are dealing with one victim, which has become the scapegoat for the entire community.40
“AT THE STAKE” was the first-page headline of the February 21, 1892, issue of the Arkansas Gazette, beneath which were the words, “Edward Coy, the Assailant of Mrs. Henry Jewell, Atones for the Crime.”41 And how did he atone for the crime? By being burned to death at the stake in front of a Texarkana mob of numbering more than “probably 6,000” people. As the newspaper reported, Coy, described as a “negro brute,” allegedly “outraged” Julia Jewell, the wife of Henry Jewell and “a respectable woman,” at her home. In fact, the reporter takes great pains to paint the Jewell family as the very picture of innocence and domestic bliss; in a section of the article headlined, “History of the Crime,” the reporter relays this information: “When Mr. Jewell left his home on Saturday last after dinner to come to town for the transaction of some necessary business, he left his young wife, with her babe in her arms, in the best of health and spirits, little dreaming when he kissed her good-bye the terrible fate that awaited her during his absence.” Such a picture of the couple is all the more perverse, perhaps deliberately so, if the alternative narrative of events, as will be discussed below, was true.
The “terrible fate” that befell Julia Jewell that Saturday, February 13, was the arrival of a Black man who “gave his name as Davis, and said he had some hogs to sell to Mr. Jewell.” After conversing with this person, Jewell then “concluded to visit a neighbor half a mile distant, and went out to lock the door, when the negro, who was in hiding, sprang from his place of concealment,” and after a struggle, he “succeeded in accomplishing his diabolical purpose.” The man, later identified as Ed Coy, “then dragged the fainting woman into the barn where he kept her for about an hour, assaulting her repeatedly,” before leaving and disappearing into the woods. When Henry Jewell returned, “he lost no time in giving the alarm,” and posses were soon scouring the country “in all directions.” Two Black men “answering the general description given by Mrs. Jewell” were brought before her but pronounced innocent. Soon, word spread that Coy had been seen heading northward in the direction of Little River County. On Thursday, February 18, another Black man was arrested and, though pronounced innocent by Julia Jewell, acknowledged having recently been with Coy and even having swapped clothes with him. Local authorities telegraphed the city of Hot Springs for bloodhounds as they ramped up their efforts to locate Coy, who was finally discovered hiding at the house of Ed Givens, a Black man living on the farm of W. B. Scott five miles from Texarkana.
The posse arrived and captured Coy, escorting him to Texarkana under the gaze of fifty mounted guards on the morning of Saturday, February 20, one week after the alleged crime. The leaders of the posse reportedly consulted on the best way to execute Coy and settled on hanging, but when they arrived at the intended place of execution, the mob began to shout, “Burn him!” And as the Gazette reported, “Some one at this juncture fired a Winchester and the excitement became indescribable. . . . [I]t was clearly to be seen that death by fire alone would alone [sic] appease the wrath of the surging multitude.” After one “old citizen” urged the crowd to burn Coy outside of town “for the sake of their wives and children,” the mob followed a “route to the suburbs” and, “when just over the Iron Mountain Railway track,” found what was described as a “single stump about ten feet high, seasoned and strong,” to which Coy was secured “with iron fastenings” and doused with kerosene.
The crowd, at this juncture, demanded the presence of Julia Jewell, the woman who had allegedly been raped by Coy. As Philip Dray notes:
This was a ritualized aspect of a Southern lynching. The woman who had been outraged was, when possible, asked to confront and identify her assailant and could, if she chose, participate in killing him, although in the actual bloodletting she was usually represented by a father, brother, husband, or other male relative, whose honor was deemed also to have been besmirched. That she be made to face her attacker and identify him was a somewhat curious tradition, considering that one of the frequent rationales for lynchings was that summary execution of rapists spared humiliated women the distress of having to answer questions in open court about the outrage they’d suffered.42
According to the Gazette, Jewell was an active participant in the death of Coy: “Pale, but determined, and supported on either side by a male relative, the little woman walked to the place of execution, where her assailent [sic] stood pinioned, struck a parlor match and applied it to the wretch in two places and stepped away. In a few moments the doomed darkey was a sheet of flame, writing and groaning in his horrible agony. Death resulted in about ten minutes.” The account ends with the statement that the burning was “justified by a large majority of the people of this section, on the ground that a desperate disease requires a heroic remedy, and that hanging was not as great a punishment as the wretch deserved.”43
Despite one prominent individual, Julia Jewell, being named in reports as having literally struck the match that killed Ed Coy, “the verdict of the Coroner’s Jury was that Ed Coy came to his death by being burned at the stake by unknown parties.” This topos of Southern lynching reports can perhaps be explained by the sacrificial ritual aspect of such mob violence, in which, the deed having been perpetrated collectively for the reconciliation of the group, “the responsibility for the death of the victim is shared by the group homogenously, so much so that no single member can be identified as an executioner,” according to Palaver. “All are involved in a communal killing, without any single member committing murder.”44 Meanwhile, the town of Texarkana was reported to be “remarkably quiet; no excitement or demonstrations of any kind,” although tourists were visiting the city to chip off pieces of the stump to which he was chained for souvenirs, “while all enterprising photographers are selling his pictures.”45 In fact, the following month, the Gazette reported, in a brief blurb on the first page, “the cedar stump to which Ed Coy was burned has been manufactured into cuff buttons.”46 As Palaver writes, “One finds numerous references in traditional folk culture to criminals who were sacralized after their execution. The remains of executed criminals (body parts, blood, etc.), as well as any arbitrary object (clothing, splinters from the gallows, the hangman’s noose) with which they came into contact, were venerated as sacred relics.”47 Dray likewise observes that the many ritualistic aspects of lynching—“the use of fire, the sacredness of objects associated with the killing, the symbolic taking of trophies of the victim’s remains, the sense of celebratory anticipation and then the lingering importance participants placed on such events—all suggest an anthropological basis for viewing lynching as a form of tribal sacrifice.”48
Correspondents with both the Arkansas Gazette and the Republic of St. Louis, Missouri, managed to interview Ed Coy shortly before he was executed at the stake, and the condemned man insisted upon his innocence to both. Coy reported that the reason he fled the previous Saturday was “because he was told the Sheriff was after him for gambling,” and that at one point, hiding out in a house in Texarkana, he considered turning himself in but “was told by the negroes that if he did so he would be lynched.”49 And subsequent investigations into the lynching of Coy would also assert his innocence. Later that year, the noted former Union soldier, writer, legislator, and civil rights activist Albion Winegar Tourgée wrote about the Coy case in the Daily Inter Ocean newspaper of Chicago in October 1892: “The woman who was paraded as a victim of violence was of bad character; her husband was a drunkard and a gambler. She was publicly reported and generally known to have been criminally intimate with Coy for more than a year previous. She was compelled by threats, if not by violence, to make the charge against the victim.”50 By the following year, Ida B. Wells was apparently citing more recent investigations by Tourgée that demonstrated that “Ed Coy had supported this woman (who was known to be a bad character) and her drunken husband for over a year previous to the burning.”51 (These characterizations of Jewell speak to Smångs’s observation on the expansion of racial respectability even to the lower classes of whites in the postbellum years.) The counternarrative that Coy was in a consensual relationship with Julia Jewell was not only long lasting but also prevalent across the United States, with the Reverend D. A. Graham referencing Coy during a sermon he delivered in Indianapolis on the subject of Southern lynchings seven years later, saying of Julia Jewell that “relatives and husband of the woman who made the charge were fully cognizant of the fact that she was equally guilty with Coy. They compelled her to make the charge and then to set fire to her paramour.”52
It is no accident, according to historian Amy Louise Wood, that “spectacle lynchings” of this kind, which featured ritualized violence in front of massive crowds, occurred in places like Texarkana, for such violence was closely related to the economic transformations underway in the South as a whole:
Racial violence surged at the turn of the century, however, not because southern communities were cut off from modern institutions and customs but because they were undergoing an uncertain and troubled transformation into modern, urban societies. The devastation and uncertainties of the rural economy after the Civil War pushed increasing numbers of southerners, white and Black, off the farm, and as northern investment poured into the South, cities and towns grew in area and population. The most spectacular lynchings took place not in the countryside but in these newly urbanizing places, where mobs hanged their victims from telegraph and telephone poles and where streetcars and railroads brought crowds to witness the violence. Even the smallest towns were undergoing an urbanization process of sorts. They were experiencing changes that white citizens regularly celebrated as progressive while lamenting what they saw as the corrosive effects of these changes on the social order.53
Texarkana was one of these modernizing communities, a county seat that, situated in the southwestern corner of the state, served as a gateway to the ever-developing West, especially with the advent of those railroad tracks the mob had to cross to find the ideal place to lynch Coy. And it is no accident that African Americans in this era would be especially susceptible to lynching, for they remained sufficiently marginal to the community without ever being entirely outside it, being considered, in the words of sociologist Orlando Patterson, “a vast mass of domestic enemies, an army of masterless slaves” whose status represented a “collective loss of honor” for Southern whites.54 No wonder, then, that allegations of rape would be sufficiently efficacious to motivate a lynching. Statistically, rape was not the most common motivation underlying a lynching; in 1890s Arkansas, nineteen lynchings were predicated upon sexual assault, while twenty-eight were based upon property crimes and fifty-five upon murder, according to one tabulation.55 Or as Sommerville asserts, “the vitriolic clamor about black rape belied the extent to which black-on-white rape ostensibly precipitated lynchings.”56 In an era when even the acknowledged eloping of Black men and white women could draw the wrath of a mob, allegations of interracial rape would have been especially potent for white communities undergoing a crisis of identity and seeking to establish their boundaries of collective identity more firmly. As Smångs writes:
Public lynchings did not simply affirm clearly or consensually defined collective racial identifications and solidarities among southern whites but directed racial group-formation processes by bringing them together in an active appreciation of the “true” nature of race relations, including the necessity of a cohesive white community standing united against the perceived black menace. The communalism, symbolism, and ritualism of public lynchings allowed whites, perpetrators and spectators alike, to enact and embody the core beliefs of extremist white supremacy as well as to attach themselves to each other, thereby transforming symbolic racial boundaries and categories into collective racial identifications and solidarities. . . . Public lynchings were a collective ritual that not only revealed but also realized the white racial community in the emerging Jim Crow South.57
In short, lynching served exactly the purpose that Girard proposed for the scapegoat mechanism: unifying the community. As such, it functions as political violence, which, according to philosopher Paul Dumouchel, “is violence that structures and brings people together. It establishes groups. It unites and divides at the same time.”58 And such unification can only be achieved if the whole community takes part, as literary historian Trudier Harris notes:
Acts of ritualized violence require group participation in order that the individuals involved may avoid feelings of guilt. The procedure can be compared to that used in firing squads where all squadsmen must fire at the victim and thereby be blamed and blameless, guilty and guiltless. The concept of law and order destroyed the offender, not the men pulling the triggers. In like manner, various concepts, not individuals, destroy black victims. Usually punished for disregarding some traditional taboo, the black men and women serve in their deaths to establish these practices as inviolable.59
Indeed, there is a dialectical relationship between “those who placed the rough noose around the neck or the flammable wood at the feet of the mob’s victim” and those who encouraged or simply observed the actions of the active participants, according to Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, who thus describes the typical spectacle lynching as “a situation where the act of murder requires a mob to make it meaningful, and where a mob becomes the excuse people use to justify their action or their presence.”60 As rhetorician Megan Eatman observes, “Even if some white audience members were disgusted, their presence in the group contributed to the white supremacist spectacle.” Moreover, this experience of “shared violence and a narrative of strength and victimhood” helped to erase distinctions, especially economic distinctions, among white Southerners and thus concealed “other possible understandings of what being a white Southerner could mean.”61 The collective participation means that no individual is responsible, which means that the victim was killed by no agent but, instead, met his death at the hands of a “concept.” In other words, collective participation in this manner rendered the butchery on display another example of structural violence (see chapter 2).
In many ways, the scapegoating form of violence serves as the culmination of the other types of violence we have so far explored within the phenomenon of lynching. Lynching is group violence, perpetrated by a collectivity upon individuals who serve as representatives for another collectivity. The goal of lynching is fundamentally structural, to preserve the exploitable station of the target population. As the scapegoat must be marginal to the community rather than outside of it completely, lynching actually recognizes the humanity of its victim, for only a human victim can serve to settle the mimetic crisis at hand. Solving that crisis is the highest virtue, for it ensures the preservation of the community and facilities its return to “normal”—except that, no matter how many people they lynched, white society never quite seemed to return to normal.