Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draught that we must drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one’s lips the wine of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality . . .
—Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
AT PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, awareness of our shared history of racialized violence is growing, along with a desire to commemorate—that is, to remember together—that violence by installing markers in public places or developing classroom curricula to teach younger generations what earlier ones often learned only through the whispers of their own elders. The Equal Justice Initiative, for one, has been prominent in the public conversation, releasing its Lynching in America study in 2015 and then, three years later, opening the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a site dedicated to the memory of those who suffered slavery, lynching, segregation, and more. But there has also been an array of state- and community-focused efforts. In Arkansas, for example, the centennial of the Elaine Massacre of 1919, part of the infamous “Red Summer,” was commemorated with a monument to the dead in Phillips County and a number of public events, including conferences and workshops, all across the state. Meanwhile, in advance of the centennial of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, experts in Oklahoma began carrying out forensic research with the aim of uncovering any mass graves that may exist. Representation of these events is even entering popular culture, with the massacre at Tulsa a cornerstone for the HBO television series Watchmen (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020). These trends reached a crescendo in the spring of 2020 with the demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Across the world, discussions of structural or systematic racism came to the fore in a way they never had previously, as exemplified best by the author Kimberly Jones, who, in one video viewed millions of times following the “rioting” in Minneapolis, specifically cited anti-Black violence at Tulsa in 1921 and at Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 as historical violations of the social contract that have fed into the present moment.1
The public hunger for information on lynching and other cases of racialized violence has fueled, and been fueled by, an expanding output of scholarship in the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, literary studies, and others. In my own research, however, I have had to confront what might be called the limits of typology, or the fact that the terms we use to characterize various cases of racialized violence—lynching, race riot, massacre, pogrom, racial cleansing, nightriding/whitecapping—constitute less discrete categories and more a blurred spectrum.2 Even more, the word lynching itself cannot be considered a discrete practice but, instead, covers multiple forms of violence. And by that, I do not mean only that lynching may be carried out using either a noose or a gun, practiced against either the mythical “Black beast” or against white horse thieves, and perpetrated either by a quiet band in the dead of night or by a whole town on the public square in the light of day. Instead, I mean that lynching, as a practice, accords with several different “big picture” frameworks for understanding violence, frameworks that theorists have produced across a spectrum of disciplines. These models of violence are not mutually exclusive—in fact, they reinforce each other quite well and offer a variety of perspectives that provide a much deeper understanding of what lynching was and what its perpetrators wanted to accomplish.
That, then, is the motivation behind this book—to illustrate concisely the types of violence within the category of lynching, and to demonstrate how we might apply these models, especially for those who may not be aware of the wealth of theory regarding the origin and nature of violence.
Chapter 1 will explicate lynching as group violence. Here, I must beg the reader’s indulgence somewhat, for it will be necessary to survey an array of scholarly literature on the nature of groups themselves in order to explain why group violence, as opposed to a very similar concept like collective violence, is the better framework for understanding the nature of lynching. While lynching has popularly been portrayed as the act of vigilantes or committed racists, perpetrated against either isolated individuals or small groups accused of wrongdoing, this chapter will reveal lynching to be, especially in its racialized manifestations, the violence of one group against another. Lynch mobs were not operating at the lawless fringes of culture but were, instead, immersed in the broader, deeper culture of white supremacy. Moreover, when the mob lynched a man or woman, they did not just punish that one person—they terrorized entire communities.
Chapter 2 analyzes lynching as objective or structural violence. This study builds upon the works of Johan Galtung and Slavoj Žižek to illustrate how lynching was not the eruption of violence into a peaceful world but, instead, the manifestation of a broader system of inequality and oppression. Such a representation of lynching will hinge largely upon a study of Act 258 of 1909, an Arkansas law that attempted to substitute mob violence with the expedited judgment of the court as a means of preventing lynching, while doing exactly nothing to punish the mobs for murder or to sanction officers of the law who failed to protect their charges from the wrath of vigilantes.
While lynching, like other forms of collective violence such as genocide, is frequently described as being possible only because of the persistent “dehumanization” of the victims-to-be, in chapter 3 I will argue that lynching actually constitutes humanistic violence. In fact, recognizing the humanity of the lynching victim was necessary for the mobs to receive the greatest satisfaction from their deeds. Borrowing from the works of Fritz Breithaupt, Kate Manne, and others, I intend to demonstrate that lynching parties were quite aware of the humanity of their intended victims—and sought to destroy them precisely because of it.
Chapter 4 builds upon the virtuous violence theory of Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, who have argued, rather convincingly, that perpetrators often perform violent deeds out of a sense that they are morally right. Violence, the theorists demonstrate, can be employed to honor, create, and sustain social relationships, and this certainly pertains to lynching, which was often justified by reference to a defense of the (white) community. Members of the mob often regarded their own deeds as heroic, and if the newspapers of the time and place did not always attach such labels to their deeds, they at least—and quite often—portrayed the victim of lynching as representing the purest form of evil possible, thus rendering the mob a virtuous collective by contrast.
The final chapter offers a synthesis of the previous four by analyzing lynching through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory of violence. According to Girard, it is the nature of human beings to imitate the desires of others, which can lead to rivalry when desires converge upon the same object. This rivalry can encompass others, threatening the entire community, with peace being restored only through the mechanism of a scapegoat whose guilt is universally agreed upon. In the United States, African Americans have regularly functioned as this scapegoat, especially as they were regarded by many white men as exhibiting mimetic desire for white women. Mimetic violence is thus both humanistic, in that it attributes human qualities to its victims, as well as collective, in that it is perpetrated by a group for the restoration of its peace—which makes said violence a virtue, too. In addition, the violent regulation of perceived desires following the Civil War was a function not only of vigilantes but also of the state, which instituted various anti-miscegenation measures to prevent cross-racial romance and solidarity, thus making violence aimed at regulating such relationships an example of objective or structural violence.
To some, this book could well seem extraneous to the broader concerns of scholars who make a study of racial violence. After all, what does it mean to study lynching? For the many sociologists and historians who have led the way in this field, studying lynching has entailed trying to understand the individual and collective motivation of perpetrators, the specific cultural contexts that made lynching viable and allowed perpetrators to escape punishment, the identity of the victims and therefore the reasons they may have been chosen for extermination, the geographical and temporal variability of the practice, how lynching affected the targeted communities, and which methods used to combat lynching ultimately proved successful and why. In addition, throughout the decades, literary historians like Trudier Harris and Koritha Mitchell, political scientists such as Daniel Kato, rhetoricians such as Ersula J. Ore and Megan Eatman, and theologians like James H. Cone and Angela D. Sims have expanded the questions we can ask relating to such performances of racial violence. However, despite all the tremendous work that has been and continues to be done on the subject of lynching, we nonetheless lack the same attempt at a unifying body of theory that one can find in other interdisciplinary fields such as genocide studies. Works such as Christopher Waldrep’s 2002 book The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America are tremendously valuable in tracking the evolution of the concept of lynching and demonstrating that the word has historically been applied not to one discrete phenomenon but to an array of them. Recognizing the historical mutability of definitions, however, does not necessarily help us at our present moment if we want to commemorate a lynching in the public space and create some shared understanding of America’s record of racial violence. Doing that requires asking exactly what kind of violence was present in lynching—the intention of the present book.
For my part, theory is not an indulgent scholarly exercise untethered from the concerns of historical and sociological evidence but, instead, simply an attempt to be precise with the words that we use. Consider the term lynching. If you were to consult your thesaurus, you might encounter a variety of related words such as murder, homicide, assassination, killing, slaying, slaughter, massacre, carnage, and more. But all of these words have a somewhat different flavor, have different connotations, and thus produce differing value judgments when encountered. Homicide, for example, carries with it the connotation of police investigations or official statistics, but lynching rarely entailed such investigations outside the typical coroner’s report that the death in question occurred “at the hands of persons unknown.” Moreover, it was not police departments or state agencies that compiled statistics of lynching but, instead, activist groups and journalists fighting a reign of racial terror.
Likewise, consider the term murder. The word can be used synonymously with homicide but also comes with an array of statutory definitions that specifically characterize the type of homicide in question, be it first-degree murder versus second-degree or murder with malice aforethought. Lynch mobs were homicidal, and lynchings were murders, but this does not make these terms equivalent. As the historian James R. McGovern put it: “While murder is usually a personal deed, lynching, in the sense of the execution of another person by a self-constituted group with accompanying public rituals, is a social act; it requires confidence in community approval.”3
Similarly, let us consider the term assassination. An assassination is a murder, but the terms have specific connotations that mean they are not exactly interchangeable. The assassin, in our mind, typically murders from a place of concealment and/or murders a particularly prominent individual, usually for political motivations. We may typically envision a lone gunman like Lee Harvey Oswald, although the killers of Julius Caesar constituted something of a mob who carried out their deed, like many lynchings, in the full light of day. But assassination is not synonymous with lynching for a variety of reasons, especially given that assassins rarely if ever engaged in the grisly rituals associated with many lynchings.
Execution denotes something that comes after a trial and sentencing and was originally defined as carrying out a legal order. While the word occasionally would be used in lynching reports, perhaps in part to lend vigilantism the veneer of process, a lynching was most certainly not an execution in the sense of having legal validity; and, as we will see in chapter 2, the state worked hard to substitute legal killings for the illegal. Meanwhile, words like slaughter and massacre suggest multiple victims of killing and thus, typically, violence against a collective rather than an individual. Lynching could certainly entail such violence but more often manifested itself in the murder of one person—even if, as we will see in chapter 1, the goal was to affect the broader community as a whole.
In other words, these various terms describe types of violence that can be differentiated in important ways, even if they do overlap in others. Thus, it is the aim of the present volume to elucidate the manner in which lynching was unique by exploring the various forms of violence manifest in it. Such an understanding should facilitate discussions about how we remember lynching, how we present it in the historical record, and how we commemorate it in public spaces.
As many scholars have already argued, no one definition of lynching can encompass the diversity of acts and motivations to which that term has applied. It is thus not my intent to fashion some definition that can encompass all the historical uses of the term. Words change meaning in subtle ways over time. Watch a play by William Shakespeare, and you will encounter words used in ways at variance from their present meaning. Rogue, for example, originally denoted a tramp or vagabond, but now the term is regularly applied to people who bravely “buck the system.” Likewise, the term lynching once denoted a range of vigilante violence, not always lethal, perpetrated for purposes of “community regulation.” However, the term has evolved significantly, and it will therefore be helpful to provide a working definition for the purposes of guiding our survey. As anthropologist Veena Das writes, “Naming the violence does not reflect semantic struggles alone—it reflects the point at which the body of language becomes indistinguishable from that of the world; the act of naming constitutes a performative utterance.”4 Given the types of violence covered in this book, I propose the following definition:
Lynching is
• a scapegoating form of lethal violence;
• performed by one group of human beings against another group of human beings (or an individual representing said group) assigned lower moral status;
• for purposes regarded as virtuous by its perpetrators, such as punishment and regulation;
• with the effect of maintaining the very structural inequalities that delineate group boundaries and their respective moral statuses.
Throughout this book, I will be pulling a variety of examples from the history of Arkansas. This is not because I consider Arkansas the most representative state from which to draw material, although an argument could, perhaps, be made for such a position, especially since Arkansas contains lowland areas that culturally and economically gravitate toward the Deep South and upland areas more representative of Appalachia, with even some bleed-over into the Midwest. Instead, I want to demonstrate the applicability of these frameworks within a relatively limited geographical area—and thus avoid the appearance of simply picking and choosing the best examples from the whole of American history. Besides, this is also the state with which I am most familiar, and thus I can provide a range of applicable examples, from well-documented spectacle lynchings that have attracted considerable researcher attention, to more obscure events only traceable through isolated sources.5
In addition, this book will focus primarily upon the lynching of African Americans by whites. While there were white-on-white lynchings, as well as cases of Black vigilantism upon fellow African Americans, and, at least in Arkansas, one rare instance of Black-on-white mob violence, the fact is that lynching mostly has been a mechanism for the social control of African Americans. In fact, recent work in Arkansas, such as that by historian Kelly Houston Jones on the lynching of slaves, has begun to revise many of our assumptions about the nature of vigilantism and has revealed, contrary to expectations, that lynching was heavily racialized even in the antebellum years.
As I will discuss in this book’s conclusion, the decades separating that time period when lynching was shockingly common from the present moment, combined with the strategies employed by activists to shame a nation into confronting racialized violence, have left us a distorted view of what exactly constituted lynching, as both an act and an idea. Lynching entailed a much greater structure of violence than is typically acknowledged. Revealing that—and thus celebrating communion with reality, no matter how horrifying—is the intention of this book.