INTRODUCTION
1. “How Can We Win,” David Jones Media, video, 6:46, June 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb9_qGOa9Go.
2. The terms nightriding and whitecapping were used interchangeably at the time to describe vigilante violence, often performed under cover of darkness or while disguised, specifically designed to intimidate an individual or group of people. Such violence could be racialized, as when poor whites organized to drive African Americans away from jobs or off their land, but such acts of intimidation were, just as often, perpetrated by whites against other whites, as when farmers banded together to prevent others from selling their cotton until the price had reached a level agreeable for all. For information on how the state defined nightriding/whitecapping, see CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, s.v. “Act 112 of 1902” by Guy Lancaster, last modified August 9, 2019, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/act-112-of-1909-14368/.
3. James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 66.
4. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 206.
5. The actual number of lynchings that occurred in Arkansas can vary widely, from the low three hundreds to nearly five hundred, depending upon what events are included—that is, whether one considers only those events that occurred following Reconstruction; whether one includes the lynching of whites alongside that of African Americans; and whether one includes mass-casualty events like the Elaine Massacre of 1919. For a survey of the disparities in these counts, see Guy Lancaster, “Introduction,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 4–5. In addition, the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas maintains a chart of lynchings, updated regularly as new information arises; see CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, s.v. “Lynching,” by Brent E. Riffel, last modified December 21, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/lynching-346/.
CHAPTER 1
1. Vincent Vinikas, “Thirteen Dead at Saint Charles: Arkansas’s Most Lethal Lynching and the Abrogation of Equal Protection,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 104.
2. “Five Negroes Shot to Death by Mob,” Arkansas Gazette, March 26, 1904, 1; “Eleven Negroes Victims of Mob,” Arkansas Gazette, March 27, 1904, 1.
3. Vinikas, “Thirteen Dead at Saint Charles,” 125.
4. Vinikas, 105.
5. Vinikas, 110.
6. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 182.
7. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 6–7.
8. James Elbert Cutler, Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1905), 276.
9. Cited in Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch, 2. After the conference, each of these rival organizations abandoned the definition because they found it incongruent with their own organizational goals.
10. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 18.
11. Rushdy, American Lynching, 20.
12. James Hawdon and John Ryan, “Introduction: Working toward Understanding Group Violence,” in The Causes and Consequences of Group Violence: From Bullies to Terrorists, ed. James Hawdon, John Ryan, and Marc Lucht (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), x.
13. Paul Dumouchel, The Barren Sacrifice: An Essay on Political Violence, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 41.
14. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers), 566.
15. Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post–Civil War Louisiana, 1866–1884 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 92.
16. Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1.
17. Horowitz, Deadly Ethnic Riot, 79, 89, 116–17.
18. Ann V. Collins, All Hell Broke Loose: American Race Riots from the Progressive Era through World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), xvi.
19. Collins, 5.
20. Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, “The Massacre and History,” in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History, ed. Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), xv.
21. Dwyer and Ryan, xv.
22. Dwyer and Ryan, xvii.
23. Alex J. Bellamy, Massacres and Morality: Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 28.
24. Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30–32.
25. May, 47.
26. Berel Lang, Genocide: Act as Idea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 75–76.
27. Lang, 79.
28. Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009), 39
29. Hogan, 43.
30. Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 10.
31. Gross, 36.
32. Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 89–90.
33. David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 102.
34. Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 79.
35. James Hawdon, “Group Violence Revisited: Common Themes across Types of Group Violence,” in The Causes and Consequences of Group Violence: From Bullies to Terrorists, ed. James Hawdon, John Ryan, and Marc Lucht (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 248.
36. Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, trans. Gabriel Borrud (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 66.
37. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (New York: Verso, 2016), 18.
38. Jan Voogd, Race Riots and Resistance: The Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 19.
39. Arne Johan Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 186.
40. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 19.
41. Ziya Us Salam, Lynch Files: The Forgotten Saga of Victims of Hate Crimes (New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2019), 4.
42. “A Ghastly Find,” Arkansas Gazette, March 12, 1894, 1.
43. “Mob Kills Negro: Riot Threatened,” Arkansas Gazette, December 21, 1909, 1.
44. “Mob Kills Negro.”
45. “Mob Kills Negro.”
46. “Kill Negro, Burn House and Church,” Arkansas Gazette, January 17, 1916, 8; “Prosecutor May Go to Buckville,” Hot Springs New Era, January 18, 1916, 1.
47. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017), 3, https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/.
48. Lynching in America, 38.
49. Lynching in America, 39.
50. Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart, “Introduction: Terror, the Imagination, and Cosmology,” in Terror and Violence: Imagination and the Unimaginable, ed. Andrew Strathern, Pamela J. Stewart, and Neil L. Whitehead (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006), 7.
51. This is an analogy I first employed in my chapter, “‘. . . or Suffer the Consequences of Staying’: Terror and Racial Cleansing in Arkansas,” in Historicizing Fear: Ignorance, Vilification, and Othering, ed. Travis D. Boyce and Winsome M. Chunnu (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2019), 88–102.
52. Strathern and Stewart, “Introduction,” 9.
53. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9.
54. Card, Confronting Evils, 166.
55. Vinikas, “Thirteen Dead at Saint Charles,” 127.
56. Thomas C. Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina, and International Human Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 10.
57. Card, Confronting Evils, 167.
58. Stephanie Harp, “Stories of a Lynching: Accounts of John Carter, 1927,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 197.
59. Harp, 201.
60. Harp, 204.
61. Harp, 205.
62. Santana Khanikar, State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 101.
63. Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency, 158.
64. See Shanika Smith, “The Success and Decline of Little Rock’s West Ninth Street.” Pulaski County Historical Review 67 (Summer 2019): 41–50.
65. “DeWitt Mob Takes Negro from Jail and Lynches Him,” Arkansas Democrat, October 9, 1916, 8; “Negro Is Lynched by Mob at DeWitt,” Arkansas Gazette, October 10, 1916, 1.
66. “In Arkansas County,” Arkansas Gazette, March 29, 1904, 4.
CHAPTER 2
1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), 119.
2. Public and Private Acts and Joint and Concurrent Resolutions and Memorials of the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas, 1909 (Little Rock: Secretary of State, 1909), 778–80.
3. “Two-Day Bill Passed the Senate,” Arkansas Gazette, January 26, 1909, 3; “News and Notes of the Legislature,” Arkansas Gazette, February 11, 1909, 3.
4. “To Prevent Lynchings,” Arkansas Gazette, February 16, 1909, 5.
5. “Pickett Negroes Here,” Arkansas Gazette, January 23, 1909, 2; “Charged with Murder,” Arkansas Gazette, March 29, 1909, 1; “Soldiers Guard Jail at El Dorado,” Arkansas Gazette, March 30, 1909, 1; “Negroes Reported Lynched,” Arkansas Gazette, March 20, 1909, 1; “21 Years Given Pickett Negroes,” Arkansas Gazette, April 2, 1909, 1.
6. “News and Notes of the Legislature,” Arkansas Gazette, April 8, 1909, 12; “In the House, Wednesday, May 12, 1909,” Arkansas Gazette, May 13, 1909, 3.
7. “Negro Assailant Escapes Lynching,” Arkansas Gazette, May 12, 1909, 2; “Will Try Abe Green Tuesday,” Arkansas Gazette, May 30, 1909, 1; “Green Sentenced to Die,” Arkansas Gazette, June 6, 1909, 2.
8. “May Stop a Hanging,” Arkansas Gazette, June 27, 1909, 5; “Abe Green to Hang,” Arkansas Gazette, July 5, 1909, 3; “Proceedings in Supreme Court,” Arkansas Gazette, July 6, 1909, 3; “Abe Green Will Not Be Hanged,” Arkansas Democrat, October 11, 1909, 10.
9. “Drastic Bill by Senator Oldham,” Arkansas Gazette, January 23, 1907, 2; “Suppression of Mob Violence,” Arkansas Gazette, January 27, 1907, 16. Senator Robb died the following month on February 10 from bronchial pneumonia at the age of forty-five, and the Gazette report on his death devoted a great deal of space to his opposition to the Oldham bill. See “State Senator Howard Robb Dead,” Arkansas Gazette, February 11, 1907, 1–2.
10. “Many Measures Are Discussed,” Arkansas Gazette, February 10, 1907, 7.
11. “Oldham Anti-Lynching Bill Is Defeated by the House,” Arkansas Gazette, April 28, 1907, 3.
12. “Endorses Oldham Bill,” Arkansas Gazette, February 7, 1907, 2.
13. Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2019), 50.
14. Michael J. Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 89.
15. Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009), 172–73.
16. Sonja Schillings, Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2017), 2.
17. “Negro Admits Attack on Girl,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, May 23, 1909, 1; “Pine Bluff Girl Is Choked by Negro,” Arkansas Gazette, May 24, 1909, 2. An April report from Pine Bluff mentions one Lovett Davis who was an escaped Louisiana convict captured in Pine Bluff, but no reports on the arrest of Davis in May and his subsequent lynching mention him being from Louisiana. A later report in the Arkansas Gazette said that David hailed from Atlanta, Georgia. See “Louisiana Convict Captured Here,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, April 20, 1909, 1; “Judge Grace Goes after Lynchers,” Arkansas Gazette, May 27, 1909, 1.
18. “Mob at Pine Bluff Lynches a Negro,” Arkansas Gazette, May 25, 1909, 1–2.
19. “Grand Jury Inquiries,” Arkansas Democrat, May 26, 1909, 4; “Judge Grace to Probe Lynching,” Arkansas Gazette, May 26, 1909, 1; “Judge Grace Goes after Lynchers,” Arkansas Gazette, May 27, 1909, 1; “Making a Thorough Inquiry in Lynching,” Arkansas Democrat, May 28, 1909, 12; “Grand Jury Is Probing Lynching,” Arkansas Gazette, May 28, 1909, 2.
20. “Judge Scores Lynchers,” Batesville Guard, June 4, 1909, 2
21. “Killing of a Dog Leads to Lynching.” Arkansas Gazette, May 31, 1909, 1; “Murderer’s Brother Is Lynched.” Broad Ax (Salt Lake City, Utah), June 5, 1909, 2.
22. “Judge Deplores Lynching of Negro,” Arkansas Gazette, June 21, 1913, 1 (the Gazette names him “Cotnam,” but “Cotham” is the proper spelling).
23. Guy Lancaster, Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 103–107.
24. Paul Dumouchel, The Barren Sacrifice: An Essay on Political Violence, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), xii.
25. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 2.
26. James A. Tyner, Violence in Capitalism: Devaluing Life in an Age of Responsibility (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 3, 4.
27. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 168.
28. Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” 171.
29. Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 168.
30. Mattias Smångs, Doing Violence, Making Race: Lynching and White Racial Group Formation in the U.S. South, 1882–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 103.
31. Chris M. Branam, “Another Look at Disfranchisement in Arkansas, 1888–1894,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 69 (Autumn 2010): 245–62; Randy Finley, “A Lynching State: Arkansas in the 1890s,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 61–85.
32. John William Graves, Town and Country: Race Relations in an Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865–1905 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), 86.
33. William Pickens, Bursting Bonds (Boston: 1923), 25–26.
34. Graves, Town and Country, 150–63, 219–25.
35. Akhil Gupta, “On Structural Violence,” in Violence Studies, ed. Kalpana Kannabiran (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 350.
36. “Drunken Mob Makes an Attack on a Negro Normal School in Arkansas.” Arizona Republican, June 30, 1897, 8; “General News.” Nebraska Advertiser, September 24, 1897, 2.
37. Robert Thomas Kerlin, The Voice of the Negro 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 101–102, https://archive.org/details/voiceofnegro191900kerl.
38. Lancaster, Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 45–82.
39. Calvin R. Ledbetter Jr., “Adoption of Initiative and Referendum in Arkansas: The Roles of George W. Donaghey and William Jennings Bryan,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 51 (1992): 199–223; Calvin R. Ledbetter Jr., Carpenter from Conway: George Washington Donaghey as Governor of Arkansas 1909–1913 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); James F. Willis, “The Farmers’ Schools of 1909: The Origins of Arkansas’s Four Regional Universities,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 65 (Autumn 2006): 224–49.
40. Dumouchel, Barren Sacrifice, xiv.
41. “Posse Out after Harry Poe,” Arkansas Gazette, January 27, 1910, 7.
42. “Negro Is Rushed to Little Rock,” Arkansas Gazette, January 29, 1910, 2; “Negro Is Spirited Away,” Arkansas Gazette, February 1, 1910, 1.
43. “Negro Must Hang at Hot Springs on April 1,” Arkansas Democrat, March 2, 1910, 1; “Poe Appeal Was Mistake,” Sentinel-Record (Hot Springs), March 3, 1910, 4; “Harry Poe’s Execution Is Stayed by Appeal,” Arkansas Gazette, March 25, 1910, 5. The Gazette has Poe being arrested and then “identified” on January 28, prior to his transfer from the county, but other sources have Poe committing his alleged crime on January 28 and being arrested two days later and positively identified on January 31; see “Harry Poe Forfeited His Life on Gallows Today for Rape,” Hot Springs Daily News, September 2, 1910, 1. However, the actual chief of police docket records his arrest on January 26; see Garland County Records: Jail and Prison Records, 1884–1965: January 1, 1904, Docket of Police Judge—January 30, 1913, Police Judge Docket, microfilm, Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock.
44. “Decisions of Supreme Court,” Arkansas Gazette, May 10, 1910, 10.
45. “Two Weeks Given for Brief in Poe Case,” Arkansas Gazette, May 22, 1910, 5; “Decision of the Supreme Court,” Arkansas Gazette, June 7, 1910, 9; “Negro Stoically Awaits His Death,” Arkansas Gazette, July 21, 1910, 3.
46. “Plead for Harry Poe,” Sentinel-Record (Hot Springs), June 16, 1910, 1.
47. “Will Send Militia to Attend Poe’s Hanging,” Arkansas Gazette, August 11, 1910, 9; “Asks Stay of Execution,” Arkansas Gazette, August 31, 1910, 6.
48. Margaret Vandiver, Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 13.
49. Matthew Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 1–2.
50. Card, Confronting Evils, 69.
51. Grif Stockley, Black Boys Burning: The 1959 Fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 83.
52. Quoted in Stockley, Black Boys Burning, 141.
53. “The Newport Lynching,” Arkansas Gazette, January 3, 1905, 4.
54. “When Public Anger Breaks All Bonds,” Arkansas Gazette, June 21, 1913, 6.
55. Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (New York: Routledge, 2010), 17.
56. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 183–84.
57. Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 187
58. Tyner, Violence in Capitalism, 19.
59. Žižek, Violence, 9.
60. Tyner, Violence in Capitalism, 8.
61. Dumouchel, The Barren Sacrifice, 90.
62. Dumouchel, 91.
CHAPTER 3
1. Karlos Hill, Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 51.
2. Hill, 40–49
3. Hill, 53.
4. Hill, 54.
5. “Negro Slayer Is Burned at Stake,” Arkansas Gazette, January 27, 1921, 1.
6. Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, trans. Gabriel Borrud (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 288.
7. Hill, Beyond the Rope, 55.
8. Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 189.
9. Claudia Card, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 207.
10. Kjell Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (New York: Routledge, 2018), 71.
11. Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (New York: Routledge, 2010), 15.
12. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 239.
13. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xxi.
14. Randy Finley, “A Lynching State: Arkansas in the 1890s,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 70–71.
15. Fritz Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy, trans. Andrew B. B. Hamilton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 84.
16. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 151.
17. Manne, 152.
18. Anderson, Perpetrating Genocide, 73.
19. David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 91.
20. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 22.
21. Lang, 21.
22. Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy, 1.
23. Breithaupt, 97.
24. Breithaupt, 99.
25. Breithaupt, 114.
26. Breithaupt, 177.
27. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 39.
28. Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy, 181.
29. Robert J. Sternberg and Karin Sternberg, The Nature of Hate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 51.
30. Sternberg and Sternberg, 54, 59.
31. Sternberg and Sternberg, 61.
32. Manne, Down Girl, 135.
33. “Assailant of Girl Lynched by Mob of 20,” Arkansas Democrat, August 9, 1916, 1; “Miss Whitman’s [sic] Assailant Pays Usual Penalty,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, August 10, 1916, 1; “Negro Who Attacked Girl Is Lynched at Stuttgart,” Arkansas Gazette, August 10, 1916, 12.
34. “Negro Is Lynched by Mob at DeWitt.” Arkansas Gazette, October 10, 1916, 1.
35. “Mob Victim Was Extended Every Earned Courtesy,” Arkansas Democrat, August 14, 1916, 1.
36. Manne, Down Girl, 134.
37. Manne, 157.
38. “Race Troubles near Star City Are Not Feared,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, September 4, 1919, 1; “Lynching at Star City Followed by Reprisal Threats,” Arkansas Democrat, September 3, 1919, 1.
39. Quoted in Robert Thomas Kerlin, The Voice of the Negro 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 103, https://archive.org/details/voiceofnegro191900kerl.
40. David F. Krugler, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 15–16.
41. Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 49.
42. Randy Finley, “Black Arkansans and World War One,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 49 (Autumn 1990): 261.
43. Woodruff, American Congo, 116.
44. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 76.
45. Andrew Whiten and Josef Perner, “Fundamental Issues in the Multidisciplinary Study of Mindreading,” in Natural Theories of Mind: Evolution, Development and Simulation of Everyday Mindreading, ed. Andrew Whiten (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 9.
46. Whiten and Perner, 10.
47. Manne, Down Girl, 147.
48. Kelly Houston Jones, “White Fear of Black Rebellion in Antebellum Arkansas, 1819–1865,” in The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819–1919, ed. Guy Lancaster (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2018), 17–39.
49. Michael Pierce, “The Mechanics of Little Rock: Free Labor Ideas in Antebellum Arkansas, 1845–1861,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 67 (Autumn 2008): 221.
50. Pierce, “The Mechanics of Little Rock,” 233–35; Jones, “White Fear of Black Rebellion,” 33–35.
51. Guy Lancaster, Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 45–74.
52. Manne, Down Girl, 148.
53. Manne, 168.
CHAPTER 4
1. “The Vengeance of the Mob,” Arkansas Gazette, May 15, 1892, 4.
2. “D., S. THUD,” Arkansas Gazette, May 14, 1892, 1. The title of the Gazette’s article, “D., S. Thud” was an abbreviation for “dull, sickening thud,” a term often used to describe the sound of someone being hanged.
3. “D., S. THUD,” 1.
4. “He’s Gone,” Arkansas Gazette, May 14, 1892, 1.
5. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 39.
6. Wood, 62.
7. “He’s Gone,” Arkansas Gazette, May 14, 1892, 1; “A Night’s Work,” Arkansas Gazette, May 15, 1892, 1, 3. For a more detailed account of the lynching of Henry James, see Guy Lancaster, “Before John Carter: Lynching and Mob Violence in Pulaski County, 1882–1906,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 170–78.
8. Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), xxii.
9. Fiske and Rai, 2.
10. David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 91.
11. René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 18.
12. Mikkel Thorup, An Intellectual History of Terror: War, Violence and the State (New York: Routledge, 2010), 21.
13. Fiske and Rai, Virtuous Violence, 7.
14. Fiske and Rai, 17.
15. Fiske and Rai, 18–21.
16. Fiske and Rai, 22–24.
17. Fiske and Rai, 37.
18. Fiske and Rai, 158, 159.
19. Kelly Houston Jones, “‘Doubtless Guilty’: Lynching and Slaves in Antebellum Arkansas,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 20.
20. Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas (Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1890), 826.
21. Diary of George W. Lewis, June 4, 1865–December 31, 1865, 12th Michigan Infantry Regiment, Lloyd Miller Collection, US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
22. “Barbarous.” New York Herald, April 17, 1873, 5.
23. “Mob Has Formed to Lynch Negro,” Arkansas Gazette, February 19, 1904, 1.
24. “Negro Murderer Burned at Stake,” Arkansas Gazette, February 20, 1904, 1–2.
25. “Negro Burned Alive by a Mob near El Dorado,” Arkansas Gazette, May 22, 1919, 1.
26. “Negro Who Slew Sheriff of Columbia County Is Burned at Stake by Mob,” Arkansas Democrat, November 11, 1919, 1; “Sheriff’s Slayer Burned at Stake,” Arkansas Gazette, November 12, 1919, 9.
27. Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 63–64.
28. Arne Johan Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 185.
29. “Retribution.” Arkansas Gazette, July 2, 1875, 4; “Lynch Law: A Negro Hung near Russellville.” Arkansas Gazette, June 29, 1875, 4.
30. “Lynchings,” Arkansas Gazette, August 11, 1898, 4.
31. Richard Buckelew, “The Clarendon Lynching of 1898: The Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 100.
32. “The Lynching Mania,” Arkansas Gazette, August 18, 1898, 4.
33. “As to Lynching,” Arkansas Gazette, August 26, 1898, 4.
34. “Nathan Lacey Was Lynched Last Night,” Arkansas Democrat, October 17, 1911, 1; “Nathan Lacey Is Lynched by Mob,” Arkansas Gazette, October 17, 1911, 1.
35. “Do Lynchings Pay?” Arkansas Democrat, October 18, 1911, 6.
36. “Some Questions,” The Appeal (St. Paul, Minnesota), May 21, 1892, 2. Lex talionis is the Latin term for the law of retaliation, or more commonly the “eye for an eye” form of justice.
CHAPTER 5
1. Aeschylus, Oresteia, trans. Peter Meineck (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 101.
2. “Was Lynched for Eloping,” Arkansas Democrat, July 7, 1905, 1.
3. “Dumas Scene of Quiet Lynching,” Arkansas Gazette, July 7, 1905, 1. As Nancy Snell Griffith has noted, a number of reports concerning “private mob” lynchings depicted the mob as going about its work in a quiet and orderly fashion. See Nancy Snell Griffith, “‘At the Hands of a Person or Persons Unknown’: The Nature of Lynch Mobs in Arkansas,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 38–40.
4. “Brownstown [Sevier County],” Arkansas Gazette, October 4, 1887, 3.
5. “Negro Is Lynched in Chicot County,” Arkansas Gazette, November 26, 1921, 1; “Note Written to White Girl Costs Young Negro His Life.” New York Tribune, November 26, 1921, 6.
6. “Denounce Rape,” Arkansas Gazette, August 20, 1899, 3.
7. Quoted in Fon Louise Gordon, Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 50.
8. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: Random House, 2002), 73.
9. Charles F. Robinson, “‘Most Shamefully Common’: Arkansas and Miscegenation,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 60 (Autumn 2001): 266.
10. Kelly Houston Jones, “‘Doubtless Guilty’: Lynching and Slaves in Antebellum Arkansas,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 33.
11. Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 29.
12. Diane Miller Somerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 24.
13. Robinson, “‘Most Shamefully Common,’” 268.
14. Quoted in Paul C. Palmer, “Miscegenation as an Issue in the Arkansas Constitutional Convention of 1868,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 24 (Summer 1965): 102.
15. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 43.
16. “Showed Their Hands,” Arkansas Gazette, February 1, 1868, 2.
17. Palmer, “Miscegenation as an Issue,” 119.
18. Robinson, “‘Most Shamefully Common,’” 271–72.
19. Mattias Smångs, Doing Violence, Making Race: Lynching and White Racial Group Formation in the U.S. South, 1882–1930 (New York: Routledge, 2017), 74.
20. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 95.
21. Robinson, “‘Most Shamefully Common,’” 275–76.
22. “A Whitecapper Killed,” Osceola Times, May 5, 1894, 3.
23. Ida. B. Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” Our Day, May 1893; online at BlackPast, January 29, 2007, https://www.Blackpast.org/uncategorized/1893-ida-b-wells-lynch-law-all-its-phases/.
24. Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, trans. Gabriel Borrud (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 36.
25. Scott R. Garrels, “Imitation, Mirror Neurons, and Mimetic Desire: Convergence between the Mimetic Theory of René Girard and Empirical Research on Imitation,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 12–13 (2006): 64.
26. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans, Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 146.
27. Girard, 145.
28. Girard, 146.
29. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 154.
30. Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 38.
31. Palaver, 59.
32. Palaver, 61.
33. Michael E. Brown, “The Causes of Internal Conflict: An Overview,” in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict, rev. ed, ed. Michael E. Brown, Owen R. Coté Jr., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 11–12.
34. Donald G. Mathews, At the Altar of Lynching: Burning Sam Hose in the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 172.
35. René Girard, “Violence and Religion: Cause or Effect?” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture 6 (Spring 2004): 8.
36. Arne Johan Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 182.
37. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 270, 271.
38. Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency, 183–84.
39. Vetlesen, 185.
40. Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 152.
41. “At the Stake,” Arkansas Gazette, February 21, 1912, 1.
42. Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 11–12.
43. “At the Stake,” Arkansas Gazette, February 21, 1912, 1.
44. Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 161.
45. “Coy’s Carcass,” Arkansas Gazette, February 23, 1892, 2.
46. “State News,” Arkansas Gazette, March 11, 1892, 1.
47. Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 288.
48. Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown, 79.
49. “At the Stake,” Arkansas Gazette, February 21, 1912, 1.
50. Quoted in CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, s.v. “Ed Coy (Lynching of),” by Larry LeMasters, last modified July 2, 2016, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/edward-coy-7035/.
51. Wells, “Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (punctuation modernized).
52. Rev. D. A. Graham, “Some Facts about Southern Lynchings,” Indianapolis Recorder, June 10, 1899; online at BlackPast, January 29, 2007, http://www.Blackpast.org/?q=1899-reverend-d-graham-some-facts-about-southern-lynchings.
53. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 5–6.
54. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1998), 192.
55. Randy Finley, “A Lynching State: Arkansas in the 1890s,” in Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950, ed. Guy Lancaster (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018), 62.
56. Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South, 200.
57. Smångs, Doing Violence, Making Race, 107, 109.
58. Paul Dumouchel, The Barren Sacrifice: An Essay on Political Violence, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 91.
59. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 12.
60. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The End of American Lynching (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 27.
61. Megan Eatman, Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 31, 32.
CONCLUSION
1. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: Viking, 1941), 830.
2. See Guy Lancaster, “Lynching and Impeachment: Some History for Donald Trump,” Arkansas Times, October 22, 2019, https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2019/10/22/lynching-and-impeachment-some-history-for-donald-trump.
3. Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 21, 23, 28.
4. Payam Akhavan, Reducing Genocide to Law: Definition, Meaning, and the Ultimate Crime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 131, 124. The terms historical injustice and enduring injustice are drawn from Jeff Spinner-Halev, Enduring Injustice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
5. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 188–89.
6. Quoted from Anne P. Rice, ed., Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 220–22.
7. René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 35.
8. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 167.
9. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), xv.
10. James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 5.
11. Jonathan Markowitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xvi.
12. Chris Gilligan, Northern Ireland and the Crisis of Anti-Racism: Rethinking Racism and Sectarianism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 164.
13. Gilligan, 175.
14. Christopher Kyriakides and Rodolfo D. Torres, Race Defaced: Paradigms of Pessimism, Politics of Possibility (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 156–57.
15. Ersula J. Ore, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019), 5–6.
16. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The End of American Lynching (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 137.
17. Ore, Lynching, 10.
18. Megan Eatman, Ecologies of Harm: Rhetorics of Violence in the United States (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 2.
19. Eatman, Ecologies of Harm, 9.