In June 1998 three young white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, committed an almost unimaginably cruel murder by dragging an African American man behind their truck until his body almost disintegrated; they then left what remained of his torso in front of a black church. It was later discovered that they had written up a plan to initiate a white supremacist cult with a ritual murder of a black man. As they chained their victim to the truck, the three young men stripped off his pants and underwear. Gazing at the work they were about to commence, one of them declared: “That's what they used to do when a black man got caught messing around with a white women, in the old days.”1 The victim of their horrific crime, James Byrd, Jr., had not been “messing around” with a white woman, nor had they suspected that of him. They had in fact chosen him at random, having picked him up hitchhiking while they drove home from a night of drinking.
What is remarkable about this episode in the history of American lynching is that it reveals the depth of what I am calling the discourse of lynching—that is, the mythology or foundational narrative that has given structure and meaning to lynching in America for the past century. The three white supremacists were motivated to act by a mythology of black men's insatiable sexual desire for white women, and a mythology of white men's sacred duty to protect white women through violent actions against black men. Like other lynchers of a century earlier, these three young men in the 1990s were roused by a discourse that made them view black male sexuality as an omnipresent danger, and inspired them, also like their ideological ancestors, to stand in awe and fear and in an attitude of violent vengeance at the sight of a black man's genitalia. In the act of stripping their victim and alleging things they well knew to be false, these three lynchers demonstrate precisely how the discourse of lynching operates, how it masks real motives (to establish white supremacy) through a mythic evocation of what lynchers of an earlier era called “the usual crime.”
Lynching, then, has a discourse, a changing set of myths, narratives, and imagery that allows lynchers and their advocates to claim the high ground of justice, chivalry, and morality. A discourse, as I am using the term here, structures the ways a group of people imagines an event. A discourse defines the parameters of, and assigns the meaning to, that event; a discourse likewise defines the group of people who use it to justify their participation in that event.2 The ascendant discourse of lynching, the one with which I began this chapter and which hereafter I will call the “lynching for rape” discourse, defined all the participants in the scenario through the act of rape: white women as vulnerable victims, white men as righteous avengers, and black men as ravenous animals. Whoever wished to challenge the lynching for rape discourse was liable to the charge of being against chivalry, against family, against the rights of self-defense, against morality, against virtually everything decent. The discourse of lynching, then, determined not just the meaning of the event but also the terms of debate over the event. Moreover, it has always been the lynching advocates who have mobilized the discourse of lynching that delimited the possible responses of antilynching activists.
It is to that history that we now turn in this chapter, to see how the discourse of lynching evolved. We will examine the factors that went into the formation of a series of discourses of lynching; how these were developed to suit different conditions; how select elements of discourses survived the demise of the rest of the discourse and how these elements assumed a place in newly emergent discourses; and, finally, how these discourses were so purposefully mobilized to motivate lynchers and embolden their defenders. Two points are worth noting at the outset. First, the lynching for rape discourse is only one of the evolving discourses of lynching. Because, however, it is also the ascendant one, the one with the most historical resonance, sufficiently evocative in our own day to inspire the hateful work of three white supremacists and the gratuitous rhetoric of one would-be Supreme Court Justice, the history I offer is largely a history of how other discourses evolved into the lynching for rape discourse. Second, the history of the discourse of lynching is the intellectual history of the terms of debate created by lynching advocates and contested by antilynching activists; it is also a history of the work of ideological myth-making, an exposé of the ways particular conflicts are hidden, certain social fissures papered over, and other, apparently more salient differences configured as meaningful.
THE FORMATION OF THE DISCOURSE
In 1880, three years after the withdrawal of federal forces from the South, a Charleston newspaper noted that it had long expressed its positive opinion on the “subject of lynching negroes who commit outrages on women.” These sentiments, the editor concluded, “are not new and they have been often times expressed.” It is true that neither the practice nor the defense of lynching black men alleged to have committed rape was particularly new, and rudimentary versions of the defense of lynching may have been expressed even earlier than the editor supposed. Enslaved African Americans were lynched throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often for an alleged rape of a white woman, and sometimes these lynchings were defended on the grounds of the alleged crime. In a notable case in Mississippi in 1841, for example, two runaway slaves from Louisiana were burned to death for allegedly committing a series of murders and rapes as they made their way along the Red River. A Mississippi newspaper editor writing belatedly in 1854 retold the story with vigor and claimed that the case demanded no less brutal or exemplary a punishment since the crime of rape appealed “to every noble feeling, to every generous sympathy, to man's high sense of inexorable justice.”3 Nonetheless, while there are scattered examples of people justifying lynching for rape in the mid-nineteenth century, and earlier, it would not be until the end of Reconstruction that there emerged a discourse that would exert an enormously influential role in motivating lynchers, inspiring their apologists, and fashioning a coherent worldview with its own history and morality. That discourse borrowed from and augmented the earlier discourses.
We saw in Chapter One that there emerged during the Revolutionary War two major claims made by lynching apologists—the frontier justice claim with its assertion that justice can be delivered by self-proclaimed groups in the absence of the conventional judicial apparatus of civilized societies, and the popular sovereignty claim that the people can execute acts of justice because they never fully surrender their will to their elected or appointed representatives. Both vigilante groups and vigilance committees drew on these claims and used them to defend the work they did, sometimes in genuine frontier conditions where there were no courts, and sometimes in urban conditions where they claimed the courts to be lax or corrupt.
In addition, we have seen that these two claims were sometimes buttressed by claims of military necessity. The case of the Bedford militia was an early example during the Revolutionary War, as was then General Andrew Jackson's summary executions of two Indian chiefs and two British agents accused of fomenting Indian rebellion during the Seminole War in 1818. An even more egregious but ambiguous case is the Civil War massacre at Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864, when General Nathan Bedford Forrest led his Confederate forces against the Union-held outpost on the Mississippi River, capturing the fort and then murdering in cold blood up to three hundred Union soldiers after they surrendered, many of them black.4 Cases of wartime summary executions are complicated and might at times be better described as military massacres in violation of the laws of war rather than as lynchings. The important point for us to note, though, is that the claim of military necessity, and concomitantly the language of war, had an undeniable appeal that could be evoked in situations that were less clearly moments of war. In recent times, we have seen the government suspend the civil liberties of those deemed enemies or “enemy combatants” in the cases of the “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror” (although, notably, not the “War on Poverty”). Prolynching advocates did not always draw on the language of war, but some did and others often implied it to indicate the sort of crisis that permitted extralegal action. Rebecca Lattimer Felton serves as an example of someone who evoked war imagery in her advocacy of lynching when she urges white men to protect “poor maidens [who] are destroyed in a land that their fathers died to save from the invader's foot.” The enemies before were the invaders, the enemy now what she calls “the heathen at home.” In either case, she casts the South and her maidens as besieged, embattled, and in battle.
Another factor that contributed to the lynching discourse, one that was largely the contribution of the regulators, which antedated the term “lynching” if not the actual practice, is the idea of a community's right or obligation to control those who violate its understood values and mores. What popular sovereignty was to democratic theory, communal values were to statutes—the informal but higher authority that governed a people. Advocates of lynching frequently note that lynchers uphold mores that are inscribed more deeply than any other laws, and that these values—values like chivalry and the sanctity of home and hearth—are to be protected whether or not the government or courts have in place means or laws to protect them. Following the example of different kinds of regulators throughout American history, including the Klan in some aspects, lynch mobs often asserted as their prerogative the correction of misbehavior by deviant or defiant members of the community. By the end of the nineteenth century, the means of correction used by lynch mobs were much more severe than those used by earlier regulators, and the kinds of misbehaviors that lynch mobs “corrected” were either allegations of spectacular crimes or unspecified breaches of racial mores.
The allegation most popular in the post-Reconstruction lynching discourse, of course, was rape. Although there is no one historical episode or intellectual forebear to which we can trace the origin of justifying lynching by reference to rape, the case that did the most to make “lynching” a nationally recognized term also introduced the embryonic form of that lynching for rape discourse. The 1835 Vicksburg, Mississippi, lynching and purging of the city's gamblers was cast into dynamic gendered terms. In explaining the “dire necessity” of the Vicksburg citizenry, the local newspaper wrote: “We had borne with their enormities, until to have suffered them any longer would not only have proved us destitute of every manly sentiment, but would also have implicated us in the guilt of accessories to their crime.” It was “manly sentiment” that drove them to lynch the gamblers, and not to have done so would not only have made the citizens destitute of manhood, but would have them “accessories,” in a word, pimps to this crime. And this crime, whatever its actual nature, was sexual. The Vicksburg Register's language—“in the name of our insulted laws—of offended virtue, and of slaughtered innocence”—is language written in the register of rape even though the actual crime was gambling.5
Here we see what would become the stark gendered dynamics of the lynching discourse, which represented lynching as a patently patriarchal practice, a defense by men of women, through violence. In later forms, primarily during and after the 1870s, the discourse of lynching will straightforwardly state that those who lynch are protectors of women and those who are lynched debauchers of them (and, of course, “women” in that discourse always could mean only “white”). It is notable that one of the earliest defenses of lynching also used the language of rape, and even more notable that the crime the lynchers punished was so obviously not rape. This apparent anomaly demonstrates the ways that the rhetoric of rape was used to register the most offensive type of crime, one for which there was no defense. Someone could murder in self-defense, could perhaps be driven to theft by hunger, but nothing could justify rape. Moreover, rape was seen to be worse than either murder or theft. While theft could be seen as an abstraction, to an extent, and not irreversible (property can be returned), rape was neither; in the terms of the debate over it, rape rendered the raped woman irredeemable and stole from her (and, in patriarchal values, her father or husband) something that was lost forever. It was common for lynching advocates to claim that rape was worse than murder because it assaulted the soul as well as the body of the victim, not a surprising rhetorical strategy in a patriarchal culture where a woman was valued for her capacity to deliver an honest heir, where centuries of religious scripture and secular writers celebrated chastity as a greater possession than life, for a woman. Finally, rape, according to the patriarchal dictates that governed the understanding of the crime, was perceived to be a crime against family, that haven in a heartless world, and one to which any man with a family was therefore susceptible. It was a crime without any means of defense, a crime that left the victim worse than dead, and one that struck close to the heart of any man with a mother or wife or daughter. In the midst of a culture holding such values, it was obvious how effective the rhetoric of rape could be, no matter what the crime. It was a metaphor for the nadir of human debasement. It was also a charge that was, in the words of British Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale, “easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended.”6
While it was rape that lynch mobs claimed to punish, it was the specific form of rape that violated racial mores that was indeed punished. This fact is almost too obvious to mention in a country where consensual interracial sexual relations, even within the sanctity of marriage, remained illegal in more than a dozen states until 1967, in a land where almost the only men who suffered capital punishment for interracial rapes were black men. If the law and the courts supported these racial mores, what could we expect of the extralegal mobs who felt the law and the courts to be too lenient? As further evidence of how obvious it was that lynchings were to punish black rapists of white women, consider those prolynching advocates who espoused the justice of their cause by claiming that it was the nature of the crime and not the race of the alleged perpetrator that drove them to lynch. In the Mississippi lynching of 1841, the apologist claims: “Had the perpetrators of these awful crimes, for which they terribly atoned, been white men instead of negroes, they would have met the same fate.”7 That white men would be lynched for this crime is the hyperbole to support the necessity of what actually happened and to whom it actually happened. This rhetorical device of insisting that race is incidental and not causal in lynchings for rape would also reappear in the post-Reconstruction discourse, and reappear in a way that actually insisted that race was in fact a central determinant.
In summary, then, the rudimentary rhetorical elements that would coalesce into the lynching for rape discourse were largely in place by the eve of the Civil War. The major claims of frontier justice, popular sovereignty, and the regulators' rhetoric of communal values had been clarified and given sanction by repeated usage. The charge of rape, the rhetoric of rape, and the language of imperative necessity (usually in the form of the rhetoric of war) were available no matter what the actual or alleged crime or social state might be. We can conclude our discussion by looking briefly at one antebellum example of the not quite complete but nonetheless mature deployment of the discourse of lynching in order to see it at an earlier stage, twenty years before it came to fruition.
In 1859, a lynching apologist in Missouri defended the lynching of four slaves in the course of three days in Saline County. A farmer and justice of the peace, James M. Shackleford wrote several letters in the local newspaper making the claims that lynching was necessary because the legal “penalty for rape” was “inadequate to the crime” and that it was an expression of the people's sensibilities about proper justice. “An enlightened public opinion,” Shackleford wrote in a proverbial phrase Tom Watson would echo a half-century later, “is the voice of God.” Having deployed the two major claims justifying lynching (frontier justice, popular sovereignty), Shackleford then lists a series of revolutionary and military events that he describes as equivalent moments of “mob law.” It was “mob law,” he wrote, when Jackson hanged the two British agents, “mob law when the men of Boston disguised themselves as Indians and threw the tea overboard,” “mob law when the people of France hurled the Bourbons from the throne, and crushed out the dominion of the priests and established a new order of things.” With these noble precedents, he concludes, “I know no reason why we should not have a little mob law in the State of Missouri, and County of Saline, when the occasion imperiously and of necessity demands it.” The immediate occasion was the slave's alleged raping of a white woman, but the imperious necessity likely was to be traced to the larger social crisis in the county and the state—the alarming number of slaves who had escaped from Saline County (at least a dozen in the year and a half prior to the lynchings) and the memory of John Brown's raid into Vernon County to abet the escape of eleven slaves. For Shackleford, the lynching was also a way to quell what he called a “spirit of insubordination” evident in the “negro population that required a terrible example to be set them.”8
In response to a social crisis precipitated by the fear of slave insurrection, and a raid by John Brown, Shackleford invokes military precedents that suggest that Saline County is in the equivalent of a state of war, that the justice system is inadequate, and that the lynching is finally an expression of communal values that are not just revolutionary but divine. When another newspaper, the Lexington Express, questioned this logic, it was called a “negro-outrage-loving,” “antisouthern,” and “contemptible” newspaper hopelessly filled with transparent “negroism.”9 These were precisely the terms of debate that would follow Reconstruction after the Civil War—between those who aligned themselves with the South and those who were disowned by it, between those who saw rape as a metaphor for their political and social crisis and those who were vilified as pimps to black rapists (“negro-outrage-loving”) because they did not understand this reasoning, between those who were apologists for and those who were critics of lynching.
THE DISCOURSE ASCENDANT: THE REBIRTH OF A NATION
Ida B. Wells, the greatest of all antilynching activists, pointed out that “the greatest of all Negroes, Frederick Douglass” was the first to trace the emergence of the intellectual justification of lynching.10 In a pamphlet published in 1894, Douglass noted that there were “three distinct periods of persecutions” of African Americans and three distinct “sets of excuses for their persecution.” The first excuse was what Douglass called the fear of “insurrection” when African Americans, as Wells noted, were slaughtered indiscriminately at the perceived threat of urban disorder. Eventually, the “story” of insurrection “at last wore itself out” when it became obvious that there were no insurrections, that whatever violence occurred left only black victims, no black rioter was ever apprehended, and no dynamite ever exploded. “It was too much to ask thoughtful people to believe this transparent story,” noted Wells, “and southern white people at last made up their minds that some other excuse must be had.”11
The second “excuse,” born of and during Reconstruction, was the fear of what Wells termed “Negro Domination,” and Douglass “Negro supremacy,” by which both meant the fear that African Americans armed with the franchise would destroy white American government and civilization. To prevent that supremacy or domination, white terrorist groups—“the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs”—maimed, mauled, and murdered black would-be voters. Having rendered the franchise meaningless by dint of “fraud, violence, intimidation and murder,” the white South finally achieved a more stable form of disenfranchisement through state constitutions and more covert forms of intimidation. With that accomplishment, as Wells put it, the “white man's second excuse became valueless.”12
The third and final rationale offered for the continued assault on African American lives was the charge that “Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon women.” Both Wells and Douglass expose what they hold to be the malice involved in the fabrication of that charge. All these “excuses” reveal what Douglass calls “design, plan, purpose and invention” called “into being by a well-defined motive.” Wells notes that all the institutions and powers of the society—“legislators, preachers, governors, and bishops”—cooperate in “intently, maliciously, and constantly” propagating these “falsehoods.” Given its constant reiteration, and given the “unanimity, earnestness and apparent candor” of those who made the accusation again and again, it was not long before the account became widely accepted—not long, as Wells put it, for the world to accept “the story that the Negro is a monster which the Southern white man has painted him” to be.13
What Douglass calls “excuses” are not simple rationales or justifications, declarations of why something was done, but rather a set of ideas that both justify and motivate the deed while implicitly delineating a social world in which that deed makes sense. These “excuses” are operative in the sense that they are apparently neutral statements that promote particular courses of action; and they are ideological in that the work they do is primarily to screen the real motives for that action. Douglass notes that these fabrications are precisely intended to preoccupy “the public mind with an issue entirely different from the real one in question.” And, he concludes, these “excuses” reveal what he calls the “American method of reasoning in all matters concerning the Negro”—that is, the account “inverts everything; turns truth upside down, and puts the case of the unfortunate Negro inside out and wrong end foremost.”14 What Douglass and Wells call “excuses”—these apparently simple statements that contain within them a constellation of associations, some hidden and some obvious, and doing the work of masking the real motivations and political aims behind the purported ones—are what I am calling discourses; and the third and final excuse is precisely the lynching for rape discourse. This lynching for rape discourse was widely accepted, by those who lynched, by those who defended the lynchers, and, most tellingly, by many who criticized lynching and its advocates.
What, then, is this lynching for rape discourse, what are its terms, its logic, its source of appeal? As with any myth, the discourse is largely a product of popular imagination rather than intellectual labor, a form of knowledge more the result of the accumulation of informal stories than any formal course of study. It also operates in the same way as popularly generated knowledge, by evocation, by connotation, more than by systematic or direct means. There were some intellectuals, however, who did make a concerted effort to mount a comprehensive case for the discourse and they prove invaluable in revealing the connections and associations explicitly in their writing that the majority implicitly make in their minds.
Thomas Nelson Page provides a paradigmatic case of an intellectual who synthesized and put into a complete and contextual framework the lynching for rape discourse. In a book published in 1904, Page, the best-selling and most successful Southern novelist in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, renounced his earlier novelistic representations of African Americans as simple and devoted retainers and fully committed himself to the black rapist myth.15 The argument he makes depends a great deal on certain rhetorical maneuvers, a strategy of implication, a backhanded way of making insidious associations, and some unsubtle innuendo. It is, in other words, a mendacious effort to give coherence to what, at certain revealing moments, even Page himself seems not to believe.16
The major rhetorical structure of the argument is fairly straightforward. Page begins by constructing a syllogism: white Southerners lynch rapists, black men commit rape, and therefore white Southerners lynch black men. Thereafter, Page offers two historical accounts (one of the rise and evolution of rape, the other of the rise and evolution of lynching), and then he provides two sociological interpretations (explaining the social conditions that make black men rape and white men lynch). The structural logic of Page's text serves a greater purpose since part of his whole enterprise is to create the illusion of parallel activities (rape/lynching), parallel sympathies (blacks' for rapists, whites' for lynchers), and ultimately parallel responsibilities (blacks' for ending rape, whites' for ending lynching). This parallelism gives the appearance of being evenhanded and fair while not so subtly creating a nefarious set of associations that place the full blame for black rapists on all black people and, in the end, indicting the religious, intellectual, and cultural values of African American life as essentially fostering and cultivating rapists.
From the outset, Page is aware of the flaws in his syllogism since lynching was not confined to those who would avenge acts of rape. By 1904 it had been made eminently clear that lynching was a response to a variety of alleged crimes and perceived violations of racist mores (of which less than one-quarter were allegations of rape). Nonetheless, Page circumvents these facts by consistently presenting rape and lynching in a cause and effect relationship. He talks about rape as “the brutal crime which has largely brought about the frightful crime of lynching” he produces an image of “ravishing and lynching spreading like a pestilence over the country.” And he makes perfectly clear the relationship between the one and the other: “The crime of lynching is not likely to cease until the crime of ravishing and murdering women and children is less frequent than it has been of late.” In the end, rape certainly becomes what he calls “the causing crime.” Lynching is reduced to merely an “effect.” Page feels compelled to make that association in order to undo the other link so obvious to Americans, the link between race and lynching. Many of his readers, he claims, might have a “feeling” of the mischief of lynching, which “has undoubtedly been due mainly to the belief, that the lynching has been directed almost exclusively against the negroes,” which in turn produces a “latent idea” that lynching has a “political complexion.”17 Having disposed of this argument by acknowledging this misguided “feeling,” wrongheaded “belief,” and inaccurate “latent idea” that suggests the apparent connection between race and lynching, Page then hastily and thereafter declares the real connection between crime and lynching.
With his syllogism now in place, Page then produces a historical account of the evolution of black rape. Like others, both antilynching and prolynching advocates, Page begins his historical account by noting that black Americans did not commit rape prior to the Civil War—“the crime of rape was substantially unknown during the period of slavery”—or during the Civil War when, as Frederick Douglass noted, African Americans “had every opportunity to commit the abominable crime now alleged against” them. Indeed, writes Page, no “race ever behaved better than the Negroes behaved during the war.” Rape, then, was “the fatal product of new conditions” brought about during “the period and process of Reconstruction,” with what Page calls “its teachings”: the main three being the “teaching that the Negro was the equal of the white, that the white man was his enemy, and that he must assert his equality.” These teachings took effect and manifested themselves first in the crime of rape when presumably Northern “members of the Negro militia ravished white women; in some instances in the presence of their families.” As a result of these “teachings” and this example from the conquering North, previously docile former slaves began to commit the hitherto unknown crime against white women. “The first instance of rape, outside of these attacks by armed Negroes, and of consequent lynching,” notes Page, “occurred in Mississippi, where the teaching of equality and of violence found one of its most fruitful fields.” The crime of rape, then, concludes Page, can be traced directly to “the teaching of equality and the placing of power in the ignorant Negroes' hands.”18
As the author of several books in which black retainers were faithful and wholly committed to their white masters, Page was somewhat loath to condemn the entire generation of African Americans who lived through Reconstruction's teachings. He was, after all, someone who fully endorsed and had profited from the plantation romance and the stock characters who populated it. Later in the book, he would spend several pages fondly reminiscing about “Uncle Balla,” the black carriage driver on the Page plantation, who was “the guide, philosopher, and friend of [his] boyhood,” and “recall with mingled affection and awe [his] mammy's dignity, force, and kindness.” To circumvent this problem, Page posited that rape arose again once that favored generation was superseded by a new one that was sadly not the beneficiary of the school of slavery. “As the old relation, which had survived even the strain of Reconstruction, dwindled with the passing of the old generation from the stage, and the ‘New Issue’ with the new teaching took its place, the crime broke out again with renewed violence.”19
What was not in doubt, though, was that rape was the crime that begat lynching. With the rise of rape during Reconstruction, by black militia and civilians alike, “lynching, in its post-bellum stage, had its evil origin.” Page's parallel history of the evolution of lynching required him to make that crucial connection to what he called “the causing crime” and then to explain how it came to be that so many lynchings were performed for other reasons. As he himself acknowledges, “though after the war lynching in the South may have begun as a punishment for assault on white women, it has extended until of late less than one-fourth of the instances are for this crime.” The story he tells to explain this anomaly is that lynching became unmoored from its justifiable roots and was therefore corrupted. “Even though lynching is not now confined to the punishment of this crime, this crime is the one that gives the only excuse for lynching.” Implicitly, Page then defends lynching for rape instead of considering the possibility that there were always other motivating factors.
The second problem Page confronted was the sheer brutality of fin-de-siècle lynchings, where mobs tortured and mutilated and immolated their victims. Such excessive violence seemed grossly inappropriate for a form of what he is essentially calling chivalry. His answer is both to downplay the violence—he refers to the Henry Smith immolation in Paris, Texas, in 1893 as “perhaps, the second or third instance of burning in the country after the war”—and to place responsibility for the increased mob violence on the black rapists. “For a time, a speedy execution by hanging was the only mode of retribution resorted to by the lynchers; then, when this failed of its purpose, a more savage method was essayed, born of a savage fury at the failure of the first, and a stern resolve to strike a deeper terror into those whom the other method had failed to awe.”20 The mob, in other words, acted rationally in choosing to castrate, torture, dismember, and burn African Americans in order to produce a greater deterrent effect on that “causing crime.”
Having completed parallel histories of the rise and evolution of rape and lynching, Page turns to the social context that makes lynching justifiable. He rehearses three justifications that had become commonplace by 1904: 1) the “ordinary course of the law” had proved no deterrent to the crime in question; 2) citizens were rightly dismayed by “the constant delay in the execution of the law” and 3) the court system was ungallant if not vicious in requiring “the innocent victim, who, if she survived, as she rarely did, was already bowed to the earth by shame, to relate in public the story of the assault—an ordeal which was worse than death.” But the final and most compelling reason that white Southerners were driven to lynching was, as we might expect in Page's logical morass, the fault of black people whose crimes and “the unnamable brutality” attending those crimes rendered white people literally insane. These “unnamable horrors … have outraged the minds of those who live in regions where they have occurred, … upsetting reason, [and] swept from their bearings cool men and changed them into madmen, drunk with fury and the lust of revenge.”21 Lynching happens, then, because white people are driven to it by the failures of the legal system and the actions of black people.
When Page finally turns his attention to the social conditions that produce black rapists he deploys his most insidious rhetorical devices. First, he makes insinuating suggestions about all black people, much as he had used innuendo to inflame the passions of his readers by noting that the “unnamable horrors” and “unnamable brutality” are not just unnamable but unprintable. With comments like the following—“the facts in the case were so unspeakable that they have never been put in print. They simply could not be put in print”—Page manages to make these facts inflammatory by making them titillating. This is a wonderful demonstration that the stories of rape and rumors of rape were what Jacquelyn Dowd Hall memorably and brilliantly called the “folk pornography of the Bible Belt.” Page uses a similar strategy to malign black people when he opens his book and his chapter on lynching with exactly the same sentence, which certainly insinuates just what it appears to be denying: “To say that Negroes furnish the great body of rapists, is not to charge that all Negroes are ravishers.” In the end, he manages to suggest that “all Negroes” are certainly responsible for rapists by noting “the absence of a strong restraining public opinion among the Negroes of any class,” and the complicity of the black intelligentsia. Not only have intellectual “leaders of the Negro race … rarely, by act or word, shown a true appreciation of the enormity of the crime of ravishing and murdering women,” but the spiritual leaders in black churches condone and give sanction to rapists, both by failing to provide for them a practical moral code and by harboring and refusing to surrender black criminals to white police. Indeed, concludes Page, “the real sympathy of the race” resides “mainly with the criminal rather than his victim,” and the crime of rape will simply not be “done away with while the sympathy of the Negroes is with the ravisher.” While not all black people were ravishers in Page's portrait, all were sympathetic to ravishers—no different than those in more rabidly racist depictions, like R. W. Shufeldt's. This writer fantasizes that the last living black man in America, tied to a stake and feeling the heat of flames licking at his flesh, with the “surgeon's knife actually pressing upon his scrotum,” would nonetheless “seize his victim and outrage her if it lay within his power to do so.”22 Black men, in this discourse, are congenitally rapists, by instinct, by genetic predisposition, and by the voting power and beliefs in equality that Reconstruction gave them.
This image of the black rapist, on which the lynching for rape discourse so obviously depends, arose during the late nineteenth century. One notable historian of the South, Joel Williamson, dates the rise of the black rapist motif to 1889, when both the charge of black rape and the act of lynching for it “commanded a new and tremendously magnified attention,” and dates “the death of the image of Negro as beast” to 1915.23 Without necessarily requiring that kind of precision, we can note that the rise of the black rapist motif coincided with the creation of the myth of the Lost Cause, that intellectual movement that attempted to defend and apotheosize the Confederacy, a product also of the 1880s and 1890s. A major tenet of that Lost Cause mythology—what David Blight describes as its most important “article of faith”—is “the disclaimer against slavery as the cause of the war.” Page too belatedly joins his voice to those Southerners who vociferously argued this point. What is most revealing, though, is that Page is more forthright in stating just what was at stake in this argument. It is “important to make it clear that the right [of secession] did exist, because on this depends largely the South's place in history,” he writes. “Without this we were mere insurgents and rebels; with it, we were a great people in revolution for our rights.” Page foresees a historical trend that will stamp the South as a backward civilization if it is believed that the Civil War was about slavery.
It is not unlikely that in fifty years the defence of slavery will be deemed the world over to have been as barbarous as we now deem the slave-trade to have been. There is but one way to prevent the impending disaster: by establishing the real fact, that, whatever may have been the immediate and apparent occasion, the true and ultimate cause of the action of the South was her firm and unwavering adherence to the principle of self-government and her jealous devotion to her inalienable rights.24
The issue, for Page and for the other creators and defenders of the Lost Cause myth, is whether the South fought for timeless political ideals about liberty or for the mere protection of an exploitative economic system—for precious principles or precious property.
There are additional issues in Page's apologia, though, and they are integrally related to the discourse of lynching. For one thing, the political issue of “inalienable rights” is part and parcel of the issue of the popular sovereignty claims on which lynching apologists rested their arguments. Even more important is that this final commentary in Page's book again reveals his primary strategy of divorcing political actions (Civil War, lynching) from what seem to be their “immediate and apparent occasion” (the desire to own and kill black people) in order to offer a more exalted and chivalrous “true and ultimate cause”—in the case of the Civil War, the protection of sacred rights; in the case of lynching, the protection of womanhood. And for Page, and other Lost Cause prolynching proponents, there is an intimate connection in the chivalry exhibited in both causes.
The reason the contributors to the lynching for rape discourse repudiate the idea that the South fought the Civil War to defend slavery, then, is precisely that they wanted to elevate the justifications for both causes to unassailable (and common) grounds. Another writer of the same epoch reveals this connection more strikingly. In her 1906 paean to the Lost Cause, Dixie After the War, Myra Lockett Avary approvingly quotes Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens's sixteen-year-old nephew, who declared that he was off to the Civil War to “fight for the fair sex,” and then offers her rejoinder to disbelievers: “And to this day some people think we fought to keep negroes in slavery!” In her discussion of lynching, Avary likewise notes that the “rapist is a product of the reconstruction period,” and that mob murder is a response only to the crime of rape, and, as such, “lynching seems to eradicate the evil for which administered.” The chapter on lynching is entitled “Crime Against Womanhood.”25 Not so subtly, then, Avary makes defense of womanhood the cause of the Civil War as much as it is the cause of lynching. The Lost Cause is supplemented by the still not yet lost cause of lynching; both are emblems of Southern chivalry.
To get an idea of how crucial this point was to the lynching for rape discourse, we can turn to the antilynching activists who challenged this representation. For Frederick Douglass, for instance, it was imperative to demonstrate the continuity from slavery to lynching, first by noting the moral legacy of slavery. The “sentiment left by slavery is still with us,” he writes, “and the moral vision of the American people is still darkened by its presence.” Lynchers are, in the end, he writes, the products of that culture: “They have had among them for centuries a peculiar institution, and that peculiar institution has stamped them as a peculiar people.” Moreover, the evocation of slavery in the antilynching critique of the lynching for rape discourse is an outright exposé of the claims of chivalry. Slavery, Douglass concludes, “was a system of unmitigated, legalized outrage upon black women of the South.” His immediate point is that no white man was ever lynched for raping a black woman—and thus demonstrating that lynching is not performed to avenge rape and defend womanhood—but his larger point is that those who held slaves and fought a war to protect that right are no more chivalrous than are those lynchers whose complete absence of “respect for human life” is the result of their living in a slave culture. Pauline Hopkins likewise demonstrates the continuity from the era of slavery to the era of lynching. She compares “these days of mob violence, when lynching is raising its head like a venomous monster” to antebellum slavery and notes that the “atrocity of the acts committed one hundred years ago are duplicated today, when slavery is supposed no longer to exist.” Lynching and concubinage—the attacks on black men and the rape of black women—are both “nothing new. Southern sentiment has not been changed.”26
This challenge to the representation of slavery as it is found in the lynching for rape discourse reveals just what is at stake for the advocates of either side. The image of slavery in the lynching for rape discourse is of a period when black men did not rape (that came during Reconstruction), a period when black people were faithful retainers (Avary notes that “my affection is for the negro of the old order”), a period when white people were in control.27 The most effective metaphor for the loss of that control was the loss of the ability to protect their women, an ability the South fought a war to protect, according to Avary, and an ability recovered now only in occasions of mob violence, according to Page and Avary. In contrast, the image of slavery in the critique of that discourse is of an epoch when white men did rape black women (as they continued to do), an epoch that created an American culture of racial violence, and an epoch to which can be traced the motives and methods of postbellum lynchers: the desire for social control.
Let me end this section by briefly discussing the primary work that the lynching for rape discourse performed, the work, that is, that was both an expression and an example of the social control lynching sought to maintain. I noted in the introduction to this chapter that a discourse defines discernible roles to social actors. In the case of the lynching for rape discourse, rape is what black men are predisposed to committing, what white women are thereby vulnerable to having committed on their bodies, and what white men chivalrously avenge in lynching. This renders white women beholden to white men and fearful of black men; it renders the violence done to black men as justifiable; and it retains for white men the power of controlling their women (through fear and chivalry) and their former slaves (through fear and violence).28 What this discourse seems utterly to ignore is the role of black women. Rape and lynching appear to be a triangular affair, with everyone but black women assigned a place. That, however, is deceptive, for in covert ways the discourse of lynching for rape contains at its heart a vicious representation of black women that holds them ultimately responsible for the whole cycle of rape and lynching.
To see the subtle work of the discourse in assigning black women ultimate responsibility, we can return to a point made by Thomas Nelson Page, who declared that “the Negro does not generally believe in the virtue of women. It is beyond his experience.” Again, with the insinuating innuendo that is his trademark, Page is saying that women's virtue is beyond black men's “experience” because they never find it in black women. Philip A. Bruce is much more thorough in spelling out the full logic, at which Page only hints. Black women, according to Bruce, “are less modest as a class at the present day than they were before the abolition of slavery, since they are now under no restriction at all.” Without the beneficial social control of white planters, black women, Bruce concludes, have become wanton and are therefore fundamentally responsible for the rapes black men commit, in at least three ways.
First, they not only fail to provide a suitable domestic morality for their men but indeed spur their men to a life of crime. “Their moral influence over their husbands is often pernicious,” writes Bruce, and “much of the crime which the latter commit is secretly or openly instigated by the wives, who frequently go so far as to be active accomplices themselves.” Second, and this is the point Page was emphasizing, the failure of black women to be chaste gives their husbands no examples of womanly virtue. Having no “perception of personal dignity or the pangs of outraged feeling,” the black man simply cannot “gauge the terrible character of this offense against the integrity of virtuous womanhood.” Therefore, the “average plantation negro does not consider rape to be a very heinous crime,” Bruce concludes, because he is “so accustomed to the wantonness of the women of his own race.” Finally, black women are responsible for black men's raping white women (and therefore of black men's being lynched) because of what Bruce calls their “corrupting sexual influences.” Black men are made insatiable because black women are insatiable. It is an infection that earlier writers had used to defend white slaveholders who found themselves seduced by the slave women they owned. The “heaviest part of the white racial burden,” notes Avary in an almost paradigmatic case, “was the African woman, of strong sexual instincts and devoid of a sexual conscience, at the white man's door, in the white man's dwelling.”29 Black women were doing to black men after slavery what they had done to white men during slavery.
We can see, then, the logic and work of the lynching for rape discourse. White men lynch because black men rape, and black men rape because black women incite them to it. The ultimate responsibility for lynching rests at the feet of black women. Using elements borrowed from the discourse of the Lost Cause, employing rhetoric inherited from earlier discourses justifying lynching as an act of popular sovereignty and an expression of communal support against violators of communal mores, the lynching for rape discourse became an almost unassailable constellation of ideas that worked to motivate lynchers, derail their critics, and assign particular roles to every segment of the society. Those forces that arraigned themselves against lynching attempted to undo this discourse, to reveal its false logic, and to challenge the particular roles that defined those critics. It is worth noting that black women's antilynching groups had to be committed to defending black women's sexual reputation as well as criticizing lynching; and white women's groups, like the Association of White Women to Prevent Lynching, made part of its mission the critique of the logic of chivalry and denounced “the mob as a false protector of Southern womanhood.”30 It was the peculiar power of the lynching for rape discourse—because it did create roles for all social actors—to demand of its critics that they first challenge their imputed role before they could challenge lynching as a practice. Having seen the terms and logic and operative force of the discourse, we can now turn to the ways this discourse was mobilized and how it served to direct the terms of debate over lynching for the rest of the century.
THE DISCOURSE MOBILIZED: AN AMERICAN CULTURAL NARRATIVE
It would be difficult to overstate the enormous power of the lynching for rape discourse. Although critics of that discourse demonstrated through the use of statistics and facts that the discourse was simply wrong in its major presuppositions, its unperturbed defenders continued to ignore that criticism and repeat with renewed energy the main tenets of that discourse. What had been cast as “unnamable” because it would offend the virtue of the reader now became unnamed because it was widely enough known not to require naming; it simply became “the usual outrageous crime.”31 We can perhaps best appreciate both the widespread power of that discourse, and therefore the challenges faced by its critics, by discerning the range of different arenas where that discourse assumed a prominent, almost hegemonic place. For the sake of brevity, we can focus on three arenas of intellectual debate—medicine, politics, and the academy—to discern how each social arena accepted and contributed to the discourse.
The medical profession weighed in on the public debate about rape and lynching in the May 1893 issue of the Virginia Medical Monthly. In a representative exchange, important because it was between the president of the American Medical Association and a professor of surgery in Chicago, the president asks the professor to provide supplementary medical proof of what both agree to be undisputable facts—that black Americans are “deteriorating morally and physically,” and that the primary sign of that regression is black men's predatory raping of “innocent, mutilated, and ruined female victims.” Both correspondents are, in the end, mildly critical of lynching, although sympathetic to lynchers—the president feels that newspapers too glibly report the lynching and ignore the crime that led to it, the professor feels that burning black men is barbarous but that he would also do it “under like circumstances.”
What is most telling, though, is how thoroughly both accept the premise that lynching is performed for rape and that black men are habitually (indeed physiologically) prone to raping white women. The professor ends his disquisition by advocating an apparently less barbarous punishment than lynching that he believes would help curb this peculiarly racial crime: medical castration “supplemented by penile mutilation.” But the more significant contribution to the debate for our purposes is the medical diagnosis offered by the doctors. The reason black men are prone to rape, the doctor concludes, is that they have a “distinct tendency to reversion to type, which reversion is especially manifest in the direction of sexual proclivities.” Held in check before by the “inhibiting influences of slavery,” the black man's reversion is now unhindered by any social agency and driven primarily by biological imperatives, by “hereditary influences,” and by “animal propensities” that even the usually ameliorating act of “cross-breeding” fails to reduce.32 In addition to its being a failing of morals and civilization, black men's raping attests to the failings of genetic inheritance. So weighs in the medical profession to make its unique and authoritative contribution to the lynching for rape discourse.
If the contribution of the medical profession to the lynching for rape discourse was to make the problem of rape pathological and physiological (and to some extent thereby suitable only for medical professionals), the contribution of politicians was to make the discourse a representative form of political demagoguery. Two South Carolinian gubernatorial candidates exemplify the way this discourse was mobilized for political purposes. In the gubernatorial campaign of 1892, Ben Tillman proclaimed: “There is only one crime that warrants lynching, and Governor as I am, I would lead a mob to lynch the negro who ravishes a white woman.” Twenty years later, Cole Blease employed the same discourse, making even more explicit what Tillman had unsubtly implied: “Whenever the constitution of my state steps between me and the defense of the virtue of white womanhood, then I say to hell with the Constitution!” So certain was he that this sentiment would impress his constituency that one of his campaign posters contained the slogan “A Governor Who Lauds Lynching.”33 Both candidates won their elections. So, too, did Jeff Davis (not the former Confederate president, who died in 1889), the gubernatorial candidate in Arkansas in 1903, who explained away his having pardoned a black man by noting that in Arkansas “when we have no doubt about a negro's guilt we do not give him a trial; we mob him. … The mere fact that this negro got a trial is evidence that there was some degree of doubt of his guilt.” Davis was elected to an unprecedented third term in 1904, and the next year he took the occasion of President Theodore Roosevelt's visit to state publicly that lynchings would happen wherever “true manhood has a representative or virtue a worshipper.”34
The lynching for rape discourse provided a fine campaign strategy because it allowed the candidates to align themselves with a principle more important than the constitution they eventually have to swear to uphold. Instead, they claim connection to a greater cause—chivalry, and, by implication, white supremacy—which is more directly meaningful to the voters. A Southern newspaper editor, commenting on a lynching in a different state, echoed this sensibility when he argued that lynchers claimed an allegiance to “a law more potent, more majestic, more unchangeable than any in the statute books … the common law … written not on tablets of stone, nor in the sections of her Code … but graven on the hearts of her men who have any manhood in them.”35 The discourse appealed to and implied a certain kind of populism, a rhetoric stating that the actions of the masses are more effective and manly than the institutions of the society, which by implication are more effete and less virile.
But it was not just on the way to or on the steps of the governor's mansion that Southern politicians could trumpet these sentiments. On the floor of the Senate in 1907, then Senator Ben Tillman offered a more graphic and personal version of this discourse. He first offered the traditional images of the stock characters in the lynching for rape discourse—black men whose “breasts [were] pulsating with the desire to sate their passions upon white maidens and wives,” and a white woman victim, “her body prostituted, her purity destroyed, her chastity taken from her, and a memory branded on her brain as with a red-hot iron”—and then concluded with a stirring narrative of familial dysfunction: “I have three daughters, but so help me God, I had rather find either one of them killed by a tiger or bear and gather up her bones and bury them, conscious that she had died in the purity of her maidenhood, than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she had been robbed of the jewel of her womanhood by a black fiend.”36
Another senator, the first woman to become one, Rebecca Latimer Felton, spoke with even more venomous power in her most famous speech at the annual meeting of the State Agricultural Society of Georgia in the summer of 1897. Felton's peroration is the most memorable and oft-quoted part of her speech—“If it takes lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary”—but the intent behind it was what gave substance to that bloodthirsty cry. And the intent was to disenfranchise black men, whose raping of white woman was in her mind symbolic of the raping of the body politic. Felton claimed that the crime of rape among black men “had grown and increased by reason of the corruption and debasement of the right of suffrage, [and] that it would grow and increase with every election where white men equalized themselves at the polls with an inferior race.” The logic, then, was that rape would decrease with black disenfranchisement, which was being accomplished in virtually every Southern state by constitutional means in the 1890s and would be effectively achieved in Georgia within a decade of Felton's speech.37
The contribution of politicians to the discourse of lynching, then, is threefold. First, as apologists for lynching they put the discourse into a public forum—state and federal congresses—whose primary function is to create the laws that lynchers violate. This situation exemplifies how greater law matters to these politicians and their constituents to such a degree that the advocates of lawlessness become the chief executives of law in their states. Second, they use the discourse to appeal to voters who are swayed by what sounds like a reform and populist rhetoric but is in reality a white supremacist agenda. We know that a promising biracial populism crashed on the shoals of racism; we see how conservative politicians employ a discourse that borrows elements of populist rhetoric to help in that wreck. Third, politicians use that discourse to create an association between the crime of rape and the one meaningful activity in the political arena, the act of voting. When blacks vote, they become rapists. When whites vote, they elect representatives who are apologists for extralegal violence against black rapists. The lynching for rape discourse mobilized a political sentiment that ultimately helped disenfranchise black people.
The third arena of social activity, the academy, is the one where we might expect to find some dissent to the discourse. A place of putatively more liberal leanings, with a stated commitment to freedom of thought and expression, the university in the South should have been the source of the kind of criticism that was absent or anemic in the media, the pulpit, and most of civil society. Two famous cases—one at Emory in Atlanta and the other at Trinity College in Durham—thoroughly demonstrate just how much free debate was stifled in the academy precisely when it came to discussing the logic of the discourse of lynching.
In 1902, Andrew H. Sledd, a professor of Latin and Greek at Emory College, published an article in the Atlantic Monthly in which he excoriated politicians and editors who were apologists for lynching, calling them “blatant demagogues, political shysters, courting favor with the mob; news sheets, flattering the prejudices and pandering to the passions of their constituency.” He directly challenged the lynching for rape discourse by declaring that rape was not alleged in the vast majority of lynching cases, and that lynchers, rather than being chivalrous Southern gentlemen, were rather members of “our lower and lowest classes.” Those politicians and newspaper editors he criticized (including Rebecca Felton) wrote with such force in denunciating him that Sledd finally resigned and left for further study at Yale with a financial “settlement” to assuage the guilt of the Board of Trustees of the college.38
A year later, John Spencer Bassett, a faculty member at his undergraduate alma mater, Trinity College, raised a similar furor when he published an article in South Atlantic Quarterly in which he asserted the rights of African Americans, prophesied their eventual social equality with whites, and condemned those white politicians and newspaper editors who employed the discourse of lynching as a strategy to foment what he called “race antipathy.” Josephus Daniels, owner and editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, who had in fact defended Sledd's right to freedom of thought and expression a year earlier, attacked Bassett and defended the discourse of lynching as the “glory of Southern manhood and Southern chivalry.” He pointedly excluded Bassett from that fraternity, claiming that he was unfit to write “from the standpoint of a Southern man.” Bassett's brethren at the Smithfield Methodist Church likewise felt that he was unfit to worship with them, as they resolved to dismiss him for what they called statements “unjust to our southern institutions, and southern sentiments, and … compromising and humiliating to southern Anglo-Saxon manhood and womanhood.” A trustee of Trinity College, John F. Bruton, concurred and averred that Bassett's article would incite black rapists to act: “Every published declaration like those of Dr. Bassett quickens the pulse of the black man.”39 In the end, Bassett was not fired from Trinity, largely because the president of the college interviewed Bassett and permitted him an occasion to rephrase and downplay every statement that had proved antipathetic to his critics. Three years later, Bassett resigned from Trinity and left the South to teach at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The academy, then, proved to be subject to rather than critical of the influences of political and media demagogues, and thus a site committed to repeating rather than investigating the claims of the discourse. The academy was also the bulwark of apologists for the discourse of lynching: some were zealots who wished to purge wayward faculty who had the temerity to doubt the truth of the discourse, and some were moderates whose graceful writing and authoritative status made the discourse more respectable. John Carlisle Kilgo, for example, the president of Trinity College, who spoke eloquently for freedom of speech during the Bassett hearings in front of the Board of Trustees, nonetheless managed to rein in the opinions of at least one faculty member in his somewhat coercive interview with Bassett. But Kilgo was no less an apologist for lynching. He had in fact published an article a year before the Bassett case in the very journal Bassett founded, South Atlantic Quarterly, in which he defended lynching, exalted Southern women, and proclaimed that the repeated lynching of black men “cannot be charged to racial prejudices.”40
While white academics might lose tenure or church membership for criticizing the discourse, black intellectuals faced the threat of losing their lives to the mob activity they denounced. In 1887 the black weekly Montgomery Herald published an editorial that mocked the lynching for rape discourse, claiming that mobs would soon “lynch every colored man that looks at a white woman with a twinkle in his eye,” and implying that interracial sexual relations were consensual and a result of the “growing appreciation of the white Juliet for the colored Romeo, as he becomes more and more intelligent and refined.” The editorial provoked the town leaders of Montgomery to call a public meeting and form a committee of ten prominent citizens who would visit the editor, Jessie C. Duke, and give him eight hours to leave town (which he had already done before the committee's visit). In 1892, Ida B. Wells published an account that likewise challenged the lynching discourse on its most basic grounds—“Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread bare lie that Negro men rape white women”—and instead claimed that many “poor blind Afro-American Sampsons [sic]” are lynched because they are “betrayed by white Delilahs.” In response to Wells's editorial, a mob destroyed her Memphis newspaper office, and two white-owned Memphis newspapers advocated lynching and castrating the offending writer (they did not know that Wells was a woman). Six years later, another black editor, Alexander Manly, would be threatened with lynching and run out of Wilmington, North Carolina, for criticizing Rebecca Felton and noting the hypocrisy of white men's lamenting “the virtue of your women, when you seek to destroy the morality of ours.” In 1927 E. Franklin Frazier likewise touched a raw nerve when he claimed that the lynching discourse was delusional and that white women suffered hallucinations of being attacked by black men—hallucinations, he concluded, that were “projected wishes.” Local Atlanta newspaper editorials attacked these ideas with vigor, and Frazier received death threats. Frazier had to leave the South hastily to avoid a threatened lynching.41
Here, then, we see the effect of the lynching discourse on several sectors of society. The ruling elites in the medical profession, the government, and the academy all contributed to the discourse and ensured that any criticism from within those institutions was regulated, and any from without threatened with extinction. The success of that discourse is measured ultimately in the ways Americans practiced lynching and interpreted the meaning of the practice. The most tragic measure, of course, is the amount of blood spilled of those whom the discourse maligned and cast beyond human sympathy, the direct victims of lynch mobs, and the potentially threatened victims of those who shared their race. A second tragic measure of the discourse's success is the ways it foreclosed debate about African American life and the ways, in the words of Ida B. Wells, it “closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment, and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law.”42
Faced with this hegemonic discourse, critics of lynching had to resort to strategies that were largely determined by the discourse. One can hear in their repetition, decade after decade, the disheartening effect of their having to state, over and over again, the raw statistics that proved that the allegation of rape was infrequent, having to defend the race against charges that stained with their very mention. Those who knew better nonetheless felt compelled to repeat the rostrums of the apologists in order to gain a hearing and avoid the fate of those critics who dared speak the truth. When Booker T. Washington, for instance, wrote in criticism of lynching, he began by accepting that lynching had been “instituted some years ago with the idea of punishing and checking outrages upon women,” before going on to show that current lynchings in 1899 were motivated by less noble principles.43 When Congressman Thomas E. Miller, a black political leader in South Carolina, wished to speak against the what he called the “slanderous, and most damnably false” charges against African Americans, he had nonetheless to tame his rage by referring to white women as those “walking emblems of American purity.”44 Presumably, because he continued to live and to live in South Carolina, no one heard the sarcasm in his voice.
This, then, is the discourse that circulated and helped form the society of the age of lynching, but, unlike the age of lynching, this discourse did not end. It continued to exercise the minds and motivate the acts of those who continued to believe the variety of myths on which it was based—the myth of the Lost Cause, the myth of black sexuality, the myth of chivalry, the myth of white supremacy. It inspired mob leaders who used what Lillian Smith denounced as its “obscene, perverse imagery” to whip up the fury of those murderous mobs who did the work of lynching.45 And it continued to do so—masking raw racial domination under the rhetoric of gallant chivalry—and continues to do so for a significant minority of Americans for whom those Jasper, Texas, lynchers of 1998 presumed to speak and inspire to form another white supremacist community.