The oppression of Black Americans during the century following the end of the American Civil War was enforced by acts of terror that were so cruel that they defy comprehension. Nearly five thousand Americans are known to have died at the hands of lynch mobs during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Four-fifths of them were Black. Many more went unrecorded.
Most Americans have an inaccurate view of what lynching involved—one that they got from television and movies and that minimizes the horror. The reality of lynching was far removed from these sanitized representations. Racist lynchings weren’t merely extrajudicial executions. They typically included torture and bodily mutilation, the breaking of bones, and the cutting off of body parts of the living victim such as fingers, toes, and genitals, which were then put on display or kept as souvenirs. Often the victim was burned alive at the climax of a lynching (which is why Whites sometimes referred to lynchings as “barbecues”), after which members of the crowd picked through the ashes for memorabilia. Many lynchings were festive, public events that were attended by hundreds or thousands of men, women, and children, with special excursion trains laid on to transport spectators to the scene of the torture and professional photographers on hand to turn their fond memories into postcards.
Here’s just one example. One of many, many others.
Claude Neal was a twenty-three-year-old Black man who lived in Marianna, on the Florida panhandle. On October 19, 1934, Neal was arrested and charged with the murder of a nineteen-year-old White woman. In the wee hours of October 26, a group of men burst into the jail where Neal was being held and took him away to a remote spot in the North Florida pine woods, where they tortured and killed him. The NAACP sent a representative named Howard Kester to Marianna to investigate. Perhaps because he was a White man, Kester found a member of the mob who was willing to tell him what happened that night. Here’s an excerpt from Kester’s report:
“After taking the nigger to the woods about four miles from Greenwood, they cut off his penis. He was made to eat it. Then they cut off his testicles and made him eat them and say he liked it. . . . Then they sliced his sides and stomach with knives and every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or two. Red hot irons were used on the nigger to burn him from top to bottom.” From time to time during the torture a rope would be tied around Neal’s neck and he was pulled up over a limb and held there until he almost choked to death when he would be let down and the torture begun all over again. After several hours of this unspeakable torture, “they decided just to kill him.”2
The horrors inflicted on this young man were not exceptional. They were typical of what the Black victims of lynch mobs were subjected to. And this naturally raises the question of what made these acts possible. I’m not asking what made them legally possible—it was the persistent refusal of Congress to make lynching a federal offense, the failure of state governments to intervene, and the refusal of the courts to prosecute lynchers (even when the identity of gang leaders was well known, the victim was said to have been killed “at the hands of persons unknown”). I’m asking the deeper and more difficult question of what made these acts psychologically possible. It’s crucial to ask that question because the men who tortured and killed Claude Neal, as well as many thousands of others who perpetrated these crimes, were ordinary people. They weren’t sociopaths. Many were family men, churchgoers, and pillars of their communities. And the grotesque spectacles of torture and execution were enjoyed by their wives and children. What was it, psychologically speaking, that empowered them to do these things and the spectators to relish them?
Part of the answer lies in dehumanizing beliefs that many Whites held about Black people—especially Black men. One need only look at the descriptions in the literature and newspapers of the day to see what the Black image in the White mind amounted to. Newspapers commonly described the Black men who were the victims of lynching as less than human beings. They were “brutes,” “beasts,” “monsters,” or “fiends.” The search for Black men accused of crimes had echoes of a hunting expedition. The victim was pursued in a manhunt, and was often tracked by hunting dogs. Once caught and killed, the kill was memorialized with a trophy photograph of the hunter proudly posing beside his quarry.
Representations of Black people as subhuman animals weren’t confined to the popular press. They also bore the stamp of academic authority. The major nineteenth-century American scientific text on race was Types of Mankind—a massive tome first published in 1854 that propounded, among other things, that the races are really separate species. Belief in the subhumanity of Blacks was entrenched and pervasive among the White intellectual elites, as the great African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois observed in 1899:
[The] widening of the idea of common humanity is of slow growth and today but dimly realized. We grant full citizenship in the World Commonwealth to the “Anglo-Saxon” (whatever that may mean), the Teuton and Latin; then with just a shade of reluctance, we extend it to the Celt and Slav. We half deny it to the yellow races of Asia, admit the brown Indians to an ante-room only on the strength of an undeniable past; but with the Negroes of Africa we come to a full stop, and in its heart the civilized world denies that these come within the pale of nineteenth-century Humanity.3
Have things changed since then? Yes, of course they have. There are no longer public lynchings or segregated public facilities. And the overwhelming majority of serious scientists deny the biological reality of race, and would scoff at the idea that Black people and White people are really separate species with no common evolutionary ancestors. However, things haven’t changed nearly as much as many White people would like to believe. We Americans have still not confronted our national crimes—the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement and oppression of African Americans—perhaps because we have never been compelled to do so. Massive racialized disparities in income, wealth, health, and mortality remain. Black, Latinx, and Native people are still assigned to the lowest rungs of a racial hierarchy, and White America has by and large refused to consider—much less to implement—reparations to the victims of its long history of state-sponsored injustice.
To combat dehumanization, it’s vital to get to know our past in all of its horror and tragedy, because doing so punctures the self-serving illusion of American exceptionalism. A public that is educated about its own dark history will not only have to admit that that they—that is, we—are capable of the very worst, but also will become more open to recognizing the persistence and rebirth of dehumanizing attitudes in the present.