LYNCHING

After the Civil War, with Abraham Lincoln dead and President Andrew Johnson politically ineffectual, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts beginning in 1867, which gave northern radicals complete military control of the South. In response, extremist whites organized vigilante patrols such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to intimidate black people. Thus violence, even lynching, was bred of the Civil War's turmoil and bloodshed.

Lynching is the punishment of alleged criminals by private persons (usually mobs) without due process of law. Lynch law penalizes a person without legal sanction. The vigilante mobs in the South quite frequently hung the accused person. The term "lynching" is often taken to mean death by hanging, but other forms of deadly force were also used. The term "lynch law" is associated with Charles Lynch of Bedford County, Virginia, and with William Lynch of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, both of whom meted out unofficial punishment during the American Revolution.

Statistics on lynching derive from three collections. The Chicago Tribune in 1882 initiated a yearly account. Ten years later, the Tuskegee Institute began collecting data about lynchings. Starting in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) maintained its account of mob lynching. These sources do not entirely agree either in the definition of "lynching" or in the number of lynchings. The Tuskegee Institute generally lists the fewest killings and it cites 1892 as the year with the

largest number of lynchings—230 persons, of whom 161 were black and the others were white.

The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, was organized in 1867 under its first Grand Wizard, former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest resigned in 1869, angered at the actions of some local dens, but some dens continued to operate on their own. During the election of 1868, the Klan and other terror groups killed perhaps 1,000 people in Louisiana alone, most of them Republican leaders, political candidates, and others challenging white, Democratic office holders. Blacks, especially, feared these terrorist lynchings.

According to NAACP leader Walter Francis White (1893–1955) in his book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), 4,951 people were lynched during the forty-six years between 1882 and 1927. These lynchings occurred in forty-four states and in the territory of Alaska. Of these, 3,513 were carried out against black people, which included 76 black women. About three-quarters of all lynchings occurred in Kentucky and the nine states of the Deep South (pp. 267–268).

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), a black American journalist who was born a slave, offers examples of mob action that she put together in Lynch Law in Georgia, an 1899 pamphlet compiled from previous accounts in the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. Nine black men were arrested near Palmetto, Georgia, in 1899 and were accused of burning three houses. A mob of more than one hundred white men, masked and armed with Winchesters, shotguns, and pistols, broke into the town jail and shot to death five black male prisoners, wounded two, and believed that they had killed nine; in fact, two escaped without wounds. Wells-Barnett describes another incident, this time in Newnan, Georgia. Samuel Hose, a black man, was accused of murdering his employer, Albert Cranford, in a dispute about wages that were owed to him. In addition, Hose was accused of assaulting Mrs. Cranford after ruthlessly tossing her infant to the floor. A Georgia newspaper announced that Hose, when caught, would either be lynched and his body riddled with bullets or that he would be burned at the stake. On 23 April 1899, in view of 2,000 people, Hose was stripped, parts of his body hacked off, and then he was burned on a pyre as he hung. On the following day, another black man, Elijah Strickland, a colored preacher, suffered torture and lynching in the nearby town of Palmetto.

The brutality worked against seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington in 1916 was similarly gruesome. Charged with the bludgeoning of Lucy Fryer, Washington, a black, confessed to rape and murder. The trial started a week later in Waco, Texas. The all-white jury deliberated just four minutes and found him guilty. Courtroom spectators seized Washington and hustled him outside to a mob of some four hundred who threw a chain around his neck. Doused with coal oil, he was lowered onto a burning pyre. The charred body was then placed in a sack, dragged behind an auto, and eventually hung for the public to view.

Perhaps Claude McKay (full name Festus Claudius McKay, 1889–1948) had torturous burnings like these in mind when he penned the poem "The Lynching," which was published in 1922 in James Weldon Johnson's anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry. McKay initiates the sonnet with these words, "His spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven." This same collection offers two other McKay poems that indirectly attack mob bigotry: "If We Must Die," and "To the White Fiends."

Bruce E. Baker in his essay "North Carolina Lynching Ballads" (1997) studies three ballads recounting the "folk culture of lynching" (p. 220). "The Death of Emma Hartsell" (1898) offers a fear-filled ballad depicting the murder of a twelve-year-old white girl and the subsequent lynching of two black men, Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer, in Concord, North Carolina. The ballad form simplifies, concentrates, and renders the incident memorable. Like folk tales, the songs skip situational factors or racial conflict and enshrine the event as timeless. The lynching victims in these songs were not always black. One North Carolina ballad recounts Alec Whitley, a white man of violence lynched for immorality. And the ballad "J. V. Johnson" refers to lynching a white man who murdered his own brother-in-law.

Women also suffered lynching. In May of 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, Mary Turner, a black woman eight months pregnant, threatened to seek justice against the vigilantes who had previously lynched her husband. As a result, she was tied, hung upside down, doused with gasoline and burned. While she was yet alive, a man cut open her abdomen. The infant fetus had its head crushed and the mob riddled Mary's body with bullets.

LYNCHINGS OUTSIDE THE SOUTH

While the majority of lynchings took place in the South and victimized blacks, the practice was also carried out in other parts of the country and targeted other people. On 28 October 1889, Katsu Goto from Japan was a lynching victim in Honokaa, Hawaii. Goto was part of a group of eight people who were accused of setting a fire. He was hanged to death from a telephone pole before he could stand trial. Four men were found guilty of his death, and they served time in prison.

On 14 March 1891 a mob stormed a jail in New Orleans where eleven Sicilian immigrants were incarcerated after being accused of killing the city's police commissioner. A jury had found these men not guilty, yet authorities incited a mob to violence. The mob stormed the jail and shot and killed the victims. Richard Gambino graphically describes this event in Vendetta: The True Story of the Largest Lynching in U.S. History (1998).

In 1920 a lynching occurred in Minnesota, a northern state that had not experienced many such events. It came about after an incident at a circus in Duluth. Nineteen-year-old Irene Tusken claimed that six black circus workers threatened her and her male escort with guns and that she was raped by the black men. In the morning, the doctor found no physical indication that Tusken had been raped, nor could the police verify claims of rape. Police jailed six black circus laborers in the Duluth County Jail. The newspapers reported the affair. A large mob formed at the jail, and soon it forcibly entered, using rails, timbers, and stones to rip open doors and cells. Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were marched to a light pole, beaten, and hung. Kingsblood Royal (1947) by Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) concerns racial prejudice set in a fictional city of Minnesota that resembles Duluth. This novel attacks racism and condemns lynching. Years later, Bob Dylan (1941–), who was born in Duluth, wrote and recorded the song "Desolation Row" (1965) that suggests this lynching with the mention of a circus, a spreading riot, a police commissioner wavering in his duty, and a hanging. Finally, Michael Fedo wrote a historical novel of this tragic affair, "They Was Just Niggers" (1979), which was later published under the title The Lynchings in Duluth.

POPULAR DEFENSES OF LYNCHING

The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) by Owen Wister (1860–1938) established the western novel and became popular as exalting the individualistic hero cowboy. The Virginian presides over the mob hanging of his friend Steve, found guilty of rustling cattle. Wister sees this type of swift justice as necessary in a Wyoming territory where the law resides a long way off. In Wister's novel Lady Baltimore (1906), the lady says that claims of the "Republican upholding of Negro equality" are "on the wane." The white race suffers, she says, because it executes people "publicly." "What I'd never do would be to make a show, an entertainment, a circus out of it" (pp. 216–218). Wister thus accepts lynching as necessary but states that it ought not be a spectacle.

Other writers also defended the use of lynching. Thomas Dixon (1864–1946) from North Carolina became well known for his trilogy: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden 1865–1900 (1902), The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: The Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). These novels offer an extremist Southern view of the Reconstruction era, vigorously promote anti-black sentiments, and forcefully support the Ku Klux Klan. In The Clansman, a white Klan chaplain offers a prayer, not for the accused man before him, but for the white women supposedly made fearful by the black murderers. The accused has a trial of sorts and then the Clan murders him.

The Birth of a Nation (1915), an early historical film by D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), is based on Dixon's The Clansman. Like the book, the film supported racist myths about black Americans, using scenes that would cause offense in that era: black legislators legalizing interracial marriage and political campaign signs calling both for marriage between the races and equal civil rights for blacks. The film masterfully employed new cinematic methods to present the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination, and the change, rise, and reuniting of Southern states with the North. But critics recognized it as "black poison," "disgraceful propaganda" (Dray, p. 202); it glorified the Ku Klux Klan and vilified black people. The anti-lynching reformer William Monroe Trotter urged that its showing be prohibited, and he declared on 17 April 1915, "if there is any lynching here in Boston, Mayor Curley will be responsible" (Dray, p. 203). Despite such protests, the film played to packed houses in Boston and across the nation.

SPEAKING OUT AGAINST LYNCHING

The NAACP strongly opposed Griffith's film and as part of its efforts produced Rachel, a three-act drama by Angelina Weld Grimké(1880–1958). The play appeared first in Washington, D.C., at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School in 1916 and served as a means to rally opposition against the motion picture. Griffith himself directed a sequel, Intolerance (1916). Black filmmakers brought forward The Birth of a Race (1918) by Emmett Jay Scott (1873–1957), but it failed to gather enthusiasm. Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951), another black director, offered The Homesteader (1919) and Within Our Gates (1920), which enjoyed more success.

Opposition to lynching had begun much earlier, however. Among the first opponents was Wells-Barnett. Beginning in the late 1880s Wells-Barnett helped publicize lynching incidents throughout the South, using Free Speech, the Memphis paper she coowned, as the forum for most of her writings. After publishing an editorial in 1892 that attacked the myth that black men were a dangerous threat to white women, a mob ransacked the newspaper offices, destroying her printing press. Wells-Barnett relocated to the northern United States but continued her anti-lynching efforts. She published A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (1895).

Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905), a lawyer and writer, vigorously opposed the Ku Klux Klan in his several novels. His A Fool's Errand (1879), which sold more than 200,000 copies, concerned Reconstruction problems and evils in the South. Among other writings, he published a lengthy letter in the New York Tribune that was addressed to an acquaintance in the U.S. Senate. He opens his letter by accusing the Klan of murdering a judge in the grand jury room of the courthouse. He recounts the Klan's beatings and scourgings, offering specific instances in North Carolina counties. He wants federal action: "Put detectives at work to get hold of this whole organization. . . . If we have not pluck enough for this, why then let us just offer our throats to the knife, emasculate ourselves, and be a nation of self-subjugated slaves at once."

In "The United States of Lyncherdom" (1901) Mark Twain (1835–1910) quotes lynching statistics from the Chicago Tribune. Twain bemoans that Missouri has witnessed this terrible crime near Pierce City in the southwestern corner of the state where "the people rose, lynched three negroes—two of them very aged ones—burned out five negro households, and drove thirty negro families into the woods" (p. 140). Twain quotes a telegram from Texas in which a mob procures coal oil to fuel the flames that burn a Negro alive. Calling such events an "epidemic of bloody insanities," Twain asks for "martial personalities" who "can face mobs without flinching" (p. 145) and so end these brutalities.

The cartoonist William A. Rogers used his drawings in Harper's Weekly magazine to demand an end to lynching. In the 8 August 1903 issue, for example, he specifically calls for an end to mob violence against black Americans. Here, the demonic figure of "Lynch Law" wielding a bloody knife, hangman's noose, and torch, succumbs to "The Law" as applied in two northern cities, Evansville, Indiana, and Danville, Illinois.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) is a novel about a light-skinned black man able to pass as a white. In the book, Johnson describes the narrator entering a mob scene. Rabid whites coil a chain around the victim and link it to a railroad tie sunk into the ground. The lynchers burn the victim. "He squirmed, he writhed, strained at his chains, then gave out cries and groans that I shall always hear . . . a great wave of humiliation and shame swept over me" (pp. 136, 137).

Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1909–1971) sets The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) in Nevada in 1883. The entire novel concerns lynching, first in the forming of a posse that seeks to hang rustlers and second in that posse's execution of the suspects. The vigilantes hang a family man, an elderly man who is witless, and a Mexican who claims to be unable to speak English. Within an hour of the hanging, the mob finds it has killed innocents and that the ranch hand whom they thought had been murdered is actually alive. The leading lyncher and his son commit suicide. The novel dramatizes turning away from the lynching evil.

POLITICAL EFFORTS TO END LYNCHING

A riot lasting three days occurred in Springfield, Illinois, in August 1908, when a white woman claimed to have been violated. The sheriff transferred the accused black man to the jail of a neighboring town, which prevented him from being victimized, but mobs lynched two other blacks in Springfield, attacked houses in the African American section of town, and dragged blacks from homes and streetcars. National Guard troops did restore order, but by then four whites and two blacks had been killed. This racial tragedy in the home city of Abraham Lincoln staggered white people. The following year in New York City, whites gathered with prominent blacks to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

African American William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois (1868–1963) became the leader of the organization, and he campaigned for the immediate equality of black people in the NAACP's periodical The Crisis. Walter White (1893–1955) was one of the association's most diligent activists in regard to lynching. Although his blond hair and blue eyes indicated that he had a high percentage of white ancestry, he chose his bit of African American heritage to arrange his life. His novel The Fire in the Flint (1924) depicts a young black man who returns with a medical degree from Harvard to his home in the South. There, he defies racism and confronts the Klan. White's Rope and Faggott: A Biography of Judge Lynch became the best known of his several writings that opposed lynching. White was also active in seeking legal remedies to lynching, throwing the NAACP's support behind the Dyer Bill in 1919. Despite his efforts, a federal anti-lynching measure was never made law. Earlier congressional bills had sought to create commissions to investigate the problem. Senator John Logan of Illinois sponsored such a bill in 1884, and Representative Henry Blair from New Hampshire proposed another in 1890. A North Carolina congressperson offered an anti-lynching bill in 1900. None of these measures passed.

The NAACP's efforts to end lynching met with success. In 1911, shortly after the association began its work, there were 71 lynchings; by the time of World War II, the practice had been abolished. These efforts are detailed by Robert L. Zangrando in The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909 to 1950 (1980).

Lynching declined after World War I for several reasons. Law enforcement improved. Newspapers condemned such mob action. Organizations such as the NAACP became more effective in their efforts. Black people offered even armed resistance and some blacks left the South and its segregation that led to lynching. Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance implicitly challenged the white supremacist view that underlay lynching.

The Tuskegee Institute ended its keeping of lynching records, which had started in 1882. In 1962 the Institute found no more accounts of such violence.

See alsoBlacks; Jim Crow; Ku Klux Klan; Reconstruction; Violence

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Ox-Bow Incident. New York: Random House, 1940.

Dixon, Thomas. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905.

Dixon, Thomas. The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865–1900. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902.

Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1907.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an ExColored Man. 1912. Edited by William L. Andrews. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.

Lewis, Sinclair. Kingsblood Royal. New York: Random House, 1947.

Tourgée, Albion. "On the KKK." New York Tribune, May 1870.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Lynch Law in Georgia. Chicago: This pamphlet is circulated by Chicago Colored Citizens . . . , 1899.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1895.

White, Walter Francis. The Fire in the Flint. 1924. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

White, Walter Francis. Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch. 1929. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Wister, Owen. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. London: Macmillan, 1902.

Wister, Owen. Lady Baltimore. 1906. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968.

Secondary Works

Baker, Bruce E. "North Carolina Lynching Ballads." In Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, pp. 219–245. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynchings of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002.

Fedo, Michael. The Lynchings in Duluth. Duluth: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000.

Gambino, Richard. Vendetta: The True Story of the Largest Lynching in U.S. History. Toronto: Guernica, 1998.

Hatch, James V., ed. Black Theater U.S.A: Forty-five Plays by Black Americans, 1847–1974. New York: Free Press, 1974.

Oggel, L. Terry. "Speaking Out About Race: 'The United States of Lyncherdom' Clemens Really Wrote." In Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 25, edited by Jack Salzman, pp. 115–158. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Zangrando, Robert L. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909 to 1950. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Emmett H. Carroll