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Popular_Justice_A_History_of_Lynching_in_America_----_Chapter_5._Indescribable_Barbarism_The_Lynching_of_African_Americans....pdf

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“Indescribable Barbarism”

The Lynching of African Americans

in the Age of Jim Crow

o n j a n u a r y 3 1 , 1 8 9 3 , a sheriff’s posse captured a black man named Henry Smith at Clow, a flag station on the Arkansas & Louisi- ana Railway in southwestern Arkansas. They arrested the fugitive for the rape and murder of Myrtle Vance, a three-year-old white child and the daughter of the sheriff in Paris, Texas. Smith, a young man with a record of mental problems, had allegedly killed the child to visit re- venge upon Sheriff Vance, who had repeatedly brutalized him. When the posse passed through Texarkana on its way back to Paris, an angry crowd awaited Smith and his captors. The leaders of the posse were able to avert a lynching, pleading with the residents of Texarkana to allow them to return the killer to the scene of his crime, where he would be brought to justice. The crowd deferred, but hundreds of people boarded the train to Paris to witness the spectacle that would surely follow. For it was understood that the posse never intended to deliver Smith to the legal authorities for trial.

Meanwhile news of Smith’s capture had attracted a gathering of roughly ten thousand people in Paris. Several men had erected a ten- foot-high scaffold furnished with a chair and a small furnace. The word justice was painted in large white letters on the front side of the scaf- fold. The “justice” administered to Henry Smith consisted of red-hot irons that Sheriff Vance and several members of his family applied to the victim’s body for almost an hour. After Smith’s torturers had poked out his eyes and burned his tongue, they doused the platform with kerosene

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Berg, Manfred. Popular Justice : A History of Lynching in America, Ivan R. Dee, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=662329. Created from insu-ebooks on 2019-04-01 08:13:21.

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and set it on fire. As soon as the flames had consumed Smith, onlookers began scavenging the ashes for whatever parts remained of the scorched body. Throughout the grisly act, observers had taken photographs, and the next day newspapers on the East Coast featured graphic eyewitness accounts of the lynching in Texas.

In her 1894 pamphlet A Red Record, the African-American anti- lynching activist Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) called the torment of Henry Smith an “indescribable barbarism” without precedent in the “history of civilization.” Unfortunately the brutality of the lynching at Paris was by no means exceptional. During the decades between the end of Recon- struction and the 1920s, “spectacle lynchings” before large crowds, often involving drawn out torture, mutilation, burning, and the dismember- ment of the victim’s body, occurred regularly in the New South. Nor did witnesses find such events indescribable; in fact they often indulged in sickening voyeurism. In April 1899, for example, a newspaper depicted the death of Sam Hose, a black farm worker from rural Georgia charged with the murder of Alfred Cranford, his white employer, and the rape of Cranford’s wife, in words that are hard to fathom: “Before the torch was applied to the pyre the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and other portions of his anatomy. The negro pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of fire with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits. . . . The negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was his liver. Those unable to obtain these ghastly relics directly paid fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them.”

Both contemporary opponents of lynching and historians have pon- dered the nagging question of why “ordinary Americans” who had families, went to church, held steady jobs, and otherwise claimed to be law-abiding citizens were capable of perpetrating such atrocities while showing no signs of shame or remorse. That question, however, is mis- leading. Most acts of collective violence in history, including mass mur- der, genocide, and war crimes, have been committed not by perverted aberrants but by “ordinary people” acting in perfectly good conscience because they received orders, believed in noble causes, or simply saw an opportunity to exert power over life and death with impunity. Most par- ticipants in lynch mobs viewed themselves as rendering an honorable service to justice and to the safety of their communities. Thus in order

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to understand lynching it is necessary to explore the cultural, social, eco- nomic, and political forces that sustained mob violence.

The most salient chapter in the history of lynch law in America was the lynching of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries. According to the most conservative estimates, slightly more than 4,700 persons were lynched in the United States between the early 1880s and World War II. Seventy-three percent of all victims were blacks. In the South, where more than 80 percent of all lynchings oc- curred, black deaths were a staggering 83 percent of the total, represent- ing 3,245 fatalities.

The obvious answer to the question of why white Southerners lynched African Americans is that lynching was an instrument of racial control. By the late 1870s the “redeemers” had successfully shaken off the fetters of Reconstruction, but most white Southerners continued to be deeply troubled by the fact that they found themselves living amidst a large black population no longer restrained by the institution of slavery. The answer to their predicament was to impose a racial caste system of white supremacy, popularly known as the Jim Crow system, designed to reduce African Americans to a pariah class without meaningful rights. To this

The lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, 1893.

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end, white Southerners introduced rigid racial segregation along with “electoral reforms” such as literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise nearly all black voters.

In the last resort, however, white supremacy depended on the ability of whites to inflict violent repression on blacks with impunity. Racial vio- lence in the age of Jim Crow ran a broad gamut, from individual bullying to wholesale pogroms with dozens of black victims. The so-called race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), New Orleans (1900), and Atlanta (1906) were the most conspicuous events of this type, but many lesser-known incidents could be added. In 1920, for instance, a confron- tation in the township of Ocoee in Orange County, Florida, in which a black farmer killed two attackers in self-defense, resulted in a three-day orgy of mob violence that left scores of African Americans dead and the entire village destroyed. Thus the lynching of individuals or small groups of blacks was only one manifestation of the racist violence that pervaded life in the Jim Crow South. But lynching was highly visible and effective.

Lynchings did not have to happen every day to fill black communities with fear and horror. As with all forms of terror, the ever-present threat sent a powerful message of intimidation. Even slight transgressions of ra- cial etiquette or misunderstandings might trigger fateful consequences. When Sandy Reeves, a black youth from rural Georgia, accidentally dropped a five cent piece in front of his employer’s three-year-old daugh- ter in September 1918, he should have let the girl keep the nickel instead of wresting it back from her hands. The child ran home, frantically cry- ing that Reeves had harmed her. Her parents assumed that the young man had sexually assaulted their daughter; Reeves was lynched the fol- lowing night. His fate may appear extreme, but Southern blacks knew that such incidents could happen to them too.

Lynchers made every effort to ensure that the black community got their message. They left the bodies of their victims on display for hours, sometimes even for days, and attached signs warning that future offenders would meet the same fate. Spectacle lynchings, such as the burnings of Henry Smith or Sam Hose described earlier, were frighten- ing reminders that there were virtually no limits to what whites could do to blacks. Although only about one-tenth of all mob killings were mass spectacles, they nevertheless epitomized the meaning of lynching as racist terror staged as communal ritual. Mock trials and confessions,

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even if obtained under torture, were essential to underscore the legiti- macy of the punishment and to create the impression that the lynching was tantamount to a legal execution. Extreme cruelty like mutilation and burning satisfied the popular desire for retribution that fit the enormity of the crime. The practice of bystanders riddling dead lynch victims with bullets emphasized community approval. The public exhi- bition of body parts as trophies symbolized the triumph over a common enemy. Because the excessive violence of spectacle lynchings was rarely applied to white victims, no one could miss the point that the cruelty served the purpose of dehumanizing African Americans. Replicating a pattern that had been established during two centuries of slavery, lynchers treated blacks as inferior “brutes” who were insensitive to any but the most horrible physical pain.

But why did so many white Southerners believe they had to go to such extremes in order “to keep the Negro in his place”? After all, whites were a substantial majority of the population in most regions of the South. They held all positions of political power and owned nearly all the wealth. Certainly whites had absolute control of the criminal justice sys- tem and could make sure that blacks who were accused of crimes against whites faced severe punishment. There was also no need to use violence in order to keep the races separate. Although African Americans wanted political and civic equality, they had very little interest in social involve- ment with white people because interracial contacts only reinforced their subordinate status. At closer look it becomes clear that, in addition to in- timidating blacks, racist mob violence in the South helped restore racial solidarity among Southern whites.

During Reconstruction most white Southerners, regardless of social class, had supported the struggle against “Negro rule” by all means neces- sary. But once redemption was complete, class tensions within the white South reemerged. A key reason was the decline of cotton prices. Many small farmers went into debt, lost their farms, and became tenants or sharecroppers. The agrarian crisis sparked a powerful protest movement, known as populism, which challenged the dominance of the Southern planter and business elites. The Populists were willing to forge inter- racial alliances based on the common economic interests of lower-class whites and blacks. The ruling conservative Democrats, used to manipu- lating the black vote in their own favor, responded by waging a ruthless

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campaign for white supremacy that once again employed lynching and vigilantism as instruments of political terrorism. Lynching peaked in the early 1890s, at the height of the Populist revolt and its conservative back- lash. In the election year of 1892, at least 161 blacks were lynched, many of whom were involved in the Populist movement.

Attempts to lynch black Populists sometimes led to amazing conse- quences. In late October 1892 H. S. Doyle, an African-American Populist leader from Georgia, received threats to his life and fled to the home of Thomas Watson, the most prominent white Populist in the state. Watson immediately summoned an army of two thousand white supporters for Doyle’s protection. In the end, however, the divide-and-conquer strategy of the conservative elites succeeded in driving a wedge into the fledgling interracial alliance. The Southern Democrats first adopted key items of the Populist program, then persuaded the white majority that “the Ne- gro” was the source of all Southern troubles and had to be disfranchised, segregated, and forcibly kept in his place if tranquility was to return. As the historian C. Vann Woodward put it, the black man became “the scapegoat in the reconciliation of estranged white classes.” Indeed, some scholars have argued that the role of blacks as scapegoats goes a long way in explaining Southern lynchings, pointing out that whenever cotton prices fell, mob violence increased. Lynching, they have concluded, was most of all a way for lower-class whites to vent their economic frustration against their black competitors. The failure of interracial solidarity in the Populist movement showed that for most white Southerners race came before class. Poor whites, a disillusioned Tom Watson noted, “would joy- ously hug the chains of wretchedness rather than do any experimenting on the race question.“ For his part, Watson decided to stake his political fortunes on white supremacy. He turned into a race-baiting demagogue and a vociferous apologist of lynching.

The appeal to the joint class interests of poor whites and blacks foundered on a powerful cultural legacy that demanded conformity on racial issues from all Southern whites. The institution of slavery had accustomed whites to the ideas that blacks stood outside the ordinary law and that all whites were responsible for controlling a potentially rebellious population of outcasts. It was no coincidence that some mob killings of African Americans in the New South resembled the insur- rection scares of the antebellum days. In 1901, for example, a mob of

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two hundred white men hunted down and hanged two blacks in Boss- ier Parish, Louisiana, for allegedly slaying a local white man. The two killers, the local newspaper insinuated, had been members of a conspir- acy ring responsible for the recent murder of several whites. Hence the lynching was a “necessary precaution” to protect the white community from a black uprising.

Slavery as a legal and social institution had provided white Southern- ers with a sense of unquestionable superiority and relative safety vis-à-vis black slaves. Emancipation had not only ended human bondage but had made blacks equal citizens before the law. In the eyes of many whites, this was an insult and a threat to their own status, and they made ev- ery effort to undermine the political and civic advancement of the freed people. Nevertheless blacks in the South now struggled steadfastly to ac- quire a modicum of education and economic independence, challenging the racist dogma that they were fit only for menial agricultural labor un- der white supervision. Moreover younger African Americans who had no personal recollection of slavery refused to wear the mask of subservi- ence that their enslaved parents had been forced to adopt. Many whites were deeply disturbed by what they perceived as a new black assertive- ness. “Too many negroes,” the Atlanta Constitution warned in 1889, “are either mad or bad, and they are increasing in number.” Supposedly these “bad niggers” were responsible for the crime wave that seemed to plague the South in the late nineteenth century. Black men who tried to make a living as migrant workers faced the highest risk of incurring mob vio- lence. The notorious black “floater,” whites complained, was roaming the roads day and night, looking for an opportunity to steal and making it unsafe for women to leave home without male protection.

White supremacists concluded that the “impudence” of the first gen- eration of freeborn African Americans proved that blacks were relaps- ing into savagery, now that the civilizing institution of slavery had been unwisely abolished. In their rhetoric, white racism knew no limits. James K. Vardaman, a leading politician from Mississippi, character- ized “the Negro” as a “lazy, lying, lustful animal which no conceiv- able amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” Works of fiction and pseudoscientific tracts, with such titles as The Negro: a Beast or The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, endlessly be- labored the purported racial deterioration of African Americans and

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their mortal threat to white Americans in general and white Southern- ers in particular. Freedom, the proponents of this ideology contended, had unleashed the supposedly insatiable sexual appetite of black males, driving them to rape white women at every opportunity. Thus lynch- ing was essential for the protection of white women because only the sight of instant and merciless revenge could impress potential black rapists with sufficient terror. Furthermore no true white man could resist the impulse to avenge outrages against helpless women, regard- less of legal constraints. “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of white women,” South Carolina governor Coleman Blease boasted, “I say to hell with the Constitution.”

It is difficult to exaggerate the pervasiveness of the “Negro-as-savage- rapist” theme in debates over lynching in the age of Jim Crow. To be sure, these notions of uncontrollable black male sexuality and the need to preserve the “purity of the white race” were not new. In the late nine- teenth century, however, black-on-white rape became an obsession. The historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called it “a kind of acceptable folk pornography,” which the white Southern press circulated with great rel- ish. Some scholars have speculated that the fascination with the black rapist mirrored the repressed sexual fantasies of white men who vicari- ously punished black men for their own secret desires. The specter of the black rapist also helped cement the patriarchical dominance of white men over their wives and daughters at a time when traditional family life on the farm was giving way to a situation of more and more white women seeking wage labor outside the home. To gain protection against the menace of rape, women had to yield to male authority and accept strict limitations of what they could do and where they could go.

The idea that white women might voluntarily agree to sexual rela- tions with black men was anathema to white men. To maintain the pretense of white racial and moral supremacy over black depravity, any sexual contact between a black man and a white woman had to be rape. For white men who discovered a female family member having a consensual affair with a black man, the obvious way to protect the honor of the family was to lynch the black “rapist.” For white women who had engaged in interracial sex, sacrificing their lovers by bringing rape charges could be a way to escape shame and ostracism. Sometimes women were left with no other choice. In her 1892 anti-lynching treatise

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Southern Horrors, Ida B. Wells reported the harrowing story of a mob in Texarkana that forced a white woman to accuse her lover of rape before the man was burned to death.

In addition to denying the possibility of consensual sex between a white woman and a black man, many white Southerners entertained paranoid notions of what constituted sexual assault. Because black men were said to be constantly lusting after white females of any age, there could be no innocuous situations. In 1917 an illiterate black man in Georgia was lynched because he had asked a little white girl to read a letter to him.

Black men occasionally did rape white women. But most certainly the wave of black-on-white rape that the apologists of lynching claimed threatened the white womanhood of the South was a racist fantasy, albeit a powerful one. Therefore anti-lynching activists worked hard to dis- credit the argument that rape was the root cause of lynching. According to various statistics they collected for the decades between the 1880s and World War II, in roughly 75 percent of all lynching cases sexual assault was not even alleged, let alone affirmed. All the same, rape dominated the public perception of lynching. Not surprisingly, Southern race baiters ignored the evidence that most lynchings had nothing to do with sex- ual crimes. Yet the rape myth also found widespread acceptance among white mainstream Americans outside the South.

Typically, Northern opinion leaders condemned lynching as unac- ceptable lawlessness. But they conceded that rape was its main cause and called upon the black community to curb sexual crime. In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech in Little Rock, Arkansas, pontificated that “the worst enemy of the Negro race is the Negro criminal of that type . . . and every reputable colored man owes it as his first duty to himself to hunt down that criminal with all his soul and strength.” Even prominent supporters of black civil rights joined the chorus. In 1901 the influential white social reformer Jane Addams, who eight years later helped found the interracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), declared that she was willing “to give the Southern citizens the full benefit of their position” on the rape issue. Most academic works on lynching, either explicitly or implicitly, accepted the causal link between rape and mob violence. As late as 1933 the sociologist Arthur Raper (ironically named in this in- stance), in his study The Tragedy of Lynching, alluded to the rape myth

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when he suggested that “Negroes can contribute much to the eridica- tion of lynching, by demonstrating the ability, character, and good citi- zenship of the race.” Thus white mainstream opinion placed African Americans in a double bind by blaming lynching on black rapists and at the same time burdening the black community with the responsibil- ity for eliminating its alleged cause.

The discrepancy between the popular obsession with rape on the one hand and the claim of anti-lynching groups that charges of sexual crime played a role in only one of four lynchings requires a closer look. The available numbers on the precipitating events of lynchings provide the following picture: Charges of homicide were by far the single most im- portant trigger, accounting for 41 percent of all incidents, followed by rape and attempted rape (25.3 percent), robbery and theft (4.9 percent), felonious assault (4.3 percent), and insult to a white person (1.8 percent). More than one in five lynchings (22.7 percent) fell into the category of “other reasons.” The overriding significance of murder is not a surprise given that the Southern states in the late nineteenth century had by far the highest homicide rates in the country, exceeding those of New England by ten to thirty times. Contemporary observers blamed the high level of personal violence on the traditional Southern code of honor that led to countless violent confrontations with a fatal ending. Because many white Southerners saw their criminal justice system as weak and inefficient, they believed they had no alternative to taking the law into their own hands, either by seeking individual revenge or by meting out communal punishment. Blacks who killed whites almost invariably provoked com- munity outrage and became likely targets of mob violence.

Yet the story of black-on-white murder as a cause of lynching requires no less critical scrutiny than the rape myth. African Americans killing or assaulting whites represented but a tiny fraction of all violent crime, if only for the fact that most acts of personal violence occur among friends and family members. Still, whenever a black person committed homicide or assault against a white person—or was suspected to have done so— mob violence became highly likely regardless of whether the suspect had already been taken into custody. Given the racist prejudice of the times, blacks accused of violent crimes against white people had little chance of receiving a fair trial. In many cases public rage against the black mur- derer obscured the evidence of what had actually happened. Numerous

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blacks who were lynched for murdering a white person may have been perfectly innocent of any crime or acted in legitimate self-defense.

In 1903 a mob lynched Jennie Steers, a black domestic, for poisoning the daughter of her employer, a wealthy Louisiana planter. Whether the girl had died as a result of natural causes or a devious crime remained unclear. But the traditional fears of Southern planters that their black servants were constantly plotting to poison them made Jennie Steers an expedient scapegoat for the unexpected loss of a loved family member. Accusing an African American could also be a convenient way to cover up a crime. In 1918 James Cobb, a black man from Cordelle, Georgia, was lynched for the murder of Mrs. Simmons, a white woman, though the victim’s father suspected his son-in-law to be the real culprit. Of course Cobb’s demise precluded further investigation.

Other murder charges grew out of interracial confrontations in which blacks often acted in self-defense. In the case of Sam Hose, the black farm worker burned to death in Georgia in 1899, private investigators hired by anti-lynching groups contested the widely publicized reports that Hose had crushed Alfred Cranford’s head while the unsuspecting man was eating his supper, and then raped Mrs. Cranford. According to their findings, Hose and his boss had been arguing over the worker’s request for an advance. When Cranford grew angry and drew his pistol, Hose flung his axe at him, killing him on the spot. Sensationalist news- paper stories, however, quickly portrayed the black man as a monstrous killer and sexual predator for whom only the most gruesome torture was fitting retribution.

It is impossible to determine if Hose killed Cranford in self-defense. Obviously the opponents of lynch law had a stake in claiming that the victims of mob killings either were innocent or had acted under miti- gating circumstances. In contrast, white Southerners who cherished their own right to self-defense would not countenance the idea that blacks also had a right to protect themselves, their families, their property, and their honor against provocations from whites. Southern planters, in par- ticular, took black deference for granted and continued to assume that they had a right to discipline their “insolent” black laborers and share- croppers. Whenever blacks defied the authority of white employers or fought back, the situation was bound to escalate. In 1904 a black tenant farmer in Georgia killed his landlord in an altercation that resulted from

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the tenant insisting on his right to sell his crop to a merchant of his own choice. A mob promptly lynched the black “murderer.”

Many historians have argued that lynching in the New South served the interests of the planter class. The reliance on extralegal punishment preserved part of the unfettered personal power the planter aristocracy had enjoyed in the days of slavery. Rural elites could easily instigate mob violence against “bad niggers” but could also protect their black clients if they saw fit. In 1894 a white mob pretending to act as a posse hunting down black criminals went on a lynching spree in Brooks County, Georgia, and massacred five African Americans. When the lynchers began molesting the black tenants of Mitchell Brice, one of the leading planters in the area, Brice halted the mob by threatening retali- ation and prosecution. In addition to their traditional paternalism and the desire to maintain their personal authority, wealthy landowners oc- casionally took steps to curtail mob violence because they were afraid that their black workers would leave the area if life became intoler- able. Ironically, though lynching was an instrument of racial terror that helped sustain the status quo in favor of the old elites, the frequency of mob violence was relatively low in many of the rural black belt counties of the Deep South where wealthy landlords exerted their paternalistic rule over a majority population of poor blacks.

In contrast, small towns where African Americans comprised about one quarter of the population had the highest incidence of lynchings. As both black and white Southerners moved to urbanizing areas in search of industrial work, the competition between the races for jobs intensi- fied while anonymous interracial social encounters heightened the risk of violent clashes. As African Americans sought more personal freedom in towns and cities, whites saw the need to reassert white supremacy, insist- ing on strict racial segregation in the public sphere and on preferential treatment in the labor markets. Characteristically, lynching in Louisiana was most prevalent not in the northern rural black belt of the state but in the parishes neighboring on the city of New Orleans, which in the late nineteenth century underwent rapid industrialization and black and white in-migration.

One of the most spectacular lynchings in the urban South occurred in Waco, Texas, in the spring of 1916. In many ways this city of more than thirty thousand, including almost ten thousand African Americans,

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epitomized the vision of the modernizing New South. Waco was a major railway hub and had a thriving industrial sector, notably a bottling plant for the Dr Pepper soft drink. It boasted the tallest building in Texas, a skyscraper owned by the Amicable Life Insurance Company. Its residents enjoyed the benefits of electricity, streetcars, telephones, and public librar- ies. In fact Waco was particularly proud of its vibrant cultural and educa- tional life, calling itself the “Athens of Texas.” Not all citizens, however, appreciated the opportunities for base amusements, such as saloons and brothels, that the city also offered and that many whites associated with “Negro crime.” Under the surface of Waco’s bustling New South image, racial tensions simmered and from time to time boiled over. In 1905 a mob had lynched a black man charged with raping a white woman, hanging him from a bridge over the Brazos River. The confluence of a vigilante tradition, racism, and the ferment of brisk social change created a climate in Waco that was highly conducive to racist mob violence.

The moment arrived when on May 8, 1916, the dead body of Lucy Fryer, a fifty-three-year-old mother and immigrant from England, was discovered on the farm of her family in Robinson, a small village about eight miles outside Waco. The investigation quickly concentrated on Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old black youth who worked on the Fryer farm. After Sheriff Samuel Fleming arrested the teenager at his home, he brought him to the jail in Waco. At first Washington, who was illiterate and possibly mentally retarded, denied the charges, but later he confessed to having slain Lucy Fryer following an argument over his treatment of a team of mules that belonged to the Fryers. Possibly his interrogators forced a confession from the black youth, but there was nevertheless strong evidence against the suspect. His clothes were stained with blood, and he led the police to the place where he had concealed the hammer he had used to crush his victim’s head. It is thus quite likely that Washington killed Mrs. Fryer, though the black press later insinu- ated that her husband George Fryer had either committed the murder himself or incited his worker to do the job for him. It remained unclear if the black man had also raped his victim, which the Waco newspapers reported in lurid detail.

Anticipating mob action, Sheriff Fleming had the prisoner trans- ported to Dallas County for safekeeping. Predictably, as soon as news of the murder spread, a mob took control of Fleming’s jail and left only

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after learning that Washington was not there. The sheriff assured mob leaders that the culprit would be put on trial in Waco as soon as possible. Indeed, the trial commenced just one week after the murder, on May 15, before a crowd of fifteen hundred spectators who raucously voiced their opinion that no court was needed. At least the judge managed to retain a façade of due process until the jury, after deliberating for fewer than five minutes, rendered a guilty verdict. At this point the mob grabbed the defendant and began driving him toward the bridge where the 1905 lynching had been carried out. But several men insisted that burning was the appropriate method of execution and built a pyre in front of the city hall. With a mesmerized crowd of ten thousand gaping at events, the lynchers tied their victim to a chain they tossed over the branch of a tree. They then lit a fire under his feet, repeatedly pulling him up and down to prolong his suffering. Shortly before Washington died, his tormentors cut off his fingers, toes, and genitals. Finally a man on horseback dragged the corpse through the streets of Waco, followed by a throng of young boys. Some of the body parts were sold to onlookers, others ended up on display in Robinson, the scene of Washington’s crime.

Although the risk of mob violence had been evident for days before the trial, the Waco police department took no precautions to prevent the lynching. On the contrary, Sheriff Fleming, who faced reelection in the fall, ordered his men not to resist the mob and himself watched the spectacle alongside the mayor of Waco. The sheriff also allowed a local photographer to take pictures from a window of the city hall; the photo- graphs subsequently became coveted souvenir items. But the appalling image of Jesse Washington’s charred body chained to a tree, one of the most infamous visual documents of American history, also ensured that the “Waco Horror” received nationwide attention and condemnation. The lynching, commented the New York Times, brought “disgrace and humiliation” on the entire country, for in no other civilized nation “could a man be burned to death in the streets of a considerable city amid the savage exultation of its inhabitants.” The naacp sent Elizabeth Freeman, a white suffragist, to investigate the Waco affair and later published a special edition of its monthly magazine Crisis, featuring a photograph of Jesse Washington’s disfigured corpse on the cover. To make sure that white Americans took note, the organization sent copies to hundreds of newspapers and to every member of Congress.

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Facing strong criticism from around the country, the white leaders of Waco mounted the usual defense. The lynch mob had been much smaller than the estimated ten thousand, they claimed, even though the pictures left little doubt about the enormous size of the gathering. The photographs also would have made possible the identification of the mob leaders, but no one was ever prosecuted for participation in the public murder. In as much as Waco leaders talked about the ghastly incident at all, they agreed that the lynching had been the deed of madmen coming from “the lowest order of society.” Of course this was a blatant distortion of the facts. Not only had the crowd included men and women from all walks of life, but, as Freeman found, the mob leaders were solid work- ing-class and middle-class men who had every reason to believe they were acting with the full approval of Waco’s white citizenry. In this respect the “Waco Horror” of 1916 was not different from many other lynchings in the New South. As countless photographs document, neither active per- petrators nor onlookers made any effort to conceal their identity because they had no reason to fear criminal prosecution. Even when lynchers had their pictures taken with dangling and disfigured bodies, the coroners

Jesse Washington’s charred corpse after the infamous 1916 lynching in Waco, Texas

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would later declare that the victims had suffered “death at the hands of parties unknown.”

Not all lynchings were the work of mass mobs carrying out sadis- tic rituals. There were also smaller mobs, ranging from a handful of participants to perhaps two or three dozen, that acted furtively, killing their victims in remote places at night without further ado. Like mass mobs that staged spectacle lynchings, small mobs claimed to avenge crimes for which the law allegedly offered no adequate punishment. Unlike mass mobs, however, small mobs often sought secrecy because they could not be sure of widespread support from the larger commu- nity. Typically this was the case when the lynchers sought personal revenge for offenses that had not triggered much public outrage. For instance, in 1912 members of a white family in Columbus, Georgia, lynched a young black man who had accidentally shot one of their own and was later convicted of manslaughter. Apparently the local white community had been satisfied with this outcome, but no one questioned the family’s desire for harsher retribution. Lynchings by private mobs may have accounted for roughly one-third of all lynchings. They were especially common in cases when whites or blacks executed members of their own race outside the law. As demonstrations of white supremacy and communal justice, however, they were of minor importance com- pared to the spectacle lynchings by mass mobs.

Most of the participants in lynching parties were members of the white rural and urban working classes—small farmers, sharecroppers, construction workers, or saloonkeepers. Nevertheless mass mobs usu- ally included people of all social backgrounds and certainly were not confined to the proverbial “riffraff.” On the contrary, the legitimacy of popular justice depended on the involvement of “respectable citizens.” Southern newspapers often rejected lynching in the abstract but cited the presence of the “best citizens” of the community—without providing specific names—in order to justify a particular lynching. Local luminar- ies supposedly ensured order and embodied the consent of the people. In combination with the rape myth, the participation of Southern elites helped make Northern opinion receptive to the apology for extralegal ex- ecutions. In 1901 the Harvard University scientist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler published the essay “American Quality,” in which he condemned mob rule but insisted that most lynchings were carried out by “decent

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men of American, law-abiding type.” Such lynchings, Shaler suggested, were the equivalent of legal executions, not “a sign of real lawlessness, nor of a people given to savage outbursts of fury.”

Approval from elected officials lent added respectability to mobs. Southern demagogues such as James Vardaman, Tom Watson, and Coleman Blease were notorious for their defense of lynching as legiti- mate popular justice. Sometimes public officeholders even participated in lynchings. In 1911, for example, Joshua W. Ashley, a member of the South Carolina state legislature, led a mob in Anderson County that hunted down Willis Jackson, a black man accused of attacking a white child. The lynchers hanged Jackson by his feet and then riddled him with bullets. Governor Blease not only refused to prosecute the mob leaders but declared that, rather than sending the militia to protect the alleged child rapist, he would have resigned his office and come to An- derson County and led the mob himself. For public officials to take a determined stand against lynching carried the risk of alienating voters. In 1926 a Florida judge who had presided over a lynching investigation lost his bid for reelection.

As a rule the execution of popular justice was the domain of men. But if black-on-white rape was the alleged offense, women could become key players in lynchings. To begin with, women provided their men with moral support. As one of the vigilantes who set out to hunt down Jesse Washington phrased it: “When we left home tonight our wives, daugh- ters and sisters kissed us good bye and told us to do our duty, and we’re trying to do it as citizens.” Yet, far from being limited to the role of pas- sive objects of male chivalry, women participated in manifold ways. In most cases women had to report the initial crime of rape. Although false accusations were sometimes made, especially to cover up a consensual af- fair, for a Southern white woman to admit publicly that she had been sexually abused by a black man was no easy step. Even though no one was likely to question the veracity of her charges, rape, also known as “the fate worse than death,” always left a stain of shame on the victim. Moreover every white woman who accused a black man of sexual assault knew that he was doomed.

If the identity of the rapist was in doubt, identification by the victim became a centerpiece of the mock trials that often preceded the execu- tion. The defenders of lynch law insisted that the crime of rape did not

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belong in regular courts because no white woman should have to suffer the ordeal of having to confront her attacker face-to-face. Neverthe- less positive identification by the rape victim lent a legitimacy to mob executions that few dared to question. In 1885 a Georgia mob brought a suspect before a young wife and mother, repeatedly admonishing her that the man’s life depended on her word. After she had confi- dently recognized him as the culprit, the leaders suggested she choose the mode of execution. Although some men called for a burning, the woman wanted the man hanged, and got her will. Of course, most lynchers considered identification a mere formality and were perfectly satisfied if the outraged woman declared that the man they dragged before her could have been the rapist.

Some white women who joined lynch mobs inflicted physical violence on the victims voluntarily and eagerly. They cheered on others, brought ropes or fuel, ignited torches, or pumped bullets into bodies, dead or alive. The desire to take an active part in lynchings was by no means limited to women who had been raped or otherwise suffered personal injury. In 1916 an Oklahoma sheriff who prevented the lynching of two black men accused of murder testified “that there were women in the crowd and that they were no less eager for the blood of the negroes than the men.” Women too scavenged for body parts and wanted their pictures taken with the victim’s body. In mass mobs it was not uncommon to see moth- ers with their children. At the burning of the alleged black rapist Lloyd Clay in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1919, eyewitnesses observed a woman and several children pouring gasoline over the man.

Black critics of Southern lynch law condemned the participation of white women in mob violence as the epitome of depravity and hypocrisy, belying the adulation of white women as torchbearers of Christian civi- lization. Then again, most Southern white women believed in the myths and privileges of white supremacy, especially in their right to protection from sexual assault. In contrast to the antebellum era, when the wor- ship of white Southern womanhood had been confined to ladies of social standing, the white supremacist ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also incorporated poor white women into the “rul- ing race.” Furthermore, inflicting violence on a perceived enemy of the community could be an empowering experience for women no less than for men. In a perverse and sordid manner, the assertive roles that women

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played in lynch mobs may have mirrored the efforts of Southern women to carve out a larger degree of power and independence for themselves.

The most prominent and articulate white Southern woman defender of lynch law was Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) of Georgia. An advocate of women’s suffrage and temperance and a reform-minded supporter of the Populist movement, Felton, like her fellow Georgian Tom Watson, initially denounced lynching and backed political rights for blacks. She switched sides after many Populist candidates, including her husband, lost to the white supremacy campaign waged by Southern Democrats in 1894. Three years later Felton’s speech on the “Needs of Farmers’ Wives and Daughters,” in which she blamed white men for failing to protect their female family members from black rapists, gained national notoriety. For the most part her speech was a harsh critique of the corruption of male-dominated Southern politics. By courting the black voter on election day and befuddling him with liquor, she ex- plained, white politicians “make him think he is a man and a brother,” thus encouraging sexual assaults on white women.

Felton called for moral and educational reforms that would benefit poor rural girls and women. Yet, as long as political and moral corrup- tion exposed hapless females to shame and fear, extralegal justice must continue: “If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravenous human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand times a week, if necessary.” White supremacist opinion leaders in the South cel- ebrated Felton as a “true southern woman” while conveniently ignoring the feminist aspects of her speech. At the same time Northern criticism prompted Felton to close ranks with Southern white men and radicalize her statements. When a Georgia mob lynched Sam Hose in April 1899, Felton commented that a mad dog being shot was “more worthy of sym- pathy.” The same year, lynching in Georgia reached its peak. Of course not all white women of the South approved of lynching, and only a small minority participated in mobs. But it was extremely diffcult for white women to speak out against racial violence. Those who did so inevitably faced reproach for betraying their race and depriving helpless and inno- cent girls of male protection.

The specter of the black rapist did not offer a plausible excuse for the lynching of black women. Mob executions of black females enjoyed much less popular support than those of men, and they occurred much

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less frequently. Still, they were not rare exceptions. Estimates vary from at least 75 to 130 African-American women who fell victim to lynch law between the 1880s and the 1920s. The use of brutal violence to discipline black women had been commonplace under slavery, regardless of the sentimental images white slaveholders held of their black “mammies.” When black women, like men, claimed freedom and independence from white control in the decades after the Civil War, they appeared increas- ingly defiant and aggressive in the eyes of Southern whites. Thus when black women were accused of especially shocking offenses, white lynch- ers insisted that they deserved the same rough justice as black men.

Most African-American women were lynched for the crime of mur- der, and many of them were killed in summary executions along with male family members. Typically such multiple killings resulted from confrontations with police officers. In 1911 Laura Nelson and her son were hanged from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma, because she had shot and killed a deputy sheriff who had intruded into her home. In 1918 a mob, acting as a posse, shot down the entire Cabiness family in Walker County, Texas, including the mother and one daughter. Accord- ing to an affidavit sworn by a surviving daughter, the Cabiness family was unarmed when the posse began firing. Press reports, however, de- picted them as a dangerous gang of criminals staging a deadly shoot-out with the forces of the law. In 1926 a mob seized eighteen-year-old Bertha Lowman, along with her brother Demon and her cousin Clarence Low- man, from a jail in Aiken, South Carolina, and shot them “like rats,” as one newspaper report put it. Earlier the Lowman family had killed a sheriff in self-defense.

When a black woman was lynched, the white press usually assumed her guilt and defamed her character, similar to its reporting on black male lynch victims. Even anti-lynching activists sometimes hesitated to protest mob violence against women who were known for their “bad character” and had a reputation for lewdness. When Marie Scott, a seventeen-year-old black woman living in Wagoner, Oklahoma, was charged with stabbing to death a young white man named Lemuel Pearce in March 1914, newspapers immediately concluded that she was guilty of murder. Supposedly Scott had attacked Pearce for no appar- ent reason. Hours after she had been arrested, a mob of about a hun- dred men overpowered the jailer in the middle of the night and hung

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Scott—who desperately fought for her life—from a telephone pole. When the naacp inquired into the circumstances, a local attorney in- dicated that Scott had been a resident of the “red light district.” But he refused to give the “revolting and shocking” details of Pearce’s death to the naacp’s white secretary May Childs Nerney because he would not discuss them with a lady. naacp leaders concluded that Marie Scott was a prostitute and therefore that her lynching would not arouse pub- lic sympathy. Several weeks later, however, the naacp obtained a let- ter from a black informant telling a different story. Two white men, including Lemuel Pearce, were roaming the neighborhood, the letter reported, and spotted Marie Scott alone in her room. They broke into the family’s home and raped her. Scott’s brother came to her rescue and killed Pearce with a knife. The young man then ran away and was smuggled by black sleeping-car porters to Mexico. His sister remained as the obvious murder suspect and suffered the wrath of the mob.

The lynching of four young African Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty, two men and two women, in Shubuta, Mississippi, in December 1918 also prompted very different accounts of what had happened. Indisputably the four youngsters had killed their employer, a retired dentist and farmer named Dr. E. L. Johnston. One white Mis- sissippi newspaper related that the four had ambushed and murdered Johnston because he had discharged them from his farm. In contrast, an investigator for the naacp claimed that Johnston had sexually abused the two sisters, Alma and Maggie Howze. When Maggie Howze and Ma- jor Clark, who was working on Johnston’s farm along with his brother Andrew, disclosed their desire to marry, Johnston told the young man to leave “his woman” alone. A scuffle ensued, and Major Clark accidentally shot his employer, according to the naacp report. Although the dentist, a notorious drunkard, was not popular in the white community, a mob seized the four young blacks from jail and hanged them from a bridge across the Chickasawhay River. Reportedly the two women were visibly pregnant at the time of their deaths.

Mary Turner, the victim of one of the most brutal lynchings involv- ing a black woman, was also pregnant when she and her husband be- came caught up in what the naacp aptly called a “lynching orgy,” which occurred in Brooks and Lowndes counties, Georgia, in May 1918. The murder of Hampton Smith, a white farmer, sparked hysteria among the

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white population of the area. Within a week mobs and posses killed up to eleven African Americans believed to have been involved in the slay- ing. Among the victims was Hayes Turner, a black farm laborer who had worked for Smith. When his wife Mary announced that she would press for the prosecution of her husband’s murderers, she herself became the target of the mob. Walter White, the naacp field secretary who per- sonally investigated the events, reported that the eight-months-pregnant woman was hanged with her head downward, doused with gasoline and set on fire. While she was still alive, one of the lynchers grabbed a knife and cut the unborn infant from her womb. Another man then crushed the baby’s head with the heels of his boots. Finally the mob unloaded their guns into the dead woman’s body.

The lynching frenzy in Georgia provoked condemnation throughout the United States. As American soldiers were fighting German “Huns” to make the world safe for democracy, observers emphasized, lynching did enormous harm to the war effort. President Woodrow Wilson, who held profound sympathies for white Southern views on race, admonished his countrymen that “every mob contributes to German lies about the United States.” Southern apologists responded that German spies had caused the trouble in the first place by fomenting insurrection among the black population of southwestern Georgia. But even in the hysterical climate of World War I, few people outside the Deep South took such ridiculous excuses seriously.

In the early twentieth century many Americans came to see lynch- ing as a peculiar Southern problem. They viewed the region as painfully backward and isolated, and populated largely by semi-literate “red- necks” whose favorite pastimes were to guzzle moonshine liquor, engage in brawls, and abuse black people. In 1917 Baltimore’s acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken spurned the South as “almost as sterile, artistically, intel- lectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.” Lynching, Mencken thought, was a “popular sport . . . because the backward culture of the region de- nied the populace more seemly recreations” such as brass bands, sym- phony orchestras, or athletic contests.

Critics of the South tended to ignore that lynchings also occurred in other parts of the country. Northern mobs, too, killed African Americans, and they targeted them for the same reasons as Southern whites. One in- cident of particular callousness occurred in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in

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August 1912, after a black man named Zachariah Walker had killed a white police officer in a saloon scuffle. While a posse was pursuing Walker, the fugitive tried to shoot himself but merely injured his jaw. The police brought him to a hospital where, the following night, a mob seized him. Although the black man desperately pleaded that he had shot the police- man in self-defense, his abductors burned him alive before a crowd of five thousand men, women, and children. In similar fashion a mass mob overpowered police headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, in June 1920 to seize three young black men held for the alleged rape of an eighteen-year- old white woman. The lynchers then stripped their victims to their waists and hanged them from a lamppost in the city center. A newspaper from Valdosta, Georgia, the scene of the Mary Turner lynching two years ear- lier, gloatingly pointed out that the incident had taken place in a state that prided itself on “its great love for the poor friendless colored man and has criticized the Southern people for not living on terms of social equality with the blacks.”

In these episodes there were nevertheless significant differences be- tween North and South: the lynchings in Pennsylvania and Minnesota resulted in serious efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. In the Coatesville affair, officials launched a thorough investigation and were able to obtain indictments against eight men, including the police chief and his deputy, for neglecting their duty to uphold the law. Eventually a local jury acquitted all defendants. Incensed by this mockery of justice, the governor of Pennsylvania threatened to revoke the town charter of Coatesville, though he never followed through with his announcement. Prosecution in the Duluth case was more successful. The governor of Minnesota immediately dispatched the National Guard to the city, and the commanding general began a preliminary investigation. A photogra- pher who had displayed images of the lynching was charged with exhib- iting “indiscreet and obscene pictures.” Ultimately more than a dozen of the lynchers were indicted. In September 1920 a jury convicted two men for rioting and sentenced them to up to five years in prison. A juvenile defendant served time in the state reformatory. The authorities also pros- ecuted thirteen black men for their alleged involvement in the gang rape of the young white woman. But lawyers hired by the naacp obtained re- leases or acquittals for all but one of the defendants, who was sentenced to thirty years in prison but paroled in 1925. In fact there was consider-

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able doubt that a rape had occurred at all. A medical examination was inconclusive, and suspicion surfaced that the young woman and her boy- friend may have made up the rape story to conceal a sexual liaison.

In both these cases the outcomes of the criminal prosecutions were dis- appointing. Yet they compared favorably to situations in most Southern states where lynchers had virtually nothing to fear from the authorities. When in 1918 naacp representatives called upon Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo to take action against the lynchers of the four black youngsters in Shubuta, Bilbo responded they should “go to hell.” Because African Americans could not expect protection from law enforcement or political leadership in the South, they had to wage their own struggle against lynching. But what could people who personally encountered ra- cial violence do to fight lynching?

Despite black poverty and powerlessness, racist terror did not cow all African Americans into silence and submission. Resistance encompassed a broad spectrum of behavior ranging from gestures of defiance to armed self-defense. One conspicuous way blacks demonstrated their opposi- tion was to refuse responsibility for burying the victims. Following the Shubuta murders, local blacks reportedly declared that “the white folks lynched them and they can cut them down.” To express their protest, African Americans also boycotted the businesses of lynchers or refused to work for them. Sometimes mob violence triggered a black exodus. In the aftermath of a triple lynching in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892, the city’s black population fell by two thousand. Following the Georgia lynching spree of 1918, observers warned that the South was driving its black labor force northward. If fear or protest caused blacks to leave, lynching was perhaps one of the “push factors” in the Great Migration north that be- gan during World War I.

Blacks also found other ways to resist mob violence. These included hiding a fugitive from a mob or perhaps setting fire to the property of lynchers. Such forms of resistance were extremely dangerous because they invited instant retaliation if discovered. Clearly the most confrontational way to stand up to lynching was armed self-defense. African American leaders unanimously insisted that blacks had not only a right but a duty to fight back when attacked by a mob. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” Ida B. Wells famously proclaimed, “and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

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Many blacks who faced a mob put up a last-ditch fight. Perhaps the most legendary of these stands occurred in New Orleans in July 1900 af- ter Robert Charles, a black worker in his mid-thirties, had wounded a police officer in self-defense and then fled the scene. When the police, accompanied by a swelling mob of several thousand whites, found his hiding place, he barricaded himself behind a window and took aim at his pursuers with his rapid-firing rifle. In a gun battle lasting several hours, the injured fugitive supposedly killed seven whites and wounded twenty more before he was smoked out and felled by volleys from policemen and vigilantes. Enraged by the death toll Charles had exacted among his opponents, white mobs staged a major riot that claimed the lives of more than a dozen African-American residents of the Crescent City.

The incident demonstrated that armed self-defense carried a high risk of provoking massive retaliation against the larger black community. The black press nonetheless celebrated African Americans who fought back as heroes. “May his ashes rest in peace for protecting his manhood,” the Chicago Defender eulogized Tom Brooks of Sommerville, Tennessee, who in May 1915 killed two white lynchers before he was hanged.

In contrast to individual acts of valor, collective armed self-defense had a greater chance of success. In 1911 rumors in Stanford, Kentucky, indicated that whites planned to seize two African Americans from the local jail. This prompted leaders of the black community to organize an armed sentinel to guard the prisoners. When the would-be lynchers spotted the patrol, they dispersed. Twelve years earlier a similar event in Darien, Georgia, had led to what local whites perceived as a “Negro insurrection.” When a black man accused of raping a white woman was arrested, a large group of armed black men rushed to the jail for his pro- tection. Evidently deterred by the presence of the sentry, no mob showed up. But the picket remained watchful and refused to allow the sheriff to remove the prisoner, fearing he would surrender him to a lynching party. Whites became so frightened by the apparent black takeover of the town that they called in the militia. The black guards agreed to hand over the prisoner to the militia but resisted the arrest of their leaders, wounding two white men. A major confrontation was barely avoided. Eventually the alleged rapist was acquitted while twenty-three of the so-called “in- surrectionists” went to prison for “rioting.”

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Although they often were outgunned, outmanned, and risked harsh retribution, African Americans, no less than whites, cherished the eth- ics of self-defense, honor, and vengeance. After the Shubata lynching, the Baltimore Daily Herald, a black newspaper, defended Major Clark for killing Dr. Johnston because the latter had abused two young black women. Noting correctly that African-American women lacked legal protection from white aggressors, the paper criticized the youngster only for ambushing Johnston—as the white press had reported—rather than confronting him “in an open and manly fashion” and then fighting him to the death. Such conduct would have made Clark “a martyr to the cause of Negro womanhood.”

Reared in a culture of violence, many blacks were not opposed to lynching in principle. Primarily they resented its racist thrust. Even Ida B. Wells admitted that she had condoned mob violence in reaction to rape before she became an anti-lynching campaigner. If Judge Lynch acted in an ostensibly color-blind fashion, blacks found reasons to ap- plaud his work. In 1919 a mass meeting of the black community in Lex- ington, Georgia, endorsed the action of whites who had lynched “Obe” Cox, an infamous black criminal, for assaulting and murdering a white woman. Allegedly Cox had earlier raped a black woman too.

Between the 1880s and the late 1920s roughly 150 African Americans fell victim to lynch mobs that were either racially integrated or all-black. In many ways black-on-black lynching mirrored the general trends of mob violence in the age of Jim Crow. It peaked in the 1890s and gradually declined afterward, and it was most prevalent in the states of the Deep South. Moreover nearly three-fourths of all blacks executed by mobs of their own race were accused of murder and rape. Often the crime had been of a particularly heinous nature. In 1885 a group of black vigilantes dispatched a man from Jones County, Mississippi, for murdering a black woman and her two children to whom the killer was a half-brother. He had also allegedly raped his half-sister before slaying her. Although less frequently than white mobs, black lynchers occasionally displayed ex- treme cruelty, burning their victims or throwing them into boiling water.

While the rationale of white supremacists that lynching was neces- sary because the law treated black-on-white crime too softly was patently absurd, black Southerners indeed had reason to complain about law

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enforcement. The authorities not only refused to protect them against white mob violence but also cared little about black-on-black crime. Ac- cording to a late-nineteenth-century remark attributed to a Southern po- lice chief, there were three types of homicides: “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable ho- micide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger.” Punishment of- ten depended on white interests. When labor was scarce, planters were inclined to intervene on behalf of workers charged with a crime against another black person in order to keep them out of prison. Because many white men regarded black women as fair game, the white-dominated criminal justice system paid little attention to black-on-black rape. More- over if black men lynched other black men for raping black women, such acts merely confirmed for whites their view that the menace of the “black brute” had become intolerable even to his own people.

Although racial hatred obviously played no role in black-on-black lynchings, participants in black mobs shared with white supremacists some of the key beliefs in popular justice. Most important, lynchers maintained they were agents of communal self-defense necessitated by a weak system of official criminal justice. Southern racism in the age of Jim Crow radicalized these ideas by creating the specter of the black rapist. But in principle, popular justice had never been limited to the purpose of racial terror. Its adherents continued to mete out extralegal punishment to other groups as well.

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