The Legacy of Lynching in the United States

Ballard & Samuelson 1

Revisioning Cultural Memory:

The Legacy of Lynching in the United States

Brandi Ballard, English Literature, Undergraduate

Elise Samuelson, Sociology, Undergraduate

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Department of Women’s and Ethnic Studies
Abstract

The history of brutal racial violence in the United States has divided and traumatized communities. The misrepresentation of the reality of these acts makes it difficult to begin the healing process and results in a gap in essential knowledge. This paper examines a variety of texts, including primary historical documents, to illustrate and expose the suppressed history of lynching in the United States. Specifically, this paper will focus on thewidespread nature of lynching, the multiethnic victimology, and the legacy of resistance,all of which are not part of the current cultural vision. Only by making this history known, and acknowledging the underlying systems of oppression that allowed for such crimes to take place, can efforts be made to reunite and heal traumatized communities.

Witnessing is especially necessary when the reality

of a lived experience is denied by the culture at

large, the culture to which the witness is brought.

-Judith McDaniel

A lynching is a murder, a group murder. You take all

of the energy of a lynching, all the hate and all the

fear, and pile it on one human being. You tie that

person to a tree and you slowly or fastly kill him.

-Melvin Edwards

In the United States, the popular cultural vision of lynching involves crimes perpetrated against blacks by white mobs. The victim is male and accused of a crime, most likely the rape of a white woman or the murder of a white man. The male victim is hung as the mob watches. His death is quick and painless. After, the satisfied crowd disperses. These scenes take place in a vague, timeless notion of the Old South. This is the narrative that has been sold to us through textbooks, literature, music, and cinema.[1] In actuality, lynchings were far more widespread, brutal in nature, and were committed against multiple marginalized communities.[2] This paper seeks to break through the cultural amnesia surrounding lynching in order to start the peacebuilding process with the historical legacy of lynching and the communities that continue to be traumatized by this history.

According to Senate Resolution 39,[3] the victims of lynching number “at least 4,742 people, predominantly African-Americans” and occurred in all but four states (S. Res. 392).[4]These reported cases took place during the Jim Crow era which spans nearly a hundred years; however, lynchings occurred both before and after this period of time and to multiple populations throughout the United States.As the socialdefinition of lynching has changed over time, including recent recategorization as hate crimes, it is more difficult to accurately track the number of cases.In addition,early recordkeeping was sporadic, which makes it impossible to know how many lynchings occurred, let alone those that wentunreported or were covered up.

Lynchings impacted a wide variety of groups that are generally notconsidered in the popular cultural vision. The statistics used to examine victimology by race are based on problematic categorization of historical data. In “Killed by Persons Unknown: Mob Violence against Blacks and Mexicans,” Carrigan and Webb state that:

the primary lynching data sets conceal the multiethnic character of

lynching. When Tuskegee researchers released their data on lynching to the

public, they divided lynching victims into two racial categories, black and

white. (38)

This categorization perpetuates the racial binary as well as blurs the impact that lynching had on other marginalized groups. Carrigan and Webb found that “The ‘white’ category actually included Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, and a host of other ethnic minorities” (38). During the course of research on the statistics presented for several states, it was determined that, “TuskegeeUniversity failed to include in their statistics more than three-quarters of the Mexicans lynched during the period that they claimed to be systematically covering the crime of lynching” (Carrigan and Webb 38). The accounts of lynchings are generally limited to whites and blacks because, in the history of the United States, the majority of the lynching victims were black.[5]

Lynchings were often done in the name of a false sense of justice.The majority of victims were accused of rape and murder, but also “‘window peeping,’‘unpopularity,’‘insulting women,’‘being disreputable,’‘self-defense,’‘giving evidence,’ and sometimes ‘causes unknown’” (qtd. in Park 156).[6] The lynching of Jesse Washington, also referred to as “The Waco Horror,” occurred in May of 1916 (“Waco Horror” 4).[7] Washington, a black teenager who may have been mentally disabled,[8]was accused of assaulting and murdering a woman (“Waco Horror” 2). After Washington was found guilty, he was removed from the courtroom despite the presence of the sheriff and the judge (“Waco Horror” 3). The mob forced the teenager to disrobe, cut off his ear and genitals, drug him around the streets behind a car, stabbed him, and then proceeded to lower him into a fire repeatedly (“Waco Horror” 4).This level of brutality was not uncommon and was often excused by the crimes allegedly perpetrated by the victims. In “Resolving the Paradox of Our Lynching Fixation: Reconsidering Racialized Violence in the American South after Slavery,” Kidada E. Williams wrote that, “Whites silenced victims by murder and then by employing awidespread propaganda campaign to justify their actions” (325).

In social narratives, the brutality of lynching is grossly under-expressed. Resolution 39 states that “the crime of lynching succeeded slavery as the ultimate expression of racism in the United States followingReconstruction” (2). The Resolution provides no other details describing lynching. By reducing the horrors of lynching to “the ultimate expression of racism,” the truth of the brutality of such crimes is stripped away (S. Res 39 2). In actuality:

The story of lynching . . . is more than the simple fact of a black man or woman hanged by the neck. It is the story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation. If executed by fire, it is the red-hot poker applied to the eyes and genitals and the stench of burning flesh. If executed by hanging, it is the convulsive movement of the limbs. Whether by fire or rope, it is the dismemberment and distribution of severed bodily parts as favors and souvenirs. (Litwick 14)

The lynching of Luther Holbert and his wife in 1904 was a prime example of such overkill. TheVicksburg (Mississippi) Evening Post, a black-run newspaper, reported that:

they were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket. Some of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore into the flesh of the man and woman. It was applied to their arms, legs and body, then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn. (qtd. in Ginzburg 63)

The New-York Tribune, a white-run newspaper, reported a conflicting account of the incident. The article, entitled “Burn Negro and His Wife,” states that after their capture, “The two negroes were brought to Doddsville and this afternoon were burned at the stake by a large mob almost in the shadow of the negro church here” (6). The beating and mutilation of the Holberts are not mentioned in this article. Not only does this incident illustrate the sheer brutality of lynchings, it also shows how cultural vision was constructed differently by the dominant culture.

Such misrepresentations of racial violence, particularly in the Jim Crow era, mislead the public in a number of ways. In “Strange Fruit Indeed: Interrogating Contemporary Textbook Representations of Racial Violence toward African Americans,” Brown and Brown examined a sampling of textbooks used in Texas. The books studied were used in K-12 educationand were published between 1999 and 2003.In one of the examples provided by Brown and Brown, the dangers faced by blacks in the South are described as follows:

The Klan attacked African Americans. Often it targetedthose who owned land or had become prosperous.Klansmen rode on horseback and dressed in white robes andhoods. They beat people and burned homes. They even lynchedsome victims, killing them on the spot without a trial as punishmentfor a supposed crime. (48)

It could be argued that, since the example is from an eighth-grade text, it is reasonableto leave out the brutal horrors of lynching. However, this excerpt clearly illustrates racial violence as an act by a group of individuals, not pervasive racial violence perpetrated by thousands of people. Brown and Brown found that the portrayals of racial violence “help to sustain the ideological belief that racism . . . only existed (or continuesto exist) because of the actions of a few unscrupulous individuals ratherthan as acts embedded within larger institutional and structural systems” (Brown and Brown 59).[9]The idea that racial violence is the action of a few individuals as opposed to widespread systemic racism lends itself to modern symbolic racism and serves to further divide communities. The distancing of ourselves from the individuals who committed these crimes, as well as from the victims themselves, translates into an us/them binary. This is evident in a statement made by Ray Meadows, a Waco county commissioner, in 2006.A group gathered at the Waco County Courthouse on the 90th anniversary of the lynching of Jesse Washington, to “read a resolution condemning and apologizing for the lynching” (Goodwyn). When asked about the apology, Meadows responded,“‘It’s a very ugly part of history, . . . I regret that it happened, but as far as me coming out to apologize . . . I didn’t have anything to do with it’”(Goodwyn).

The manner in which resistance to racial violence is portrayed leads to problematic perceptions of the victims. As stated by Brown and Brown, “in the case of the JimCrow era, such acts were relegated generally to the work of anti-lynchingcoalitions led by Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist” (50).The relegating of anti-lynching resistance to a handful of prominent activistshas a continuing impact on the black community. In “Recognising Victims without Blaming Them: A Moral Contest,”Ponsonnet asserts that, “to say that someone isa ‘victim’ seems to infer that she is fully deprivedof her agency and that she will necessarily beblamed for her difficulties” (45). The portrayal of the black community as passive in the face of the brutal violence of the Jim Crow era is inaccurate and has been used by some to shift the blame away from the perpetrators. Ponsonnet states that, “nobody can bean ‘absolute victim,’ a victim in every regard andat every point in life. A victim is also an agent”(45).

This agency is seen in the varied means of resistance employed by the black community. After the 1904 lynchings of Paul Reed and William Cato, violence erupted in Statesboro, Georgia(Brundage 275). The response was “an exodus of blacks from the area [which] threatened to create a labor shortage at the beginning of cotton-picking season” (Brundage 275). The threat to the local economy spurred officials to “issue a public statement calling for a halt of the attacks against blacks” (Brundage 275). While fleeing was a passive means of resistance, it had the potential to have an economic impact on the community which, as seen in Statesboro, could prompt a reaction from officials. There were other means by which large groups of blacks resisted the violence of the era. For instance, “In Jacksonville, Florida, in 1920, outraged blacks canceled their policies with a white life insurance company after some of its agents led a lynch mob. Despite the urgent efforts of the firm, sixteen thousand black customers shifted their business to a newly organized black life insurance company” (Brundage 278). This was a major blow to the company and a clear message to the white community as a whole.

Other, less overt, methods of resistance show that the black community did not take the violence of the times in stride. In “The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: Black Resistance and White Violence in the American South,”W. Brundage states that:

the language of dissent sometimes surfaced during the funeral ceremonies for lynching victims when the families of mob victims vented their pain and bitterness by denouncing lynching. In other instances, they protested the mob’s actions by refusing to accept the cost of burial. In 1897, for example, the aunt of a black lynched in Alexandria, Virginia, raged, ‘As the [white] people killed him, they will have to bury him.’ (274)

The placement of responsibility for burial on the killers forced these communities to acknowledge, in some small way, the act committed. The results of such actions had the potential to make targets out of those who spoke out against the crimes. Another way that marginalized communities resisted that simultaneously served to make them targets was to assert basic rights and go about everyday life. Williams writes that:

White supremacists knew that Reconstruction policies crystallized AfricanAmericans’ determination to benefit from freedom and citizenship. Black people haddemonstrated how seriously they took these entitlements by negotiating laborcontracts, enrolling in schools, purchasing land, and engaging in the action conservativeshated most: voting. (333)

Such activities were attempts to forge ties in the communities that often rejected them.

The pervasive cultural narratives that position blacks as occasional, inactive victims leavecommunities open to further traumatization. In 2010, there were a series of racially charged incidents onUniversity of Californiacampuses. During Black History Month, a fraternity party called the “‘Compton Cookout’” invited students to dress “‘ghetto’” (Garrett). In March, a noose was left hanging in the library by a student who,“insisted that it was not meant as a racially charged gesture and that she ‘simply forgot’ about leaving it dangling. The individual, who identified herself as a minority student, [was] suspended” (Garrett). Soon afterwards, “a noose with the words ‘lynch’ was scribbled in a bathroom” at another UC campus (Garrett). The following week, school officials found“a Ku Klux Klan-style hood . . . draped over the head of a statue . . . outside the campus library” (Garrett). These incidents at UC are part of a slew of similar cases in which college students claim to be unaware of the historical implication of hanging nooses. The fact that a minority student was involved points to the extent to which the suppression and denial of the history of lynching by the dominant culture has succeeded. Given the history and impact of lynching, the public has a moral responsibility to educate themselves on this issue.As quoted by Jean Harvey in “Victims, Resistance, and Civilized Oppression,” Laurence Thomas states that,

It is a mode of moral learning which those who have been oppressed are owed in the nameof eliminating the very state of their oppression. In the absence of such learning, oppressioncannot but continue to be a part of the fabric of the moral life. Indeed, the absence of suchlearning, the studied refusal to engage in such learning, is one of the very ways in whichoppression manifests itself. Worse, such studied refusal to learn adds insult to injury. (16-17)

The call for education is key to the peacebuilding process as education can counter racial intolerance and spur communities to develop methods of prevention as well as means of support.

Lynching results in the collective traumatization of communities. Collective trauma is “a condition that results from the experience of both overt and structural violence” and “from the experience of living in an environment rife with fear and institutional failure” (Kantowitz and Riak 6). The trauma of violence “applies to not only direct personal exposure (being the victim of the violence), it also includes exposure through witnessing and vicarious exposure (knowing someone to whom the violence has happened)” (Bryant-Davis 3). In addition to the punishment of individuals, lynching serves to further oppress targeted communities. Under such conditions, narratives of warning develop on both the side of the oppressing group and the victimized community. These narratives take the form of personal stories, verbal and nonverbal threats, cartoons, newspaper articles, photographs, and even the display of the victim’s bodies.

The social narratives surrounding lynching hurt the development of impacted communities as members are forced into survival mode. In survival mode, “people mak[e] decisions based on meeting basic needs which prevents focus on long-term sustainable development mechanisms” (Kantowitz and Riak 6). Conversely, social narratives are also used by marginalized communities as a means of resistance. Claude McKay’s 1920 poem,“The Lynching,” focused not on the men committing the lynchings,[10]but the women and children who witnessed them. He writes: