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Many Faces in the New South: Word and Deed in Lynching Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy*
Affiliation:
Wesleyan University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Keywords

lynchinghate crimeFitzhugh BrundageChristopher Waldrepplacards (signs)
Type
Special Forum: Lynching in the New South A Quarter of a Century Later
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 95 - 103
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Holden-Smith, Barbara, “Lynching, Federalism, and the Intersection of Race and Gender in the Progressive Era,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 8 (1996): 31–78, esp. 44 n. 75.Google Scholar

2 “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018,” ALB18773, 115th Congress, 2nd sess. Leonidas Dyer’s anti-lynching bill, H.R. 11279, was introduced in 1918, passed by the House of Representatives in 1922, and derailed by Senate filibusters.

3 The “Hate Crimes Statistics Act” was introduced in 1985, and the “Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act” was passed and signed into law in October 2009.

4 Waldrep, Christopher, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hereafter, I will cite all quotations from this book in the body of the essay.

5 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 17–48 Google Scholar. Hereafter, I will cite all quotations from this book in the body of the essay.

6 I discuss the James Byrd Jr. case, and the media commentary on it, in Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., The End of American Lynching (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 128–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Cutler, James Elbert, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (Longmans, Green, 1905), 276.Google Scholar

8 Christopher Waldrep, ed., Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006). Likewise, see Christopher Waldrep and Michael Bellesiles, eds., Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

9 Markowitz, Jonathan, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).Google Scholar

10 See Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., American Lynching (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a study of lynching and the political idea of popular sovereignty; and Rushdy, The End of American Lynching, for lynching and the idea of legal and moral complicity. Also see Daniel Kato, Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

11 Raiford, Leigh Renee, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Apel and Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

12 Williams, Kidada E., They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. Also see Karlos K. Hill, Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Latham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009).

13 Carrigan, William, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

14 This note was affixed to the body of Lige Strickland in Palmetta, Georgia, in 1899, who was accused as an accessory to the murder of Alfred Cranford, for which Sam Hose had already been lynched. He was tortured and hanged after he refused to confess to the accusations made against him. On his hanging body, someone had pinned what the reporter from the Macon Telegraph described as a “scrap of bloodstained paper.” On one side was written: “N.Y. Journal. We must protect our Ladies. 23-99.” On the other side: “Beware, all darkies! You will be treated the same way.” See “Another Lynching,” Macon Telegraph, Apr. 25, 1899; quoted in Arnold, Edwin T., What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 127.Google Scholar

15 Howard, Walter T., Lynchings: Extralegal Violence in Florida during the 1930s (1995; New York: Authors Choice Press, 2005), 101 Google Scholar. In some cases, the notes were specifically meant to address particular people. In one case in Mayfield, Kentucky, the note pinned to the lynched corpse of Jim Stone in December 1896 listed “the names of several blacks who were to leave town or suffer the same fate.” See George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 75.

16 Feimster, Crystal N., Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 96–97.Google Scholar

17 Florida Times-Union (July 13, 1893); quoted in Vandiver, Margaret, Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 72.Google Scholar

18 Raper, Arthur F., The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 268–69.Google Scholar

19 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, Popular Tribunals, Vol. 1, in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft (San Francisco: The History Company Publishers, 1887), Vol. XXXVI, 431.Google Scholar

20 Bancroft, Popular Tribunals, Vol. 1, 619–21.

21 Bancroft , Popular Tribunals, Vol. 1, 667–69. There was also a similarly signed note posted on the body of John Clark, who had been lynched outside of Boisé City a couple of weeks before Updyke.

22 Rable, George C., But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 25.Google Scholar

23 Gilje, Paul A., Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 103.Google Scholar