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American Mobs Lynched Both Blacks and Whites. But Not in the Same Way.
Retweeted by FiteMeHat: https://twitter.com/Popehat
Me in NR on lynching and how brutal punishments reinforce status
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American Mobs Lynched Both Blacks and Whites. But Not in the Same Way.
By Gabriel Rossman
April 28, 2018 5:30 AM
Reflections on the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
On April 26, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Ala. It is a museum to commemorate the thousands of black Americans lynched by mobs. Plinths are suspended from the roof of the memorial like hanged men, each one engraved with details of the victim and his (or in a handful of cases, her) death. One can agree or disagree with the proprietor’s message that these murders are contiguous with current penal issues and still recognize that lynching was a pervasive horror in the United States, especially in the decades following the end of Reconstruction.
Extra-judicial executions were common throughout the 19th century United States, especially in frontier areas, and in many cases these executions were whites executing other whites for suspected crimes. However, those behind the new memorial are correct that the lynching of blacks was qualitatively different from, say, cowboys hanging bandits or Hatfields forming an informal firing squad to execute a McCoy who had killed one of their own clan. There were two major differences between frontier rough justice and racial lynchings.
First, as a rule, whites were lynched only when suspected of a felony, but blacks could be lynched for minor crimes and breaches of etiquette. As Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck note in their book A Festival of Violence, 60 percent of white lynching victims, but only 39 percent of black lynching victims, were accused of murder. While two-thirds of black lynching victims were accused of capital crimes (rape or murder), the balance were accused of property crimes or minor offenses, and about a quarter were lynched for either unknown reasons or breaches of racial etiquette. The most infamous instance of this is the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was tortured and murdered in 1955 for directing unwelcome flirtation towards a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store.
Second, white-on-white lynchings tended to be fairly expeditious extra-judicial executions. Lynchings of blacks were often gruesome affairs with torture preceding the murder and mutilation following it. Sometimes this torture was anticipated and even advertised in advance, as with the 1919 headline from a Tennessee newspaper, “3,000 Will Burn Negro,” the story accompanying which added that the burning was to occur at 5 p.m. and the further detail that the “Negro [was] Jerky and Sullen as Burning Hour Nears.” This torture was a primary reason for lynchings to occur even for capital crimes, since a state execution would occur without the requisite theater of degradation or the collecting of relics. Mobs often seized black men from courthouses awaiting trial and even black men who had already been sentenced to death, lest the state’s implementation of capital punishment be insufficiently painful, personal, or gruesome. About a third of attempted lynchings were thwarted by law enforcement, and these thwarted lynchings typically involved men already in custody, which both indicates how often lynching was intended to go beyond insufficiently horrible state justice and how lynching often represented a contest of authority between local elites out of office leading the mob and local elites in office staring it down.
....
Gabriel Rossman — Gabriel Rossman is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
By Gabriel Rossman
April 28, 2018 5:30 AM
Reflections on the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
On April 26, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Montgomery, Ala. It is a museum to commemorate the thousands of black Americans lynched by mobs. Plinths are suspended from the roof of the memorial like hanged men, each one engraved with details of the victim and his (or in a handful of cases, her) death. One can agree or disagree with the proprietor’s message that these murders are contiguous with current penal issues and still recognize that lynching was a pervasive horror in the United States, especially in the decades following the end of Reconstruction.
Extra-judicial executions were common throughout the 19th century United States, especially in frontier areas, and in many cases these executions were whites executing other whites for suspected crimes. However, those behind the new memorial are correct that the lynching of blacks was qualitatively different from, say, cowboys hanging bandits or Hatfields forming an informal firing squad to execute a McCoy who had killed one of their own clan. There were two major differences between frontier rough justice and racial lynchings.
First, as a rule, whites were lynched only when suspected of a felony, but blacks could be lynched for minor crimes and breaches of etiquette. As Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck note in their book A Festival of Violence, 60 percent of white lynching victims, but only 39 percent of black lynching victims, were accused of murder. While two-thirds of black lynching victims were accused of capital crimes (rape or murder), the balance were accused of property crimes or minor offenses, and about a quarter were lynched for either unknown reasons or breaches of racial etiquette. The most infamous instance of this is the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was tortured and murdered in 1955 for directing unwelcome flirtation towards a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store.
Second, white-on-white lynchings tended to be fairly expeditious extra-judicial executions. Lynchings of blacks were often gruesome affairs with torture preceding the murder and mutilation following it. Sometimes this torture was anticipated and even advertised in advance, as with the 1919 headline from a Tennessee newspaper, “3,000 Will Burn Negro,” the story accompanying which added that the burning was to occur at 5 p.m. and the further detail that the “Negro [was] Jerky and Sullen as Burning Hour Nears.” This torture was a primary reason for lynchings to occur even for capital crimes, since a state execution would occur without the requisite theater of degradation or the collecting of relics. Mobs often seized black men from courthouses awaiting trial and even black men who had already been sentenced to death, lest the state’s implementation of capital punishment be insufficiently painful, personal, or gruesome. About a third of attempted lynchings were thwarted by law enforcement, and these thwarted lynchings typically involved men already in custody, which both indicates how often lynching was intended to go beyond insufficiently horrible state justice and how lynching often represented a contest of authority between local elites out of office leading the mob and local elites in office staring it down.
....
Gabriel Rossman — Gabriel Rossman is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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