The Muckrakers and Lynching: A Case Study in Racial Thinking (original) (raw)
The Issue of Race and Lynching
2010
Decades before Alice Walker coined the term womanist that Katie Geneva Cannon and others appropriated theologically, Wells’s tenacity to investigate lynching was, from my vantage point, a gift from God. In fact, her ability to find “truths where everyone else seems afraid to look”1 is a trait typically shared among individuals who deliberately probe beneath the surface of an issue in order to better understand how the interrelatedness of various dynamics of race, gender, and lynching operate to obscure lessons about strength and hope. For this reason, Wells was convinced that “the A fro-American papers are the only ones which will print the truth, and they lack means to employ agents and detectives to get at the facts. The race must rally a mighty host to the support of their journals, and thus enable them to do much in the way of investigation.”2
Populism and Black Lynching in Georgia, 1890-1900
Social Forces, 1992
This research tests general claims of how political and economic competition affected county-level variation of black lynching rates in Georgia in the 1890s. The central argument is that rates of racial violence rose when interracial competition increased. This increase was due primarily to black migration to southern manufacturing areas, black participation in the cotton economy, and the rise of black participation in the Populist movement. To address morefully the politicalfacet of interracial competition, wefirst analyze theforces leading to the Populist movement. Wefind that black counties and counties with a higher degree offarm tenancy were more likely to have supported Populist candidates, and that manufacturing counties were less likely to vote Populist. IA4en we analyze the causes of lynching, we find that lynching rates increased when economic competition increased, but that counties that voted Populist did not have significantly higher rates of black lynching. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), between the years of 1889 and 1900, 3,224 people in the U.S. fell victim to the hands of lynch mobs.' Of these victims, 2,522, or 78.2%, were black. Lynching represents an extreme form of racial violence, and the study of the phenomenon allows for comparison with other analyses about different forms of racial or ethnic violence. This project applies general arguments about racial violence as a function of intergroup competition for economic and political resources to black lynching in Georgia in the late nineteenth century. Historical and sociological explanations for lynching and other forms of racial violence are varied, but historians and sociologists agree that forces that increased competition between groups for economic and/or political resources heightens intergroup antagonism (
Improving Lynching Inventories with Local Newspapers: Racial Terror in Virginia, 1877–1927
Current Research in Digital History, 2019
Lynching inventories are fundamental tools to measure the extent and trends of lethal mob violence against alleged criminals during the post-Reconstruction era in the United States. The digital history project "Racial Terror: Lynchings in Virginia, 1877-1927" revisits the Beck-Tolnay inventory of Southern lynchings, the most comprehensive and accurate scholarly catalogue of lethal mob violence in the Deep South. Focusing on lynching in Virginia, this project uses local, rather than national, newspapers as its main source of information. Importantly, the use of local sources reveals that white victims of lynching in Virginia have been overcounted in lynching inventories. This is a significant finding because lynching apologists often used white lynching victims to defend lethal mob violence arguing that, rather than a tool of white domination, lynching was a legitimate and non-racialized form of "popular justice" against hideous crimes. This project enhances our understanding of lynching as a form of racialized terrorism and recommends the systematic use of local newspapers and sources to correct existing lynching catalogues.
Review Essay: Looking at Lynching: Spectacle, Resistance and Contemporary Transformations
Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2011
The study of lynching has a lengthy history of sustained investigation. Early work focused upon compiling empirical evidence of race violence and on contesting dominant explanations for it. 1 Through the 1990s, historians, sociologists, and political scientists worked on placing the material act of race lynching in broader socio-political, economic and historical contexts. 2 Contributions from rhetorical and critical/cultural studies were modest throughout these years. However, in the past decade lynching has become a growing focus in rhetorical and critical/cultural studies. Central themes of these works include the rhetorical history of the intersections of Christian evangelical fervor and lynching, lynching as public performance, visual vocabularies of lynching photography and the appropriation of prolynching rhetorics by antilynching advocacy groups. 3
The Bloody Red River: Lynching and Racial Violence in Northeast Texas, 1890-1930
2012
During the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, the United States underwent vast transformations. This was especially in the South where, in the wake of Emancipation, new economic, social, and political relationships emerged between blacks and whites. Industrialization, urbanization, modernization, and reform were the dominant themes of post-Reconstruction America. Underneath the façade of achievement however, rested the dark underbelly of the American past. Between 1890 and 1930, race relations reached a particularly difficult and discouraging point. African-Americans were disenfranchised, racially segregated, and institutionally denied basic human rights. Black resistance to forced second-class citizenship often resulted in outbursts of lynching and racial violence. From the late 19 th century to the present, African-American activists, sociologists, and historians struggled to explain Americans' historical penchant for vigilante violence. Dating back to the revolutionary period, lynch mobs punished alleged criminals and social pariahs of all races and genders. The origins of lynching in the U.S. are inconclusive, but it is commonly believed that lynching in the United States began in Virginia during the American Revolution. William and Charles Lynch set up makeshift courts and dispensed vigilante justice against Tories in the region. These courts had an air of legality, closely mirrored institutionalized court systems, and punished criminals 10 White, Rope and Faggot, 11. 11 Ibid., 45. 6 Woodward devoted less than two pages to lynching. He broached the topic as an introduction to a larger discussion of the Atlanta Compromise and race relations in the 1890s and early 1900s. He simply articulated that by 1900 lynching became a-southern and racial phenomenon.‖ 12 Scholarly interest in the history of American violence increased in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the student protests, urban riots, and the Civil Rights Movement. 13 Initially, historians examined lynching as lesser parts of larger narratives or biographies.
Interspecies Welfare and JusticeAnimal Welfare and the Anti-Lynching Movement
2017
In "Hellhounds," his introductory essay to the landmark Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, Leon Litwack repeatedly presents analogies of lynching's violence against African Americans and violence against animals, most notably through an array of testimony and anecdotes, both white and black, that he offers up throughout the essay. To give just a sampling: from a white Memphis man in 1909, "We work to protect ourselves against the negro, just as we do against the yellow fever and the malaria-the work of noxious insects" (34). Or, as a black man recalled a catch phrase, "Back in those days, to kill a Negro wasn't nothing. It was kill a mule, buy another, kill a nigger, hire another," and, as another black southerner lamented, "They had to have a license to kill anything but a nigger. We was always in season" (12). 1 Litwack summarizes this litany with an argument that is all too familiar in its one-dimensionality: "The cheapness of black life reflected in turn the degree to which so many whites by the early twentieth century had come to think of black men and women as inherently and permanently inferior, as less than human, as little more than animals" (12-13); lynching was the manifestation of "the triumph of a belief system that defined one people as less human than another" (34). As one white southerner told a northern critic, "We Southern people don't care to equal ourselves with animals" (13). Litwack is certainly onto something in demonstrating the myriad ways that lynching's rituals appropriated and applied the violence to African Americans that was, for the most part, unquestioningly inflicted on animals. Yet such an observation, in the end, presents nothing new. Scholarship has long pointed to lynching's dehumanization, even as it has left largely unexamined the historical, interspecies specifics of this process and the ways that white supremacy mobilizes itself through the intimate entanglings of racism and speciesism. Black anti-lynching activism itself provides a plethora of testimony to the dangers of being animalized-of being treated as animals are treated-and it is, of course, undeniably true that blacks have historically suffered enormously through racist and speciesist associations of blackness and animality. At the same time that we acknowledge these
2006
Dr. Strickland, I don't know if you realize how important you are to me. I am so glad that I was lucky enough to be part of your last group of "children" at Mizzou. I learned so much as your teaching and research assistant as well as your student. Your gentle, yet firm and always supportive spirit warmed Black Studies as well as my heart. I had the privilege of beginning my graduate studies at Morgan State University under the tutelage of one of the foremost scholars of black women's history, Roselyn Terborg-Penn. Dr. Penn, thank you for opening up a world of knowledge as well as awakening the desire to advance in this field. I have learned a great deal from you and still refer to you pencil written comments, on occasion. There were many people, who without their help, this project would not have developed as it did. In South Carolina, I am deeply indebted to those people who arranged interviews and to those who granted them: Senator John