Strange fruit? Syrian immigrants, extralegal violence and racial formation in the Jim Crow South

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2004 by Sarah Gualtieri

(24.) As recent work on Italians indicates. See Vincenea Scarpaci, "Walking the Color Line: Italian Immigrants in Rural Louisiana, 1880-1910," in Are Italians White? How Race' is Made" in America, Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (Eds.). (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 60-76. There is also quite an extensive literature on mutually supportive relationships between; blacks and Jews. See for example. Arnold Shankman. Ambivalent Friends: Americans View of the Immigrant (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982).

(25.) James R. McGovern notes that what distinguishes lynching from murder is community approval, "either explicit, in the form of general participation by the local citizenry, or implicit, in the form of acquittal of the killers with or without trial." See Anatomy O/a Lynching. the Killing of Clouds Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. x.

(26.) W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 8. For statistics outside the South (and superb analysis of how race and gender came together in the practice of lynching) see, Jacquelyn Down Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Againts Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 134.

(27.) Mississippi had the highest number at 88. See U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, "Crime of Lynching" (Washington: GPO, 1948), p. 100.

(28.) Between 1881) and 1930, 3.220 of those lynched in the South were black, while 723 were white. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, p. 8.

(29.) Thomas C. Holt. "Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History," American Historical Review v. 100, No. 1 (1995): p. 3: Grace E. Hale. Making Whiteness: vs. The Culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). p. 214.

(30.) On the history of the Syrian racial prerequisite cases, see Sarah Gualtieri, "Becoming 'white,'": pp. 29-58.

(31.) Blundage, Lyching in the New South, 5; Hall. Revolt Againt Chivalry, p. 131.

(32.) E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay argue that the decline in white lynching was linked to the development of the South and the establishment of more formal avenues of punishment. The lynchings of blacks, however, were "so intimately intertwined in the broader race conflict and competition that extended far into the new, century" that they continued to be tolerated by legal authorities. See "When Race Didn't Matter: Black and White Mob Violence against Their Own Color," in Under Sentence Of Death: Lynchings in the South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Ed.), (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1907), pp. 150-151.

(33.) Frank was lynched after his sentence was commuted. For an especially interesting analysis of the Leo Frank Case (which includes a critique of the literature), see Nancy MacLean, "The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism," The Journal of American History 78, No. 3 (1991), pp. 917-948. On Shoemaker and Hodaz see Walter T. Howard, Lynchings: Extralegal Violence in Florida during the 1930s (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1995).