killing season, The

New Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2002 by Dray, Philip

A History of Lynching in/America

The lynching records at Tuskegee University date from 1882, a year after Booker T. Washington establish the school in the town of Tuskegee, Alabama. Several generations of Tuskegee librarians and students, guided by the example of Tuskegee's first Director of Records, sociologist Monroe Work, have carefully maintained a wide range of newspaper and magazine records of lynching and other acts of racial violence in America, and until 1962 published a yearly tabulation that came to be considered a definitive tally - a kind of Dow Jones ticker of the nation's most vicious form of intolerance.

Although Booker T. Washington condemned lynching, for many yearly he was inclined to downplay it, or of to suggest it befell mostly vagrants or lowlifes. The lynching records many Tuskegee's library, however, soon took on a life and an importance all their own. Lynch mobs rather pointedly do not keep accounts; in a sense, they seek to negate history itself. The Tuskegee's files, silently accumulating during lynching's worst years, ultimately frustrated this result - simply by keeping track.

In the years 1882 through 1885, the Tuskegee records show the number of whites lynched in America to have exceeded the number of blacks. After the year 1886, when the school recorded the lynching of 74 blacks and 64 whites, the number of blacks always exceeded whites. In 1892, the archive records 162 black Americans put to death outside the bounds of the law, chiefly in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Kentucky. Through 1944, when lynchings first began to decline strongly, Tuskegee recorded 3,417 lynchings of blacks and 1,291 of whites. Not until 1952 did a year pass without a single recorded lynching.

Discerning who and what type of person took part in lynchings is made difficult by the fact that those who carried out extralegal punishments were pointedly anonymous. This was both practical it protected lynchers from arrest and prosecution - and symbolic, in that the lynching was seen as a conservative act, a defense of the status quo. The coroner's inevitable verdict, "Death at the hands of persons unknown," affirmed the public's tacit complicity; no persons had committed a crime, because the lynching had been an expression of the community's will. Other protective euphemisms came into play. Lynchers, never identified by name, were "determined men," members of "Judge Lynch's Court," or men "agitated to a high degree"; and eyewitnesses, even law officers, invariably swore they hadn't recognized any of the mob's individual members.

Although the most sensational and commonly repeated excuse for a lynching was a sexual assault by a black man against a white woman, the instigating reasons were actually wide-ranging. The black-owned Richmond Planet kept a running tabulation in a column entitled "The Reign of Lawlessness." Where possible, the paper gave the white accusation against the victim that led to the lynchings. In 1897, with two or three lynchings making news every week and a total of 123 black victims recorded for the year, the causes of the incidents ranged from murder, rape, and assault to wanting a drink of water and sassing a white lady. In a typical four-week period beginning June 14, 1897, Mrs. Jake Cebrose of Plano, Texas, was lynched for "nothing"; four men Solomon Jackson, Lewis Speir, Jesse Thompson and Camp Reese - accused of murder, were lynched together in Wetumpka, Alabama; an eight-year-old black child identified only as "Parks" was lynched in South Carolina, for "nothing"; Charlie Washington was lynched for "rape and robbery" in Alabama; William Street was burned at the stake for "assault" in Devline, Louisiana; Dan Ogg was put to death in Palestine, Texas, because he was "found in a white family's room;" and Alex Walker of Pleasant Hill, Alabama, had his life extinguished for being "troublesome." The NAACP, working in the 1930s to combat the Southern argument that black men posed an inordinate sexual threat to white women, culled its own extensive case files for the actual causes of lynchings over several decades and produced a list that included such infractions as window peeping, making moonshine liquor, slapping a child, conjuring, stealing hogs, not turning out of the road for a white boy in an automobile, and disobeying ferry regulations.

-from the introduction of At the Hands of Person's Unknown

On February 3, 1893, Ida Wells [a Chicagobased journalist and national anti-lynching activist] was in Washington D.C., at Frederick Douglass's invitation to deliver a speech to an integrated group of reformers when news arrived of a major spectacle lynching in Paris, Texas. A young black man had been burned before a crowd of ten thousand people, one of the largest events of its kind to date.

Several days earlier, it was reported, threeyear old Myrtle Vance, the daughter of the local sheriff, had been "outraged with demoniacal cruelty and then taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity." The suspected killer, Henry Smith, was a retarded seventeen-year-old black man. His motive in killing the little girl, it was claimed, was vengeance against the father, who had arrested and harassed Smith on previous occasions.