Black and White Justice in Little Dixie: Three Historical Essays

In a collection of his best three essays, Doug Hunt invites us to consider the evolving interplay between race and justice–not only in the Midwestern city where.
Table of contents

In Legacies of Lynching , Jonathan Markowitz surveyed the collective memory of lynching as invoked and represented in contemporary American popular culture. Focusing on racial mob violence in the s on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Ifill advocated a reconciliation and restorative justice process that would in some measure redress the lingering effects of racial lynching on the local level—for example, the devastation of African Americans who witnessed the mob killing, the complicity and silence of the white community and institutions such as the white press and the criminal justice system, and racial disparities in terms of economic resources and representation in the legal system.

Recent work has also helped elaborate understanding of lynching in the postbellum South. Feimster did this in part through a comparative analysis of the African American antilynching activist Ida B. Wells and the white prolynching advocate Rebecca Latimer Felton. Feimster read Wells and Felton deftly and thoroughly, locating the origins of their perspectives on white male supremacy and violence in their respective Civil War experiences especially for Felton, who was twenty-seven years older than Wells , Reconstruction, and the years after the return of white conservatives to power in the South in the late s.

Feimster's analysis of Felton stressed the ways Felton's infamous advocacy of the lynching of black men was simultaneously consistent and at odds with the journalist and political operative's long-standing critique of white male patriarchy and her shifting positions on mob violence. Feimster persuasively argued that Wells and Felton were similar in their quest throughout their careers to puncture and prove false the claims of white masculine power, whether they were used to justify the rape of black women, the lynching of black men, or to relegate white women to the confines of masculine protection and the household.

Feimster also richly examined the role of southern white and black women as participants in and victims of lynching. Evocatively emphasizing that white women lynched in a disavowal of male efforts to circumscribe female autonomy, Feimster analyzed black and white women as victims of male lynchers who, like male rapists, refused to respect women's bodies. In some cases, Feimster showed, lynchers and rapists were actually the same men. Other recent work has enriched knowledge of lynching in the postbellum South through case studies and state studies.

In Troubled Ground Claude A. Clegg constructed a compelling microhistory of several early twentieth-century lynchings in North Carolina, adeptly locating the significance of these events in the matrix of local race relations and in the eventual evolution of attitudes toward lynching in the Tar Heel State. Terrence Finnegan's deeply textured study of lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, A Deed So Accursed , compared social and cultural relations in the two states to suggest why, from to , Mississippi logged victims to South Carolina's victims.

Possibly the most important contribution of recent scholarship on postbellum southern lynching is how these new works have begun to provide a much fuller sense of African American responses to lynching, which ranged from testimony to armed self-defense to institutional activism to artistic representation.

While scholars have not ignored African American responses to white mob violence, much lynching scholarship including my own in the last two decades has tended to focus more on the structure and context of lynching violence than on its impact on African American communities. Focusing on the violence and those who perpetrated it, scholars have spent less time analyzing the ways blacks responded in deed and word to the extraordinary brutality performed ritualistically before large crowds and the everyday violence perpetrated by smaller groups with less public attention. Williams mined Freedmen's Bureau records, congressional hearings, black newspapers, the correspondence of federal agencies such as the Justice Department, and the records of civil rights organizations such as the naacp to recover the voices of African Americans who witnessed white violence and strategized to counter it.

Beginning with the response of African Americans to Ku Klux Klan actions during Reconstruction, Williams revealed a consistent African American counternarrative that exposed the ways whites lawlessly infringed on blacks' rights. She showed that blacks energetically beseeched federal officials to take note, even as federal officials followed the U.

Supreme Court in deferring to state authority that mostly ignored or abetted whites' violations of blacks' rights.

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Williams highlighted the complexity of African American responses to white violence, which ranged from deference to defiance and included self-improvement, exodus, and armed self-defense. Williams argued that the counternarrative that African Americans constructed about white violence assisted the rise of antilynching activism from the s through the s, forging a pivotal prologue to the vernacular history of white racism and African American community empowerment that guided the civil rights movement in the s and s.

Keeping in mind the strengths of the lynching scholarship of the last two decades, I would like to suggest where weaknesses remain and where future scholars might most fruitfully direct their energies as the field continues to develop. Scholars might best focus their efforts by keeping the experiences and responses of the victims of racially motivated mob violence including African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans at the fore of their inquiry, whatever that inquiry's central concerns.

Among matters in most dire need of scholarly attention are the legacies of lynching, an excavation of collective killing in the South before and of lynching in other regions of the United States, the compilation of a national database that spans eras, and the study of American lynching and mob violence in other cultures in comparative, transnational, and global perspectives. As Williams's book brilliantly notes, the myriad responses of African American communities to white violence need a great deal more attention, including better integration into case studies, state studies, and examinations of lynching and cultural production.

While the experience of African Americans with lynching has hardly been neglected by historians, it has been less central to histories of the phenomenon than should be the case given the contours of American lynching history; perhaps five thousand or six thousand African Americans were murdered by white mobs in the American South, with hundreds more killed by whites in other regions of the country.

Keeping the black or Hispanic or Native American experiences of and responses to white racial violence—whether it be testimony, armed self-defense, institutional activism, or artistic representation—at the fore of the story changes the narrative, rendering it fuller, more accurate, perhaps more complex, but also much more reflective of the brutality, devastation, and resilience through which mob violence was experienced by communities.

While scholarship has started to address the lingering effects of mob violence in the many American communities where it occurred, this endeavor merits considerably more effort and attention than it has received. Attempts to memorialize and grapple with the history of lynching have been made in the last fifteen years or so as a public conversation has begun—perhaps most notably in the U.

Senate's apology for its historic failure to adopt antilynching legislation, which elicited considerable press attention—but such efforts remain anomalous, fitful, and embryonic. In the majority of American communities where lynchings occurred, little or no effort has been made to confront this history, and a local heritage of mob violence against African Americans, Hispanics, or Native Americans lurks unexamined within communal memory, perpetuating further silences and inequities.

More work must be done on the significant amount of lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons—including Hispanics, whites, Native Americans, African Americans, and Asians—died at the hands of lynch mobs. Regional boundaries in studying lynching have, perhaps more than anything, reflected the parochialism of regional histories and of the limiting circumstances that guide the generation of scholarship, as southern historians typically do not read western history, western historians do not read southern history, and dissertations and first books necessarily encompass what it seems feasible to study as opposed to what might be studied to fully encompass a topic.

Shaped by these constraints, lynching scholars have sometimes posited the southern experience with mob violence as the American norm, casting the lynching violence in other parts of the country as anomalous or insignificant, and ignoring or eliding the lengthy and complex histories of collective murder that occurred in other parts of the country. Scholarship on western violence has been particularly incurious about other regions—at times even incurious about its own region—the scholarship has long been shaped by a peculiar debate over whether the nineteenth-century West was violent.

Southern historians, at least, have never doubted that the South was violent. The stalemated debate over whether the West was violent conspired with understandable distaste for the region's tradition of valorizing vigilantism to effectively discourage meaningful study of western lynching until relatively recently. Fortunately, scholars have begun to remedy this in the last fifteen years with important studies of mob violence in Colorado, California, and central Texas—by Stephen J.

Much more needs to be learned about lynching violence in the West and the Midwest. For example, some of the most lynching-prone swaths of the West—Texas and Montana—still have not received serious, comprehensive scholarly treatment. Among territories and states in the Northwest, Montana probably tallied the greatest number of lynching victims, with dozens collectively murdered amid the homicidal social sorting of the mining and ranching booms from the s through the s, but scholars have yet to examine systematically Montana's lynching violence.

In the Midwest, the central and southern tiers of counties of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa—settled by backcountry migrants with origins in the upper South and the mid-Atlantic typically a generation or two removed from North Britain—were especially prone to communal violence that sought to avenge allegations of homicide, sexual offenses, and transgressions of property.


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Nowhere along the middle border were lynchers more entrenched than in Indiana, where mobs murdered at least sixty-six between and , eighteen of them African Americans. The field still lacks a comprehensive study of lynching in the Hoosier State, much less of mob violence in other corn belt states such as Illinois or Ohio, where, from the antebellum years through the mid-twentieth century, lynchers murdered at least forty-five victims eighteen of them black and twenty-eight victims fourteen of them black , respectively.

Even as the field of lynching history needs more state and local studies of the Midwest and the West, it also needs scholarship that strongly incorporates the perspective of those targeted by racial violence, such as African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Scholars of lynching history also need to learn much more about the connection of gender and lynching in and outside the South, including the masculinist ideology of male lynchers and, as Crystal Feimster has shown, the crucial perspective and experience of women as participants and victims in mob violence across the United States.

Even the South, which has received the lion's share of attention from historians and understandably so, as the majority of American lynching probably occurred in Dixie , merits considerably more labor from lynching scholars. Lacunae include aspects of the history of the New South—the most well-traversed ground of lynching territory for scholars. Keeping the experience of the African American community at the fore, scholars ought to research and write studies of lynching in Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Florida—states with extensive lynching histories that have not yet benefited from comprehensive study.

Given the digitization of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers, such work would be much easier today than it was the s and s, when earlier generations of lynching scholars researched and wrote pivotal state studies using dusty, flaking hard copies and myopia-inducing microfilm. Historians should also ask new questions of lynching in the New South. What set of factors—for instance, group dynamics, mob leadership, aggressive preventative action by the authorities, visible armed self-defense by African Americans, local patterns of black-white relations—might forestall an attempt at collective murder or by contrast lead to the enactment of lynching?

Moreover, it is essential that scholars probe deeper and earlier into the southern past, abjuring the relative ease and convenience of research conducted with lists of postbellum lynching incidents compiled by early twentieth-century antilynching activists and later sociologists and historians. As noted above, George C. Wright found in his work on Kentucky that more lynchings occurred during Reconstruction than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baker, relatively little is known about lynching violence in the pivotal years that began with emancipation in the mids and ended with the return of white conservatives to power across the South by the mid- to late s.

Substantial evidence suggests that whites collectively murdered several thousand African Americans during Reconstruction, sometimes through paramilitary organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and sometimes in more routine, everyday enactments of brutal white supremacy in an era of continual contestation of racial boundaries and prerogatives. Southern historians need to comb difficult sources such as newspapers alas, southern white newspapers were largely, but not entirely, reticent on white mob violence after emancipation , coroners' records, and African American testimony to the Freedmen's Bureau and congressional hearings to document and tabulate the number of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, white Republicans, who died at the hands of conservative white southerners in the dozen years after the Civil War.

Scholars should also delve back further into antebellum and colonial southern history to locate the roots of southern mob violence. I have argued that a small-scale but significant practice of lynching slaves developed in the antebellum years as white southerners cleaved over the role of formal law in policing African American resistance and deviancy.

Needed, however, is much more research on the origins and extent of informal collective violence in slavery, which arguably served as an essential precursor to the much more extensive collective racial violence that followed emancipation and the end of slavery. The field also still needs a comprehensive database on American lynching and reliable statistics that could be extrapolated from it.

For many years scholars relied on the data and statistics compiled on lynching incidents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the Tuskegee Institute, the naacp , and the Chicago Tribune. While this data can be quite useful for individual cases and meaningful in aggregate terms, it also incorporates numerous errors—including incorrect dates and locations of incidents as well as other misreported and misinterpreted information.

See a Problem?

These lynching lists, which are available on the Internet and are still often cited, are also problematic in the sense that they begin with the era in which the organizations began collecting data—the early s. This is not, however, when lynching began; the s and s, as noted above, saw many acts of mob violence directed against African Americans, while the s witnessed numerous mob killings of Mexicans in the newly annexed American territories in the Southwest, most prominently in California.

By virtue of how and when they were compiled, the traditional lynching lists thus omitted the thousands of African Americans murdered by mobs in the Reconstruction South and the hundreds of Mexicans and Native Americans lynched in the Southwest, and the lists also effectively imposed an artificial chronology on scholars who used the data. Also still missing are reliable statistics for lynchings outside the South. The traditional lynching lists included nonsouthern states, but their information tended to be less reliable for areas outside Dixie.

It is imperative that cliometricians and others interested in the quantitative analysis of U.

Black Man Delivers The Fists Of Justice

Until this happens, analysis of American lynching in quantitative terms will remain, at least in part, an exercise in speculation. This egregious gap in knowledge of the dimensions of American lynching is an injustice to the thousands who died at the hands of American lynch mobs, and it should be remedied by future scholars who must shirk the regional and chronological parochialism and the proprietorial attitude toward their research that has at times contributed to this grossly inadequate situation. Finally, from a broader perspective, scholarship on the history of lynching in the United States has until quite recently been largely an exercise in, and an argument for, American exceptionalism—most particularly, the exceptionalism of the American South, with Jim Crow—era southern lynching viewed ahistorically and parochially as effectively sui generis.

Until the last few years, U. This has begun to change, however. Future scholarship ought to energetically continue this trend, focusing on transnational connections and making informed comparisons that pursue structural similarities and differences between American lynching and mob violence across world cultures. Analyses that carefully stress the universality of mob violence across cultures and eras and the particularity of its occurrence in certain cultural and historical contexts will situate American lynching in fuller context and provide a more informed basis for understanding the dynamics of lynching and other forms of collective violence such as vigilantism, rioting, and terrorism in the United States and in other global cultures.

This has certainly been the case in a course on global lynching and collective violence that I teach at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where students typically make rich and illuminating comparisons of lynching, vigilantism, and rioting in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, lynching cannot be dismissed as a phenomenon peripheral to U.

To the contrary, mob violence matters to historians of the United States and other nations as a key index of contested state formation, as a brutal and culturally powerful collective expression of social values such as honor, race, gender, sexuality, and class, and of understandings of criminal justice in opposition to or in tension with evolving structures of state authority. Lynching is central, then, to the histories of, among other places, the United States, Latin America, and a number of sub-Saharan nations.

Mob violence should be fully integrated into those respective histories. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Close mobile search navigation Article navigation.

At the Hands of Parties Unknown? Readers may contact Pfeifer at mpfeifer jjay. A traveling exhibit of lynching photographs attracted much attention in See also James Allen et al. Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America , http: The Slavery Debate in Missouri, Kremer and Antonio F. The Negro in Missouri Politics, The University of Arkansas Press, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie.

The Orderly Pack Rat, Slavery North of St. Lewis County Historical Society, Missouri Slave Schedules: The Underground Railroad on the Western Frontier: African Americans in Mid-Missouri: From Pioneers to Ragtimes. The History Press, The Campus History Series. Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks. Part E, Missouri Race, Slavery, and Free Blacks: Series I, Petitions to Southern Legislatures, University Publications of America, Greenwood Publishing Company, A Composite Autobiography Missouri National Archives and Records Service, Gender and the Jubilee: Studies in the Legal History of the South Series.

Slave Schedules for - Missouri. The National Archives, Slave Schedules for -- Missouri. From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier. Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, ,. Cambridge University Press, Ohio Historical Society, Whisper on the Wind: Long Riders' Guild Press, Equestrian wisdom and history series. Black and White Justice in Little Dixie: Register a free 1 month Trial Account.

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