A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature

JACQUELINE GOLDSBY is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2006 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2006

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN: 0-226-30137-0 (cloth)

ISBN: 0-226-30138-9 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-226-79198-2 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goldsby, Jacqueline Denise.

A spectacular secret : lynching in American life and literature / Jacqueline Goldsby.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-30137-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-226-30138-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Lynching—United States—History. 2. United States—Race relations. 3. Lynching—United States—Historiography. 4. Lynching in literature. 5. American literature—History and criticism. I. Title.

HV6457.G65 2006

364.1'34—dc22

2005026551

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

A Spectacular Secret

Lynching in American Life and Literature

JACQUELINE GOLDSBY

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

In memory of my mother

One is really at a loss for words in dealing with the subject of lynching. The horrible wickedness of it is so plain, and so gigantic, that only one conclusion is possible; and comment falls so short of the terrible reality as to constitute an anticlimax. It is hard to stretch the imagination so far as to realize these deeds belong to our day and land.

JAMES F. MORTON, THE CURSE OF RACE PREJUDICE

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. A Sign of the Times: Lynching and Its Cultural Logic

2. Writing Dynamitically: Ida B. Wells

3. The Drift of the Public Mind: Stephen Crane

4. Lynching’s Mass Appeal and the Terrible Real: James Weldon Johnson

5. Through a Different Lens: Lynching Photography at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

6. In the Mind’s Eye

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1.1 J. L. Mertins, Little Myrtle Vance Avenged

1.2 Negro Rule

1.3 The Vultures’ Roost

1.4 Next!

1.5 What Stands Less Chance Than a Snowball in ____?

2.1 Diary entry by Ida B. Wells

2.2 The Ways of the Heathern

2.3 Southern Horrors’s title page

3.1 Stephen Crane at Corwin Linson’s apartment

4.1 Portrait of James Weldon Johnson

4.2 The Next Colored Delegation to the White House

5.1 Timothy O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death

5.2 Lynching at a Texas courthouse (1905)

5.3 Avengers of Little Myrtle Vance

5.4 J. P. Ball, Execution of William Biggerstaff

5.5 J. P. Ball, Portrait of William Biggerstaff

5.6 Kodak snapshot of lynching (1902)

5.7 Lynching of Lige Daniels (1920)

5.8 Verso of lynching postcard of Lige Daniels’s murder (1920)

5.9 Lynching of Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, and Joseph Riley (black-and-white postcard, 1908)

5.10 Lynching of Virgil Jones, Robert Jones, and Joseph Riley (color postcard, 1908)

5.11 Lynching of Jesse Washington (1916)

6.1 Emmett Till’s Funeral Saddens City, Nation

6.2 Judge Curtis L. Swango

6.3 Chicago Sun-Times, Mamie Bradley at Emmett Till’s casket

6.4 Emmett Till’s Mother’s Double Heartbreak!

Introduction

Reading a poem led me to write this book. Or better said, I was inspired by reading a poem aloud and hearing in its cadences a call to rethink my understanding of literary and cultural history’s relation to one another as fields of academic inquiry. Because Gwendolyn Brooks’s lynching ballads indelibly shaped the chapters that follow, it is helpful if I here trace how one of those poems transformed my understanding of lynching’s significance to the African American past and to the trajectories of American life as experienced today.

Then off they took you, off to jail,

A hundred hooting after.

And you should have heard me at my house.

I cut my lungs with laughter,

Laughter,

Laughter,

I cut my lungs with laughter.¹

The Ballad of Pearl May Lee begins with this plunge into danger: over the course of the poem, the speaker’s lover Sammy is arrested then kidnapped from jail, wrapped . . . around a cottonwood tree (l. 83), and burned to death by the hundred hooting white men that constitute the lynch mob. Sammy’s crime? Rape—a charge made after what the poem’s speaker, Pearl May Lee, believes was her lover’s consensual tryst with a white woman:

Say, she was white like milk, though, wasn’t she?

And her breasts were cups of cream.

In the back of her Buick you drank your fill.

Then she roused you out of your dream.

In the back of her Buick you drank your fill.

Then she roused you out of your dream. (ll. 61–66)

The vicious tumult of these three imagined scenes—Sammy’s death march, Pearl May Lee’s house of bitter mirth, and the sexual fervor in the back of the white woman’s car—is anchored by the aural symmetries of Pearl May Lee’s oration. Repeating herself two and three times over (by doubling and trebling lines and stanzas), she beats down her hurt with the metrical foot of the iamb, using the elements of poetic form to redress the pain of Sammy’s betrayal. The tightly tuned rhyme scheme (after paired with laughter; cream matched with dream), together with the alliteration within and between lines ("A hundred hooting after, breasts, back, and Buick") constrain the fury of the poem without confining it, making the poem’s turns of events all the more memorable to the reader.

Remarkably, though, the ruthlessness of Sammy’s white paramour and the mob’s sadism meets its match in Pearl May Lee’s rage, a tonal congruity I found disturbing. Pearl May Lee seeks a sarcasm beyond mere bitterness, one that sounds disdainful itself because Sammy’s choice to risk his life implies her inability to satisfy his needs as a lover. Since Sammy’s first tryst limns her memory of his death, irony becomes Pearl May Lee’s shield against despair:

You paid for your dinner, Sammy boy,

And you didn’t pay with money.

You paid with your hide and my heart, Sammy boy,

For your taste of pink and white honey,

Honey,

Honey,

For your taste of pink and white honey. (ll. 95–101)

Hearing the ferocity of the poem’s speaker, Pearl May Lee led me to ask different questions about the history of anti-black lynching in the United States. Where scholarly studies usually focus on the 3,417 African American victims of white mob violence between 1882 and 1968, Brooks’s poem turned my attention to the lovers, wives, children, sisters, brothers, friends, and extended kin who survived lynching’s violence.² How did communities remain or become that—communities—in the face of mob assaults? How did the living cope not only with the brutal losses of their loved ones but with the fact of their own survival? Indeed, what did it mean to be spared lynching’s way of death? Using African American newspapers or actual survivors’ oral histories as primary sources, I could address these questions more directly, perhaps.³ Listening carefully to Ballad of Pearl May Lee, however, I realized that untold histories of lynching were possible to conceive, ones that conventional sources might in fact obscure from view.

First published in A Street in Bronzeville (1945), the ballad presents a figure who presumably lives in Chicago, which is to say that she represents the history of lynching summarized by the push-pull thesis that is meant to account for the Great Migration: mob murders pushed black southerners to leave the region while the allure of social and economic opportunity in the North pulled African Americans away from Dixie.⁴ Pearl’s flight to safety is not an act of protest against southern white supremacy, though, because the poem refuses to be magnified by the hope of resistance that the push-pull paradigm promotes. Instead, she seethes over Sammy’s rejection of her dark meat (l. 38), not to damn the psychology of white racism so much as to hold black people (and, specifically, black men) accountable for the system of caste politics we internalize and use to subjugate black women as sex objects. Or, as Pearl May Lee puts this point, Yellow was for to look at, / Black for the famished to eat (ll. 40–41).

The narrowed scope of Pearl’s anger suggested to me that her predicament was an event in need of a history broad enough to redefine lynching as a practice of racial domination. For instance, her sexual jealousy, a sentiment that no woman-authored, anti-lynching stage dramas admit into their telling, emerges surreptitiously in the ballad’s cousin—namely, the blues. As Adam Gussow suggestively argues, the laments for lost loves and empty beds that abound in blues women’s songs can be read as memorials to the black men lost to lynch mob murders.⁵ But the sharp edge of Pearl May Lee’s laughter slashes the page with an angry sorrow that needs a name of its own, one that neither the blues nor feminist critiques of lynching develop in their analyses of the violence.⁶ Thus, when she insists upon her prospects for freedom—Oh, dig me out of my don’t despair / Pull me out of my poor-me / Get me a garment of red to wear. / You had it coming surely (ll. 1–4)—I was challenged to imagine where Pearl’s desire for the world might lead in an interpretation of lynching’s effects beyond the instance she represents. Surely, black women widowed by lynch mobs must have felt such rage somewhere, sometime, in which case Pearl’s fictional experience does not lie irrevocably outside the realm of the possible. On the contrary, the poem points toward the historical through the force of its literary form.

Notably, the poem is written as a ballad, a genre that—in its common or folk form—narrated events of popular concern for working-class audiences in particular. Sung by traveling poets in public, communal settings, ballads were crafted to be easily recalled by listeners who, in turn, adapted the poems to reflect their personal interests or local mores.⁷ According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, what made ballads malleable was their impersonal approach to storytelling. The poem’s narrator seldom allows his own subjective attitude toward the events to intrude. Comments on motives are broad, general, detached (62). Though Brooks only wrote about lynching in the ballad mode, she did so in rebellious ways. For instance, Pearl May Lee personalizes the event of Sammy’s murder in every possible way; elongating the usual four-line stanza to seven, the poem’s construction draws attention to itself as a non-anonymous piece. Why break the genre’s codes so deliberately? Brooks’s clear affinity with ballad aesthetics co-existed with her obvious skepticism toward it, a dissonance which gives rise to the cultural commentary offered through the poem’s form.

When I read Pearl May Lee aloud, I envision Brooks’s protagonist in her Chicago kitchenette apartment, naming the ballad for herself and reciting its lines to proclaim the salience of her experience of Sammy’s murder against the history and sociology of lynching as it was understood in 1945.⁸ For me, then, the Ballad of Pearl May Lee evoked a different set of questions that influenced the argument and methods of this book. What kind of evidence could literature offer to a history of lynching’s violence? And more precisely, what histories of lynching could the aesthetic forms of literary depictions reveal that we did not already know?

Written and published throughout the century that lynching became a racialized form of punishment, a rich canon of literary sources points toward another way of understanding the oppressive force of the practice. By reading history out of literary texts instead of into them, I glean accounts of lynching’s life—its formation, meaning, and significance as a social practice—that identify the material and psychic forces in addition to racism that allowed the violence to remain unchecked in American society and under-interrogated in American cultural criticism. Thus, in the chapters that follow, debates over the federal powers of the nation-state; struggles to confer citizenship rights to women, people of color, and immigrants; the growing hegemony of secularized science and technology over the domains of public and private life; the rise of corporate-monopoly capitalism; and the confusions brought on by the abundance of mass culture—in short, America’s emergence into modernity at the start of the twentieth century—orient my analyses, because the literary works I analyze narrate lynching as congruent with these transformations. More precisely, the narrative forms of these texts suggest this relation, and I follow the leads their genres prompt, weaving together close textual analysis with conventional historical sources to explain how and what literature bears witness to in its depictions of lynching’s violence.

Shifting our attention to cultural formations beyond the South and structures of legitimation besides racism that made the violence both possible and tolerable as a social practice, I argue that lynching’s relation to modernity consolidated its repressive force with the long-lasting effects historians and cultural critics usually attribute to the manifestly racist sources and aims of the practice. This reformulation is most sharply encoded in the book’s central theme, that of lynching’s cultural logic, a term I have carefully chosen and one that has several interpretive facets. The first is, frankly, rhetorical. For long enough, we have stressed both the local and irrational dimensions of lynching in our analyses of the violence.⁹ By shifting our perspective to lynching’s logic, I ask that we conceive of anti-black mob murders as a networked, systemic phenomenon indicative of trends in national culture. Consequently, I mean to think more broadly about why lynching emerged when it did, why it persisted for so long, and what instrumental purposes the violence served over time. Put another way, why lynching thrived amid American progress and abundance (as opposed to southern provincialism and impoverishment) is a riddle that I address in this book, one that the concept of cultural logic allows me to explore.

Thus, the second reason I speak of lynching’s cultural logic is to adopt the critical posture of Gwendolyn Brooks’s ballad as my own, to challenge the prevailing definitions of lynching’s oppressive functions and cultural effects. Arguments that stress the regionalism of the violence rather than its national scope or that hold lynching to be symptomatic of racism’s supposedly eternal hatreds cede too much ground for substantive materialist analysis to evolve, precisely because such hypotheses imply the violence is largely resistant if not immune to historical change. For this reason I don’t turn to models premised on scapegoating, purity taboos, or identity politics. These approaches, I believe, limit analysis rather than further it insofar as they are unable to readily admit when change occurs that alters what the violence means. For instance (as I discuss in chapter 6), the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 was, like any other lynching of an African American, heinous, needless, and awful. And yet his murder initiated a chain of events that transformed modern racial politics in America. How do accounts that stress the racial etiquette of the South as the locus of the case’s importance allow us to conceive the progress his murder created? Ever since, Till’s alleged wolf whistle directed toward a white woman has focused public debate about the case, entrenching us in the long, inexorable history of social taboos against interracial desire in the South. But do America’s anxieties about miscegenation best explain why Till’s is the murder we remember most readily? What does it mean that his death organizes how at least two generations of Americans know the history of lynching? How do the answers to those questions clarify what lynching does and means as a tactic of racist terrorism? Similarly, for Stephen Crane to write The Monster when he did (1898) and how he did (under the spur of great need) was, as chapter 2 shows, a remarkably self-serving act on Crane’s part; and yet it is precisely because Crane forgets to depict the lynching on which his novella is based in any explicit way that we’re made privy to how northern white liberals’ indifference—cultivated through the economics of corporate-monopoly capitalism and the aesthetics of realist fiction writing, as the literary history of Crane’s novella shows—supplemented the negrophobia we’re all familiar with as the driving impulse behind lynching murders.

In my definition and use of the term, then, the cultural logic of lynching enabled it to emerge and persist throughout the modern era because its violence fit within broader, national cultural developments. This synchronicity captures why I refer to lynching as spectacular: the violence made certain cultural developments and tensions visible for Americans to confront. On the other hand, because lynching’s violence was so unspeakably brutal—and crucially, since the lives and bodies of African American people were negligible concerns for the country for so long a time—cultural logic also describes how we have disavowed lynching’s normative relation to modernism’s history over the last century. Hence, I speak of lynching’s secrecy as an historical event.¹⁰

I turn to literature to trace this dynamic and its consequences because, I believe, literature is particularly responsive to historical developments we cannot bear to admit shape the course of our lives. This, for me, has been the lesson and challenge of the Ballad of Pearl May Lee: how, through the provocative uses of genre, does literature imagine for us the histories we cannot admit we need to know? For the purposes of this study, then, cultural logic operates on two levels at once. First, it traces how the operations of racism fit into and sustain a historical milieu not as an ever-present norm, but as a process the unfolding of which cannot be fully predicted in advance. Second, it guides my turn to literature and genre because fictive discourse models how cultural logic works: we choose works that fit with our interests, but find our deepest pleasures from those that disavow an exact coherence with the real world. Chapters 2–5 of this book define lynching’s cultural logic through particular case studies. My hope is that these build on one another, each demonstrating from different but complementary angles of approach how the fit and disavowal that characterized the violence across time multiplied lynching’s power to oppress to more insidious degrees that we have cared to know.

Insofar as my argument depends on analyzing literary forms as registers or archives of lynching’s history, the book is not exempt from the processes and tensions described in the following chapters. I have no doubt that my argument emplots the violence as much as any other text I explore. Thus, I should explain my turn to narrative biography and the length of the chapters throughout the book. As I deploy it, life-writing encompasses people, things (newspapers, novellas, novels, and photographic apparatuses), and ideas (literary genres and movements) not to privilege personal experience as incontrovertibly true or self-evidently significant. I mean instead to suggest how, through the individual instance, personal circumstance meets the public sphere’s developments to reveal history in all its contradictions and complications. Biography is particularly important when studying lynching because our tendency has been to regard the murders as one and the same event (i.e., an act of racial domination) that literally look the same way every time (dead bodies hanging from trees; burnt corpses atop pyres; shot bodies sprawled on the ground; bloated bodies dredged from rivers). Biography protects against my homogenizing the murders I examine, requiring instead that I produce accounts that hone in on select events while reflecting systemic forces that, in turn, help us understand specific cases and their relation to (as well as their differences from) one another.

Since lynching’s cultural logic functions best when it conceals how the violence fit into a given historical milieu, each biography narrated in the chapters is a secret one—a history we don’t know as well as other major figures, events, and processes that have come to characterize the period I study. For this reason, the chapters tend to run long; the little-known stories I tell require lengthy explication. For instance, since Ida B. Wells is routinely omitted from histories of Progressive-era journalism, I analyze her craftsmanship in chapter 2 as I narrate the innovations that modernized news writing during the 1890s and 1900s. Similarly, because Stephen Crane’s critics stress his life history as an urban observer in New York City and New Jersey’s Asbury Park, in chapter 3 I treat at some length Crane’s relation to Port Jervis, his hometown in upstate New York, the cultural history of which is important to the lynching that occurred there and that inspired Crane’s novella The Monster.

I could abbreviate my argument by directly engaging the established scholarship more than I do, but I have chosen to consign those debates to the book’s endnotes, thus preserving the storytelling style that characterizes the text of the chapters. This is important because what we know about lynching has settled into narrative molds that are hard to break apart so that we might ask other kinds of interpretative questions. It’s a southern phenomenon. The Klan did it. Poor white trash did it. The rape myth is a lie. Lynching maintained white supremacy. The murders aimed to keep black people subordinate, in their place. The best way to enlarge on this array of accounts while interrogating their claims and conclusions is, I think, to involve the reader in other narratives sufficiently long to prompt one to rethink what is known about lynching and to reconsider how one knows it. Knowing what I’m trying to accomplish, then, I hope readers will persevere in working their way through the chapters.

Thinking biographically matters to me for a fourth reason: it has enabled me to remember life in the midst of lynching’s death toll—the lives of the men, women, and children killed; the lives of the writers who confronted the catastrophes and the anxiety and fear they caused; the lives of the texts that bear witness to this violence in and across time. Life must be asserted in the face of the attempt to suppress public discourse that lynching murders encouraged. Ever mindful of the caveat that to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger, I assume that my biographical accounts are as volatile as Walter Benjamin suggests, the better to discern both the flash-strength and moment of danger that life-stories encompass.¹¹ And yet a sad conundrum that has made lynching’s history difficult to comprehend frustrated me as well. Protest movements didn’t stop the violence.¹² For that reason, writing biography led me to adopt a point of view signaled throughout this book by a carefully chosen pronoun—namely, we. Who is included in that circle of reference and why do I draw it so ambiguously?

Using we has prompted me to imagine my relation to those who came before me in this history. I speak of us in these pages because there have been moments during my research for this book that I’ve felt distanced from the people and events I write about not only because of time, culture, and circumstance, but also because lynching’s cruelties are so great as to have often exceeded my own interest in coming to understand them as an object of knowledge. This is, after all, a topic that should not exist for me or anyone else to write about. The murders I narrate in the chapters that follow should not have happened. Writing we has enabled me to look as fully as I can at the flash of danger this history presents, to be outraged when necessary, and to be self-aware of my own limitations as I learned what I needed but sometimes didn’t want to know to write this book.

Another mode of collective understanding has been crucial to this book. Thinking and writing interdisciplinarily offered the best approach for me to respond to the issues posed by the literature I study here: what cultural formations other than southern white supremacy explain lynching’s ebb and flow with the tides of American life? Given lynching’s cultural logic—its capacity to reproduce and even mimic social structures while seeming distant, strange, and disavowable to us because its violent excess is directed against black people—how should we understand the dimensions of racism, class division, and gender difference that the murders unquestionably reproduced and reinforced? Do identity politics summarize all there is to know about the violence? Probing after lynching’s meanings this way is not to dispute the scholarship that proves mob murders’ instrumentality as a tactic of racist repression. Nor do I take issue with the statistical evidence of reported mob murders that map lynching to have been a largely southern phenomenon. Indeed, I draw heavily from such studies in the chapters that follow.

But I want to be clear what this book is not about. I do not treat the role of the Ku Klux Klan or its subsidiary terrorist cells in any substantive way. Nor do I dwell on the gender politics of the rape myth. Negrophobes have little say in my argument since I’m more concerned with the normalization of lynching’s violence rather than its demonization (which also explains why I don’t feature literature as a mode of resistance).¹³ In short, because the history I propose to tell follows from works of imaginative literature (rather than the other way around), this book charts a genealogy that often mirrors but more frequently departs from the knowledge we already possess.

Nonetheless, in writing this book I have benefited from an upsurge in recent years of public interest in lynching’s history. In the effort to educate the general public of the injustices suffered by people of African Heritage in America, and to provide visitors with an opportunity to rethink their assumptions about race and racism, America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was founded in 1988 by James Cameron, who survived a lynch mob’s attack in 1930.¹⁴ Since the museum’s opening, Americans have begun to acknowledge publicly the losses that lynching has exacted from black families, black communities, and our common life as a nation. Survivors of lynching murders and race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rosewood, Florida; Duluth, Minnesota; Moore’s Ford, Georgia; and Scottsboro, Alabama have mobilized to demand reparations from state governments for the destruction of life, property, and opportunity the assaults in those locales caused.¹⁵ On the popular front, the editors of Time magazine declared Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s incomparable elegy for lynching victims, the Song of the Century at the end of the year 2000, while the first year of the new millenium began with an equally astonishing event. Mounted first at Manhattan’s Roth-Horowitz Gallery and then at the New York Historical Society for almost a year, the Without Sanctuary photograph exhibit revived what its owners, James Allen and John Littlefield, called Lynching Photography in America.¹⁶ Adding to these acts of remembrance, scholarly investigation about lynching has gained new momentum, with no fewer than ten books devoted to the topic published within the last five years.

How should we understand this upsurge of public interest? Surely it marks what Michel Rolphe Trouillot calls the production of history: What we are observing here is archival power at its strongest. The power to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and, therefore, of mention.¹⁷ This moment is deeply and importantly humanist, though, because people and the politics they make are defining this moment as much as any institution’s power. We are witnessing instead, I think, how language names what counts as significant and worthy of collective memory. Although the term lynching has been part of America’s lexicon of violence since the late-eighteenth century, the range and types of violence referred to by the term vary widely, as I discuss in chapter 1.¹⁸ Despite the word’s imprecision, and despite the fact that black people were lynched in any number of ways (hanging, shooting, stabbing, burning, dragging, bludgeoning, drowning, and dismembering), similar atrocities that occurred in the course of race riots aren’t called lynching, nor are they factored into established inventories of lynching’s death toll.¹⁹ Hundreds of murders and assaults occurred under the regimes of convict lease labor and debt peonage too, the accounts of which often describe what we would consider lynchings. Like the rapes of black women by white men, however, those atrocities aren’t considered part of lynching’s history.²⁰

Put another way, a complex history of racial violence is concealed by our increasingly restricted use of the term lynching. Like an archive, the word functions to denominate the violence, ordering and fixing its meanings in ways that delimit our capacities to interpret it.²¹ For that reason, I use lynching interchangeably with murder, anti-blackmob violence, and lynching’s violence. Ultimately, though, to produce a history of lynching attentive to its constitution and operations through language, we need to invent a new name for the violence. What the word(s) might be, I cannot claim to know. But I can suggest where we might begin our search. As the nation’s unlistened-to history, I am sure the word exists where Ralph Ellison assures us American literature works its power best: indelibly, at the lower frequencies. There, the lives lost to us and made invisible by lynching and its cultural logic are waiting for us to listen.

ONE

A Sign of the Times: Lynching and Its Cultural Logic

History, like trauma, is never simply one’s own. . . . History is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.

CATHY CARUTH, UNCLAIMED EXPERIENCE: TRAUMA, NARRATIVE, AND HISTORY

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.

WALTER BENJAMIN, SOME THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

On February 1, 1893, a black man named Henry Smith was arrested in Paris, Texas, for raping and murdering a three-year-old white girl, Myrtle Vance. Smith was taken into custody after being tracked down by a search posse some two thousand members strong; so large a group was thought to be needed because the suspect had bolted out of the state for Arkansas, where he was eventually captured. On his return to the small town located in the northeastern corner of Texas, a thunderous tribunal of ten thousand spectators, many of whom had been ferried to the scene of the crime by specially arranged railroad junkets, met up with Smith to kill him.

First paraded around the business district for those thousands in the city who wanted to see the fiend of fiends and monster of monsters, Smith was carted off to a clearing just beyond the city limits of Paris. There, atop a scaffold bearing a placard entitled Justice, the dead child’s father exacted the vengeance he had been waiting for. With fire-stoked iron rods Henry Vance burned the black man’s arms, legs, chest, back, and mouth. Then, to complete his deed, Vance set all of Smith’s body aflame as final punishment for his daughter’s murder. And so did death come to Henry Smith, one commentator wrote in 1893.¹

When death came to Henry Smith, it was no clandestine affair. As local resident J. M. Early bragged: If we, locally speaking, [had] been an insignificant moiety of a great nation with no other notoriety than suspected sturdiness, we are so no longer. Wherever print is read, wherever speech is the vehicle of thought, the people of Paris [Texas], of the United States of America, are now geographically located, and for moral stamina and worth, are known.² In newspapers around the country, front-page headlines spread word of the events in Paris, Texas. From Chicago to New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Kansas City—even to London—did the mob’s grisly feat come to be known.³ The town photographer J. L. Mertins copyrighted and deposited as many as twelve images with the Library of Congress (ensuring the pictures’ having an archival home in that national repository). Another technophile preserved the event in an equally astonishing way: a sound recording of Henry Smith’s trial by fire was made, copies of which—like Mertins’s photographs—were reprinted and sold throughout the nation (see fig. 1.1).⁴

Later that year another black man, Samuel Burdett, encountered these records of Henry Smith’s lynching in Seattle. Whiling away an hour seeing the sights in the city he called home, Burdett came upon a crowd that was attending some sort of entertainment. Curious, he approached the group, threading his way to the front where a man was mounted on a stand or platform of some sort. At the center of the circle, Burdett clearly saw that the attraction was not an impromptu theatrical performance or a street-corner oration, but a carefully planned display of the newest technology America had to offer in 1893. An exhibit for civilized citizens to enjoy according to their individual relish for the awful—for the horrible, Burdett recalled in anguish, the presentation consisted of photographic views, coupled with phonographic records of the utterances of a negro who had been burned to death in Paris, Texas, a short time before.⁵ Mounted on easels and placed in chronological order, the photographs tracked the Paris lynching from the discovery of Myrtle Vance’s corpse to the capture, torture, and cremation of Henry Smith. Adjacent to these images was a gramophone with several listening devices—what we would today recognize as headsets. As its disc plate spun, listeners could hear a recording of the confrontation between Myrtle Vance’s father and the child’s alleged assailant.⁶

Figure 1.1. Paris, Texas photographer J. L. Mertins sought to obtain the copyright for Little Myrtle Vance Avenged by depositing this image along with eleven other photographs chronicling the lynching murder of Henry Smith in 1893. Mertins’s efforts to assert intellectual property rights were in vain, since bootleg copies of the series circulated across the country from Seattle to Philadelphia and were used in early cinematic adaptations of the murder. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-29285.)

This remarkable combination of sight and sound intrigued Burdett, who had never heard or seen such a thing. Like the others who were there on that street corner in Seattle, he took up the tubes of the phonographic instrument and placed them to [his] ears. What Burdett then saw and heard profoundly unnerved him; gripped by guilt nearly a decade later, he described the moment: Oh, horror of horrors! Just to hear that poor human being scream and groan and beg for his life, in the presence and hearing of thousands of people, who had gathered from all parts of the country about to see it.⁷ Printed on the page, Burdett’s torment is clear. The clichéd exclamation (Oh, horror of horrors!) sounds out his struggle to find language to express his encounter. Underscored by his compound phrasing ("scream and groan and beg"), Smith’s cries press on the reader’s ears, forcing us to imagine the agony of both black men. However, as his prose also demonstrates, it is unclear who horrifies Burdett more: the mob that watched the murder in Paris, Texas, or the entranced audience of onlookers in Seattle.

Certainly Burdett did not share the Texans’ reasons for wanting to see Henry Smith killed; as a member of the International Council of the World, he was an avid anti-lynching activist.⁸ Nonetheless, his interest in witnessing something new, something novel, something modern—his own admission of being curious like the others—enticed him to look at the photographs and to listen to the sound recording of Henry Smith’s murder. And for that reason, the function of the audio-visual display confused Burdett’s perception of his relation to the murder scene. Was viewing the simulation a way to protest the lynching, or did watching amount to a vicarious act of complicity with the southern mob? How different could Seattle and Paris, Texas, be if the deaths of black people were openly sought out as public events worth seeing and without the risk of legal reprisal? These questions, raised by Henry Smith’s murder and by Samuel Burdett’s anguished memories of his place in the crowd, suggest we should reexamine the history of lynching in America, to explore more broadly why mob violence was indeed a horror of horrors for African Americans and how mechanisms of modernity served to mediate the public’s experience of the violence at the turn of the nineteenth century.

*   *   *

Henry Smith’s murder and Samuel Burdett’s encounter with it were not unusual in their day. The United States during the 1890s saw the numbers of vigilante murders of African Americans soar to unprecedented heights. In the year that Smith was lynched, 103 blacks died at the hands of white mobs. During the period 1882–1930 (the years, scholars agree, when the most reliable lynching statistics were kept), 3,220 African American men, women, and children were murdered by lynch mobs.⁹ Though the majority of these murders occurred in the Deep South, anti-black mob violence spread to far western states like Colorado, midwestern states like Illinois and Minnesota, and northeastern states like Pennsylvania and New York.¹⁰ And as the lynching of Henry Smith demonstrates, mass-media representations of the violence extended the borders of southern lynchings as well. Indeed, the national press kept such a steady watch over the violence that, in 1903, William James worried about the effect it might have on the country’s collective soul: The hoodlums in our cities are being turned by the newspapers into as knowing critics of the lynching game as they long have been of the prize-fight and football. The Harvard philosopher’s remarks appeared in Literary Digest, one of the genteel magazines that devoted editorial space to debates about the practice of lynching in late nineteenth-century American society.¹¹ Book-length studies also stirred the air of public commentary. Lynching apologists such as Phillip Alexander Bruce, Frederick L. Hoffman, and Robert W. Shufeldt published their best-selling books and monographs with reputable establishments, while anti-lynching activists such as T. Thomas Fortune, Mary Church Terrell, and Kelly Miller relied on an earnest and growing black publishing industry to carry their words of protest to African American readers across the nation during these crucial decades.¹²

The word lynching, however, did not always refer to the summary, extralegal executions of African Americans by groups (larger than three) of self-appointed public authorities.¹³ As one commentator noted in 1900, the modern application of the term, with its deeds of wild lawlessness or ruthless murder, misrepresented the word’s earlier use.¹⁴ After the Revolutionary War but before the Civil War, lynching referred to the nonlethal, corporeal punishment of white men by semiregular public authorities in frontier societies.¹⁵ Public lashing, tar-and-feathering, and riding the rail were the usual penalties meted out to Tory loyalists, horse and livestock thieves, bank robbers, or adulterers who threatened to disturb the peace in just-established communities. What distinguished lynch law between the 1780s and 1850s were its statelike aspirations to govern, since upright and ambitious frontiersmen wished to re-establish the values of a property-holder’s society. For this reason, lynch mobs during these decades were also noted for their decorum and restraint—hence, the other oft-used term for pre-Civil War vigilantism, regulators—in dispensing punishment to outlaws and wrongdoers.¹⁶

But all this is true only of lynch-law justice as applied to white men. For African Americans who transgressed the laws and customs of their plantation societies, the master’s and mistress’s lash often stopped short of regulators’ apocryphal thirty-nine strokes, the better to inflict more damaging pain; slave narratives published during and about this period are replete with scenes of torture and whippings that demonstrate how economizing corporeal punishment maximized its brutal effects. Similarly, African Americans who disturbed the peace by plotting to overturn the slave regime were summarily executed under the auspices of the state but in conspicuously unrestrained demonstrations of the law’s power, as the examples of the 1714 and 1741 New York City conspirators, Gabriel Prosser (1800), Denmark Vesey (1822), and Nat Turner (1831) attest.¹⁷ During the antebellum era, then, it is clear that the term lynching referred to something different than what we now understand that term to mean. Furthermore, the practices of punishment designated by the word evolved over time as well. If, however, what always distinguishes lynching is its extralegal status, the word lynching potentially misidentifies the range and aims of punishments targeting African Americans precisely because the state routinely allowed extreme, and often lethal, measures of discipline to be exacted on them.

By all accounts, though, the racialization of lynching—the near-exclusive targeting of African American people for punishment by white vigilante mobs—took clear shape during the era of Reconstruction.¹⁸ Marked by an increased harshness that generally involved the killing of black people, the word ‘lynch’ has come to be a synonym for ‘murder’ or mistreatment of a Negro, South as well as North, essayist Walter Fleming observed in 1905. Lynching’s lethal turn made it an especially heinous tactic of social control at the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁹ First, the modern practice was crucial to the restoration of the Confederacy’s power. The terrorist campaigns waged by the Ku Klux Klan during its first incarnation between 1867 and 1871—the Klan’s infamous night rides and race riots—accomplished southern Democrats’ goals to oust northern Republicans from leadership positions across the region and to intimidate African Americans from casting ballots in local, state, and national elections.²⁰

Though scholars agree that the reestablishment of Redeemer governments in the former Confederate states enabled the practice of anti-black lynching to thrive, African Americans were terrorized and murdered with impunity because they had been excluded from the legal and moral frameworks that defined national citizenship at the end of the nineteenth century.²¹ Paradoxically, the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in the Slaughterhouse (1873), Cruikshank (1876), Civil Rights (1883), and Plessy (1896) cases made emancipated blacks more vulnerable to mob assault from any and all quarters, precisely because these new laws and public policies conceded the point that made lynching an actionable crime.²² By nullifying African Americans’ rights of citizenship and, with them, the affirmative duty to protect black people from unjust harm, the federal government effectively granted mobs a license to kill. For instance, since the 1870 Force Bill and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act allowed federal courts jurisdiction over cases involving racial violence against blacks, either one could have been cited as precedents to criminalize lynching as murder; they were not.²³ Between 1901 and 1934, anti-lynching activists vigorously argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause ensured alleged black criminals the right to fair trials in competently administered courts. However, each time federal anti-lynching legislation was introduced (in 1901, 1921, 1922, and 1934) Congress rejected those bills on the grounds that such a law would violate the constitutional ideal of protecting states’ rights.²⁴ Though contemporary commentators insisted otherwise—no definition has ever been attached to ‘lynch law’ that does not plainly indicate that its operation is wholly without, and, indeed, in opposition to, the established laws of government, Howell Featherston argued in 1900—by the end of the nineteenth century there was nothing extralegal about the mob murders of African Americans.²⁵ Lynching functioned as a tool of domination meant to coerce (and not rough-handedly correct), to deny (and not merely restrict), and to subjugate (not only banish or dispatch) black people, depriving them of the political, economic, social, and cultural opportunities promised by emancipation.

Lynching’s trajectory from its antebellum roots to its (then) modern-day practice disturbed contemporary observers who debated its place and function in late-nineteenth-century American society. The barbarities and atrocities [of lynching] . . . almost beggar description and hardly find parallel in the world today and have been seldom matched or surpassed in the world’s history, Winthrop Sheldon lamented in 1906.²⁶ But more than a decade earlier, in 1892, Frederick Douglass had observed the very same thing—white lynch mobs that struck out with frantic rage and extravagance. For more than ten years the most violent excesses of mob rule had been tolerated as if they were a commonplace affair:

Not a breeze comes to us from the late rebellious states that is not tainted and freighted with Negro blood. In its thirst for blood and its rage for vengeance, the mob has blindly, boldly, and defiantly supplanted sheriffs, constables and police. It has assumed all the functions of civil authority. It laughs at processes, courts, and juries, and its red-handed murderers range abroad unchecked and unchallenged by law or by public opinion. If the mob is in pursuit of Negroes who happen to be accused of crime, innocent or guilty, prison walls and iron bars afford no protection. Jail doors are battered down in the presence of unresisting jailers, and the accused, awaiting trial in the courts of law, are dragged out and hanged, shot, stabbed or burned to death, as the blind and irresponsible mob may elect.²⁷

Even the unreconstructed southern novelist Thomas Nelson Page was awestruck by the sweep of lynching’s violence: Over 2,700 lynchings in eighteen years are enough to stagger the mind, he wrote. Either we are relapsing into barbarism, or there is some terrific cause for our reversion to the methods of medievalism.²⁸

The atrociousness of anti-black lynchings left the African American scholar Kelly Miller nearly speechless because he, unlike Page, identified with the sufferings of black lynch victims and was enraged at how lynching’s death sentence could extend to any African American. Such fiendish practice outrages human feeling, and hurts the heart of the world, the sociologist cried.²⁹ The nation’s callous disregard for the mortal danger under which African Americans lived was indeed widespread. Religious denominations were divided in reaction to the violence. For instance, the southern branches of the Methodist church refrained from public censure of anti-black lynch mobs while the northern branches issued their first repudiation of the practice in 1900.³⁰ Nor did U.S. presidents use their bully pulpits to the fullest advantage of anti-lynching politics. As Winthrop Sheldon reminded readers of Arena in 1906, no reference . . . of any practical importance has ever been made to the subject [of lynching] by any of our Presidents in their annual messages [to Congress], a silence that not even Franklin D. Roosevelt would break.³¹ In what was perhaps the most egregious display of governmental neglect to at least acknowledge the problem, President William McKinley steadfastly refused to condemn the Wilmington, North Carolina race riots of 1898 despite such pleas from African Americans as the following:

We have suffered, sir . . . since your accession to office . . . from the hate and violence of people claiming to be civilized, but who are not civilized, and you have seen our sufferings. . . . Yet you have at no time and on no occasion opened your lips on our behalf. . . . Is there no help in the federal arm for us, or even one word of audible pity, protest, and remonstrance? Black indeed we are, sir, but we are also men and citizens.³²

Where a pogrom like the Wilmington riot galvanized black activists, other violent outbreaks so overwhelmed African Americans that they were traumatized into a seeming complaisance. Ida B. Wells recalled the black community’s response to the Springfield, Illinois race riots of 1908 with sad bitterness:

As I wended my way to Sunday School that bright Sabbath day, brooding over what was still going on at our state capital, I passed numbers of people parading in their Sunday finery. None of them seemed to be worried by the fact of this three days’ riot going on not less than two hundred miles away.³³

While it may be that some African Americans of the day were motivated to at least appear unperturbed by lynching murders (recall Samuel Burdett’s being lured by the technology that enabled him to witness Henry Smith’s murder), such demeanor lends credence to Winthrop Sheldon’s observation in 1906 that this indifference is by no means confined to the South. Rather, a malaise was almost the country over:

The American citizen, as he partakes of his morning roll and coffee and reads in his newspaper the sickening account of the latest lynching tragedy, is moved for the time being with a thrill of horror. He lays his paper aside, goes to his daily work, becomes absorbed in the business of money-making, and—that is the end of it. The incident is closed. It is only a few days’ sensation and soon forgotten.³⁴

We have all but forgotten how varied and complex were the debates about lynching at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is because scholarly studies have unwittingly polarized our understanding of the violence as it was inflicted on African American communities. For instance, we have stressed the politics of negrophobia in our analyses of lynching because, despite its instrumental effects in maintaining social hierarchies, racism—at bottom, we believe—is stirred by deep, irrational hate.³⁵ And yet, as the observations by Kelly Miller, Ida B. Wells, and Winthrop Sheldon suggest, African Americans’ trauma and white Americans’ apathy allowed lynching to thrive as much as did white southerners’ much-studied antipathy. Understanding the politics of hurt, shame, and indifference (rather than fear, rage, and obsession) might help explain why anti-lynching movements never succeeded in criminalizing anti-black mob murders. Furthermore, as Sheldon hints, such a study should examine how the business of money-making urged white Americans to be thrilled with horror at the news of lynching in one moment, only to forget the murders in the next. What, then, becomes the proper economic context to interpret lynching: southern impoverishment or northern abundance?

Scholars, however, have tended to close off such promising routes of interpretation. Typically, historians, sociologists, psychologists, and literary critics analyze lynching in one (or a combination) of three ways: as a phenomenon peculiar to the South and its regimes of white patriarchal supremacy in economic and electoral politics; as the murderous fulfillment of Freudian sexual pathologies; or as the perverse but decisive culmination of making whiteness and masculinity the nation’s ideals of citizenship. As rich as it is, however, the historiography has institutionalized the perception that lynching means less to the central processes defining American life and culture because the violence is, we presume, best understood as regional and aberrant.³⁶ Regarded as a southern problem, lynching confirms the extent of rural backwardness compared with urban sophistication. It reifies the feudalistic power dynamics of agrarian politics against the hierarchical instabilities produced by technologically driven industrialization. Lynching lays bare the neuroses shaping the ideologies of white supremacy against the humanism of democratic liberalism. However, the lynching murders of Mexicans and Chinese in the West, Southwest, and far North ought to be a first clue that we need to develop sustained analyses that posit lynching to evince more than the South’s economic provincialism or its perverse will to racial dominance. Moreover, the ever-lurking symbols of American progress deployed in the mob murders of African Americans (hanging victims from electric street light poles or suspension bridges; using newly invented cameras to take and sell photographs of the murders; playing football with victims’ corpses) denies us refuge in the presumption that lynchings were always retrograde, atavistic displays of racial aggression.³⁷

To be sure, writing about lynching during the pivotal decades of its racial transformation was as divisive as the scholarship describes. Indeed, the all-too-familiar demonization of black men as inherently criminal, rapacious fiends, brutes, imps, and beasts no doubt stirred the foment that caused the numbers of anti-black lynchings to rise so high at the start of the twentieth century.³⁸ I am interested in exploring another history of lynching, however, one that examines those strands of public discussion that have yet to be accounted for in our now-familiar paradigms of analysis. In the chapters that follow, I turn to representations of lynching across various print and visual media, to read the depictions of the violence from the inside out, as it were. That is, rather than read history into such literary texts, I read history out of them to discern how American writers understood the meanings