At the Hands of Parties Unknown? The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship

Abstract

In October 2002 more than ninety historians and other academics gathered in Atlanta to attend “Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies.” That Emory University conference, held in conjunction with a touring exhibition of lynching photographs that had attracted considerable publicity, was, to many participants, an important watershed in the study of the history of American lynching. Twenty-five panels of scholars explored collective violence in the United States from a wide range of angles; the variety and extent of inquiry evident at the conference signaled that the study of lynching and racial violence had reached a scale and depth that would have seemed unrealistic even just ten years earlier. As the fifteenth anniversary of the conference approaches, it seems appropriate to assess how lynching scholarship has developed over the last several decades, to measure the current strengths and weaknesses of the field, and to examine where future scholars might best direct their energies in grappling with the role of collective violence in the varied American regions where it took root during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also an opportune moment to reflect on what the phenomenon of lynching—that is, informal group killing—can reveal about the historical processes of state, social identity, and cultural formation in the United States and in global cultures.1 I began studying American mob violence twelve years before the Emory conference; an undergraduate senior thesis on lynching in Missouri grew into a doctoral dissertation on the relationship of lynching to the criminal justice system across the United States. The flowering of lynching scholarship over the following decade could not have been fully anticipated in 1990, as the history of mob violence was obscured in relative oblivion. The