Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas by Terry Anne Scott Simon Balto Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas. By Terry Anne Scott. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 390. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-218-4; cloth, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-68226-189-7.) Terry Anne Scott’s Lynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas is a painful, important book. In it, Scott explores the lynching of Black Texans from the wake of Reconstruction to the 1940s, assembling a record of anti-Black racist atrocities in Texas—atrocities that remain undercounted to this day. Separated into two halves, Scott’s argument in Lynching and Leisure is ultimately about the evolution of lynching practices in post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow Texas. In the book’s first half, Scott routinely returns to the point that while lynching itself was not a new phenomenon, the cruel sadism that came to define it was. Put another way, while white Texans had lynched and continued to lynch other white Texans, the point in such contexts was punitive. These victims were not tortured; there was no public spectacle associated with their deaths; and those who enacted the violence were not eager to reveal their involvement. Lynching changed in the late nineteenth century, as the practice became increasingly, and eventually overwhelmingly, directed against Black people. Torture, spectacle, and the mob’s reification of white supremacy became the point. Lynching and Leisure’s fundamental strength lies in its second half, when Scott turns her attention toward analyzing lynching as a form of leisure. Countering assumptions that lynching was some sort of antiquated barbarity, Scott instead shows how modernity and developments in technology and American popular culture helped build “the new lynching culture” (p. 9). She considers Texas’s expanding network of railroads as a critical facilitator of this culture, allowing for the long-distance transport of Black people to the place they were to be lynched, and carrying mobs of white Texans eager to attend lynchings. She also explores how the advent of the automobile provided a literal vehicle for lynchings. Cars were used as removable platforms during hangings, and tourists out for a “Sunday drive” attended lynchings or visited famous lynching sites for recreation (p. 210). The arrival of projected film in Texas during the late 1890s allowed white Texans who had missed out on a lynching to see it replayed, as theatergoers at the Dallas Opera House did in 1897. The invention of the phonograph allowed people to consume the sounds of a lynching. Phonographic recordings of the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, made their way to communities as far north as Iowa and Nebraska, where white audiences listened to Smith being burned alive while they attended popular attractions like county fairs. Scott shows that there was a large material culture associated with lynching, beyond the photographs and postcards familiar to historians of racist violence. Scott asks that we see anti-Black lynching as of a piece with modernity and the making of race and identity in Texas and beyond. For its white practitioners and the white consumers of both its immediate spectacle and its enduring material culture, lynching was entertainment; it was leisure. And it was leisure in service of a larger effort to settle a racial order that Black achievement and mobility were routinely unsettling. [End Page 371] While I understand the reasons Scott has for focusing this story exclusively along a Black/white binary (across the late 1800s and early 1900s, a large majority of lynching victims in Texas were Black), Lynching and Leisure would have been further strengthened by a comparative analysis examining the lynching of ethnic Mexicans during this same period. There is a large literature on anti-Mexican racist violence in Texas, particularly in the borderlands. Bringing that story into conversation with the one Scott tells may reveal still more about violence and the making and affirmation of white identity and white supremacy. Similarly, the argument that white Texans were binding together Blackness and criminality during this period by seizing the power to...