Lynching Coverage and the American Reporter-Novelist

Abstract

Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1904 story “The Lynching of Jube Benson” opens with three men conversing in a smoke-filled library. They drift from one topic to the next until one of them, “an ambitious young reporter,” mentions a lynching story from a recent magazine and declares that he personally would like to see “a real lynching” (91). This announcement inspires one of the other men, a prematurely gray-haired doctor, to recount the lynching of an innocent man in which he had taken part seven years earlier. As the remorseful doctor begins to talk, the reporter surreptitiously readies his pencil and notebook. We never learn what he writes down or whether he uses the material, however, since the doctor's tale takes over the narrative and the journalist disappears. Because stories like the doctor's rarely appeared in print, we can read Dunbar's incomplete framing device as a pointed reflection of the broader history of lynching reportage in the US, a reminder of the untold stories circulated only as puffs of smoke among men in closed rooms.