No Ordinary Crime: Reflections on the Future of the History of Mob Violence

Abstract

Historians’ study of lynching has matured greatly since I first began exploring the subject in the early 1990s. I was fortunate to have been a student of George C. Wright at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Wright introduced me to the topic of extralegal violence and became my adviser as I completed a senior thesis on the infamous 1916 lynching of the teenaged African American farmhand Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas. From those early days, one question consumed my research and still animates my work: Why did ordinary people lynch? Most of the men and women who participated in lynch mobs, attended spectacle lynchings, and defended (or at least tolerated) lynching possessed no criminal record and were not the outcasts sometimes portrayed by civic elites defending their communities. Why did these “ordinary” men and women support a culture of extralegal violence that could and did include the hanging, burning, and mutilation of human beings? While a graduate student at Emory University and later as a professor at Spelman College and then Rowan University, I worked on this question even as I came into contact with a number of other scholars who had already grappled with the subject and had produced important work on lynching, including W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Christopher Waldrep, and Jacqueline Dowd Hall. Of course, I also met a number of fellow graduate students and recent Ph.D.s who were also studying lynching. Michael J. Pfeifer was one of these, and since then his scholarly contributions to the field have been profound. We who study lynching, and those who are considering entering the field, are in his debt for this comprehensive and rich state-of-the-field essay.1 Pfeifer’s survey of the literature is exhaustive, and his suggested avenues for further research are illuminating, but I am pleased to be able to add some of my thoughts about future directions for scholarship.