Race, Class, and the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in American History

Abstract

For nearly forty years, the Alabama-based independent scholar M. Watt Espy Jr. has been compiling a database of executions that extends across the history of the United States, from the colonial settlements to 1945. While it may never be complete, this collection promises to permit analyses of capital punishment in America that will advance our perception and understanding of long-term trends. In Race, Class, and the Death Penalty, Howard W. Allen and Jerome M. Clubb have taken up this challenge. Notwithstanding its broad subtitle, their work is a monograph that focuses on particular features of capital punishment that can be traced in the statistical record. These include frequency of use, the nature of offenses charged, and identifiable characteristics of those executed. The broad temporal scope of the study reflects that of the Espy collection itself, although Allen and Clubb acknowledge the collection’s limitations and seek to address them by using other sources where possible. Since Espy has sought to list only legal executions, Allen and Clubb incorporate figures for lynchings and vigilante killings developed by other scholars. These figures contain gaps of their own (such as the absence of national lynching counts before 1882). Moreover, for nearly one-quarter of the cases identified by Espy (4,139 out of 17,130 total executions), only summary data—the race and ethnicity of the executed; the colony, state, or territory in which the execution occurred; and the decade—was available. A long-term, big picture analysis relying mainly on this database therefore faces unavoidable constraints. “The most striking historical change” from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, according to Allen and Clubb, is “the relative decline in the use of capital punishment” (p. 168). As population rose, decade by decade, the number of executions also rose but at a slower rate. Several other patterns are also shown to persist over the centuries. Rates of execution of members of racial and ethnic minority groups remained disproportionately high. African Americans made up a near majority of total legal executions (even excluding lynchings) and were executed in higher numbers, and at much higher rates, than whites in almost all decades from the mid-eighteenth century onward. The geographical distribution of executions also maintained a basic continuity— heavy concentration in the South—over the same long period. Between 1786 and 1855, “more than 66% of all executions occurred in the South and almost 80% in the South and Border states in combination” (p. 52). Between 1865 and 1945, “more than 5,000 were executed in the Southern states, an average of about five executions per month, and this does not take into account lynching” (p. 69). In all decades over both these periods, the vast majority of those executed in the South were African Americans. Reviews 89