The Scaffold's Revival: Race and Public Execution in the South

Abstract

��� In the half-century after the Civil War, three-quarters of those legally executed in the South were African Americans. That so many of these hangings were in front of crowds numbering in the thousands adds another gruesome note to the violent history of southern punishment. From a distance, southern public executions appear to be yet another means of terrorizing and humiliating African Americans, a legal analog to lynching or to the slavery-era display of severed heads on pikes as lessons to other would-be black criminals. But a closer look reveals important complexities in the history of public executions in the South. Public execution was not reserved for black convicts, whites rarely predominated in the crowds at the execution of blacks, and little evidence suggests that African American condemned men saw the public nature of executions as an added humiliation. Whites demonstrated a growing concern that the huge crowds gathered for public executions provided a challenge not only to public order in general, but also to white authority, for the theater of the gallows was not controlled by whites alone. On the “stage” in front of thousands at the hanging of a black convict, African Americans were central actors. The morality play performed on the gallows was less often like a lynching than a revival, an African American camp meeting at the scaffold. Reminiscent of seventeenth and eighteenth century Puritans, black ministers in the era of public execution found some of their largest congregations around midday on Fridays in some southern town square, hillside, or dell, performing their religious ceremonies in the presence of death, white secular