Lynching Research Articles

Midnight Rambles from Micheaux to Lee: An Analysis of a Century of Shaping the Black Brand Through Film

Branding is the process of creating an intentional and unique image in the public mind. #oscarssowhite. #blacklivesmatters. #marriageforall. Economic equity and social justice advocates globally recognize the value of a breakout hashtag. In light of the deeply troubled branding of persons of African descent in America as “Black” and therefore “other”, it is vital to explore the power visual images have had in cementing the “Black” image in American society. This essay examines the equally persistent yet futile efforts of the most prolific Black filmmakers at the start and close of the 20th century — Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, to create agency and counter narratives to reshape the Black brand. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, political economic theory and other analytic communications tools, the focus is specifically about the use of film to shape public perception of African-Americans, what is referred to as “the Black brand”. The essay highlights a particular branding challenge for today’s filmmaker, regardless of race. Be it towards one commercial brand, or an entire ethnic community, brands are shaped by public perception, and visual imagery is a powerful force for building the kind and strength of our connection with any brand. If you aspire to influence public opinion about the Black brand — what do you think of when you think of Black people? Is it laugh-out-loud funny or are your eyes starting to well with tears of a brutal and violent legacy of suffering from enslavement, rape, and lynch mob murders? This paper analyzes the efforts and results of Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee across 100 years of American film in their efforts to influence national perspectives on the Black brand near the start of the 20th and 21st Century respectively. Examining Micheaux’s and Lee’s texts, this paper arrives at several conclusions and highlights questions for future research. In the face of an onslaught of counter and oppositional imagery across all media forms, a conclusory point is that successful efforts to shape public perception of a particular ethnic group — in this instance, the Black “brand” — involves conscious, cross-racial and cross-platform partnerships in order to move the needle forward, a nod to the reality that Black-Americans do not control the production studios, distribution platforms (though there has been some recent growth in this area), and advertising channels critical to achieve the audience share necessary to enable film production to grow as a viable tool for reshaping racialized stereotypes.

The Threat of BDS

The Threat of BDS

The Mafia, La Raza, and the Spanish-Language Press Coverage of the 1891 Lynchings in New Orleans

On October 15, 1890, New Orleans police superintendent David C. Hennessy was shot six times in the French Quarter as he headed home from work. A dying Hennessy uttered his captain that his murderers were Dagos, using an epithet for the growing Italian population in the city. With headlines claiming Hennessy was Ambuscaded and a Victim of the Vendetta, the local newspaper blamed the mafia for the murder, giving fodder mounting stereotypes of Italian immigrants. In the coming weeks local law enforcement indicted nineteen Italians, allegedly mafia members, for their supposed involvement in the murder. When a trial of nine Italians ended without convictions on March 13, 1891, outrage ignited in New Orleans. The Daily Picayune's headline the following morning read None Guilty!, and newspapers across the city printed announcements of a mass meeting scheduled later that day to remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessy case. Despite their acquittals, the Italians remained imprisoned along with others awaiting trial. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, Italian consul Pasquale Corte summoned the help of Governor Francis T. Nicholls, who responded that he would intervene only upon Mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare's request. (1) With no dispersal order from the mayor, a mob reportedly consisting of more than six thousand people gathered outside the jail take their revenge. Militia members forced entry into the jail and fired point-blank, killing nine of the nineteen imprisoned Italians. To appease the demands of the mob outside, the militia brought two more Italians into the streets, hanging them their deaths the delight of the raucous crowd. In total, the lynch mob assassinated eleven Italians in what is often considered the largest documented lynching in U.S. history. (2) Responding the massacre, Italy, a fledgling nation that had unified only thirty years before, sought immediate justice. Italian ambassador Baron Saverio Fava demanded that the United States pay reparations the victims' families. When the U.S. federal government failed act, Fava considered it a breach of a treaty protecting Italian subjects in the United States. Accordingly, Fava withdrew his post from Washington, D.C., and issued a subtle threat of war. The two nations remained in a diplomatic standoff for more than a year, until the U.S. government partly conceded Italy's demands by awarding $25,000 in total reparations the victims' families in April 1892. (3) Italy's bold retaliation U.S. inaction led a diplomatic debacle that resonated internationally. As one would expect, newspapers and magazines across the United States--the New York Times, the New Orleans Daily Picayune, the Illustrated American, Harper's Weekly--reported extensively on the lynchings, with reactions the mob violence ranging from condemnation support. But more surprising, Spanish-language newspapers from across the Americas showed genuine concern through extended coverage. For example, two weeks after the lynching, an editor from Panama City's La Estrella de Panama described in detail the mob's tactics: [they] arrived in front of the prison and when they tried enter through the door, no one responded so they busted it open by ramming [the door] with a wooden stake. (4) La Nation of Buenos Aires, Argentina, published a front-page editorial by Cuban writer Jose Marti that recounted the scene of the lynching. Shots blast out, Marti wrote; Bagnetto, the dead Italian, is hoisted a limb. They riddle his face with bullets. Marti noted that lynch mob members took home souvenirs of pieces of bark and leaves still fresh from the foot of the oak tree from which an Italian, covered with blood, hangs swinging. (5) Through their prose, these writers captured with aplomb the barbarism in New Orleans, recreating the events with satire and imagery. In some instances, the Spanish-language newspapers addressed racial constructions in the United States by centering on the vilification of Italian immigrants. …

Textual Portraits

Textual Portraits Leslie Nichols (bio) In the series Textual Portraits, I am interested in visualizing the historical context of women’s lives and conveying a sense of social heritage. This work starts with an image of a contemporary woman, often a scholar, artist, or student, who has made an impression on me. I select a classic social text that has relevance for the woman’s life. With image and text prepared, I begin typing on a manual typewriter. I have a small collection of typewriters, but my studio workhorse is an Underwood with an extended carriage, named Gwen after the British painter Gwen John. The titles of these works reference my source materials. For example, Lois (Woolf 1929) is a portrait of artist Lois Dodd created with Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. I met Lois during a studio visit at Vermont Studio Center. I chose this text to create her image because, in 1952, she was a founding member of one the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. She created a public space for artists to share their work. A Room of One’s Own was written only two years after Lois’s birth, and therefore partially describes the time period in which she was born. By interlocking the historic words and the contemporary image, I hope to convey the context of time and place. I create portraits with text to emphasize the weight of words and to allude to the idea that our lives are the creations of our minds and social constructs. Click for larger view View full resolution Leslie Nichols’s Underwood typewriter with Pia (Butler 1988) in progress [End Page 114] Click for larger view View full resolution JESSICA (IRIGARAY 1977) Excerpts from Luce Irigaray’s essay “The Sex Which Is Not One” are layered to create a portrait of Jessica Kreutter, a contemporary ceramic artist based in Houston. 9.5″ × 9.5″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 115] Click for larger view View full resolution JENNIFER (MAATHAI N. D.) This image portrays Jennifer Sheffield, an educator and educational consultant passionate about fostering creativity and innovation in students. The image is typed with the story of the hummingbird often told by the environmental political activist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. 12″ × 12″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 116] Click for larger view View full resolution EBONY (WELLS-BARNETT 1900) Portrait of artist and educator Ebony Marshmann, typed with words from Ida B. Wells’s speech “Lynch Law in America,” delivered in 1900. 12″ × 12″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 117] Click for larger view View full resolution LOIS (WOOLF 1929) Portrait of New York artist Lois Dodd typed with words from Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own. 12″ × 12″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 118] Click for larger view View full resolution SIOBHAN (GRIMKÉ 1837) Phrases such as “My Dear Sister” from Sarah Grimké’s “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” make the background for this portrait of New York-based artist Siobhan Liddell. 9.5″ × 9.5″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 119] Click for larger view View full resolution TIFFANY (TRUTH 1851) Words delivered by abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth in her 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” are legible in the background of this image depicting art student Tiffany Jackson. 9.5″ × 9.5″, created on a manual typewriter. [End Page 120] Leslie Nichols leslie nichols uses found and original text to create visual imagery. A recent NEA Studio Residency Grant from Women’s Studio Workshop supported experiments in letterpress printing. Her work has been recognized with additional grants from the Elizabeth Green-shields Foundation, AAUW, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Great Meadows Foundation. Her studio is in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Copyright © 2017 University of North Carolina Wilmington

The Strange Career of Judge Lynch: Why the Study of Lynching Needs to Be Refocused on the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The Strange Career of Judge LynchWhy the Study of Lynching Needs to Be Refocused on the Mid-Nineteenth Century William D. Carrigan (bio) The systematic reporting and analysis of lynching began as a way to shock ordinary white Americans, both northern and southern, to reconsider the system of racial oppression and segregation that dominated the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The impact of such antilynching work on the lives of African Americans in the South is open for debate, but there is no doubt that the efforts of early lynching specialists shaped the scholarly study of lynching all the way to the turn of the twenty-first century. While applauding this foundational work, this essay nevertheless argues for a broadening of lynching as a field of study. The history of mob violence in the United States is for not only those interested in race relations in the postbellum South but all historians interested in the evolution and transformation of ordinary people's attitudes toward crime, punishment, the law, and the state over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The role of discrimination and racial prejudice remains central to any understanding of this history, but there is much to be gained from disentangling the history of lynching from the relatively narrow framework that gave birth to the field. In 1955, in the introduction to his iconic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward wrote that southerners should understand more than all other Americans that social institutions are not fixed and immutable. In echoing Woodward's title, I hope to underline an irony at the heart of the study of lynching in the United States. Historians of the nineteenth-century United States should be the ones leading the exploration of the subject, because the mid-nineteenth century was the key period in the history of mob violence in the United States, the period that proved pivotal in creating a culture that nourished extralegal violence and defined racial minorities as perpetrators of violent crimes. Yet, relatively few historians [End Page 293] of nineteenth-century America have published monographs on the history of lynching and mob violence; instead, they have largely left the field to historians of the early twentieth century. This essay has two goals. First, I argue that the history of lynching should occupy a greater space within the larger body of work on the history of violence and crime in the United States. In particular, I suggest that the study of lynching in the mid-nineteenth century holds great promise for historians interested not just in American race relations but in fundamental issues such as the history of law, crime, and the development of the state. Second, I want to try to explain why the literature itself has been part of the problem, one of the reasons the study of lynching was for so long the domain of journalists, sociologists, and historians of the early twentieth century. Understanding how the field developed should give clarity as to why there are still many opportunities for historians to study mob violence as a means for understanding the nineteenth-century United States. ________ Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate the value of the study of lynching for a longer history of violence is that of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, a topic I know well from years of research with my co-author Clive Webb. Historians of the border have long known about violence against Mexicans in the Southwest, and they have made this violence an important element of their history of the Mexican experience in the Southwest. Yet, these historians did not make connections to existing scholarship on lynching, while historians of lynching paid scant attention to extralegal violence in the Southwest. Webb and I saw clear advantages to a comparative approach; from our research, we drew four conclusions that we think illuminate the history of racial violence across regions. First, we found evidence that the chronology of lynching varied greatly by ethnic group and followed no standard timeline. Second, murder remained the most frequent charge of lynch mobs across time and space, but secondary justifications varied greatly; Mexicans were rarely charged with...

The Skirted Sheriff: Florence Thompson and the Nation’s Last Public Execution

The Skirted Sheriff:Florence Thompson and the Nation’s Last Public Execution Carrie Pitzulo (bio) On August 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea, an African American man in his twenties, was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky. Convicted of raping the elderly Lischia Edwards, a local white woman, Bethea was sentenced to public execution. The case was both remarkable and tragically typical for the region. White authorities in the American South had a well-documented history of labeling African American men as sexual predators and then meting out brutal legal or extralegal punishment for alleged crimes, often at the end of a noose. In that sense, the hanging of a young black man for the rape of a white woman was perversely ordinary. For the town of Owensboro, however, the execution came to represent the humiliating grand finale of a dark era in American history.1 In the summer of 1936, this case drew intense national media coverage, largely because the sheriff responsible for overseeing the execution was a white woman, the forty-four-year-old widowed sheriff of Daviess County, Florence Thompson. Upwards of twenty [End Page 377] thousand onlookers, most of them white, camped out overnight to witness the early morning hanging and the woman executioner. The tremendous attention was the last straw in a decades-long national trend away from public execution and resulted in Kentucky becoming the final state to ban the practice. Rainey Bethea thus attained the dubious distinction of being the last publicly executed convicted criminal in the United States. In North America, debates over execution—public and private, legal and extralegal—stretched back to the late eighteenth century.2 Yet, for generations, crowds, sometimes in the thousands, gathered to witness hangings. The display of lynched black bodies had attained such cultural currency that postcards marked their passing. Black activists challenged such savagery for decades. Northern states moved to private execution via electric chair around the turn of the twentieth century, and most southern states joined them by the 1920s.3 Public hanging had come to be seen as uncivilized, whereas electrocution was widely considered “progress” because it removed execution from community view, placed it in the hands of professionals, and utilized the modern technology of electricity.4 Historically, lynchings reinforced the racial status quo, and white women played vital roles in that process as accusers and witnesses. The murders of black men were deliberately public in order to send a message not only to the African American community, but also to southern whites—male and female—as well. White men used white women’s sexuality as a pawn of racial oppression in order to terrorize black communities for the imagined sexual crimes of black men. As a result, mob violence served both white supremacy and patriarchy.5 [End Page 378] Many scholars have emphasized the continuity between nineteenth-century lynching and the emergence of more “modern” capital punishment in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, many southern states bowed to outside pressure and moved toward more “humane” ways of executing convicted criminals. In the twentieth century, although black men like Bethea often stood trial, justice was impossible when the threat of the lynch mob hung over court proceedings.6 According to historian Stephen B. Bright, “The death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching and other forms of racial violence and racial oppression in America.”7 Bethea’s execution bore many of the hallmarks of lynching culture. Given Kentucky’s history of racial violence within the broader context of southern lynch law, historian George Wright has argued that the 1920 amendment to the state’s capital punishment law, which allowed for public execution of rapists, was “clearly designed to appeal to the will of the mob.”8 Thus, many of the capital cases against black men in the South were attempts by law enforcement to pacify the thirst for vigilante justice and take control of their communities, while maintaining racial dominance.9 The public execution of Bethea, attended by thousands of women and children, contradicted years of modernizing trends such as privatization and elite control over capital punishment, done in private settings. In the Bethea case, the usual power dynamics—a white, female victim, and white...

Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence

In 1995, Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck published the landmark study A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930. Based on a painstaking data-collection effort, including manually sifting through contemporary newspapers in various archives to find articles with information about lynchings, Tolnay and Beck constructed an inventory of lynching events in ten southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee). Drawing upon theories of intergroup resource competition, Tolnay and Beck use these data to craft a powerful argument that lynching served as a means of racial control and repression, reducing competition from African Americans to white economic interests, particularly demonstrating that lynchings were more common where and when whites experienced worsened conditions within the southern cotton economy. Published twenty years after A Festival of Violence, the volume by Amy Bailey and Stewart Tolnay under consideration here is as pathbreaking as its predecessor. While A Festival of Violence was, in part, concerned with producing reliable data on how many lynchings occurred, where they occurred, and when they occurred, Lynched focuses on whom lynchings happened to, that is, their victims. In this, Lynched is, like A Festival of Violence, based upon an immense data-collection effort, described in detail in chapter 2, made possible by the digitalization and availability of online data sources. In order to collect individual and family information on the victims of lynchings, Bailey and Stewart used the Beck–Tolnay lynching event inventory as their point of departure and tried to link all lynching victims therein (a total of 2,164 victims, excluding victims for whom they lacked names) to the information recorded on them in the original decennial US Census enumerators’ manuscripts for the census immediately preceding their death. For lynchings that occurred, for example, in the 1880s, Bailey and Tolnay searched for the victims in the 1880 census manuscripts. Through this procedure, they have been able to collect information on 935 lynching victims pertaining to personal characteristics such as age, literacy, marital status, occupation, and birth state, as well as to the composition of the household they resided in at the time of the census. In doing so, Bailey and Tolnay are able to go beyond what we know about the characteristics of lynching victims, that is, that they were predominantly black and male, to in unprecedented rich and illuminating detail further describe the characteristics of the African American men most commonly victimized by lynch mobs (chapter 3).

“… the Furrow of His Brow”: the Cultural Logic of Black Lynch Mobs

The little known historical phenomenon of black lynch mobs functioned within a dynamic network of mainstream racial praxis, public discourses, and evolving cultural values. Public narratives about lynch law use vigilantism and lynching as a meme that marks the fluidity of social and discursive power among whites and blacks during the Jim Crow Era. This essay will examine the cultural logic that informed black mobs.

The powerless starchitect: How Zaha Hadid became the first person working on the Al-Wakrah stadium that actually did die

Starchitect Zaha Hadid won the bid to design one of the planned stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup event in Qatar. Her design for the Al-Wakrah stadium became the centrepiece of a discussion on the role that starchitects play in society. That debate reached a boiling point in August 2014, and resulted in a digital lynching party that sheds serious doubts on the ethics and professionalism of architectural critics and journalists alike.

Contested Terrain: The State versus Threatened Lynch Mob Violence

Prior research on mob violence in the American South has focused on lynchings that were successfully completed. Here, the authors explore new territory by studying the relationship between state interventions in threatened mob violence and industrial expansion in the South. Using a newly available inventory of lynching threats, they find that the frequency of extraordinary state interventions to avoid mob violence between 1880 and 1909 was positively related to the strength of the manufacturing sector within counties and negatively related to the prevalence of a “Deep South cotton culture.” The authors’ research offers support for the hypothesis that mob violence was incompatible with the image of the “New South” and that contradiction motivated state authorities to make extraordinary interventions when lynching was threatened.

Beef, Murderous Rage, Public Lynching: A Look under the Surface

Beef, Murderous Rage, Public Lynching: A Look under the Surface

The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930

Collective violence when framed by its perpetrators as 'citizen' justice is inherently a challenge to state legitimacy. To properly account for such violence, it is necessary to consider an opportunity structure incorporating the actions of both vigilantes and agents of the state. The motivation and lethality of lynch mobs in the South cannot be understood without considering how the state reacted to the legitimacy challenges posed by lynching. We trace the shifting orientation of state agents to lynching attempts between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Depression. Analyzing an inventory of more than 1,000 averted and completed lynching events in three Southern states, we model geographic and temporal patterns in the determinants of mob formation, state intervention, and intervention success. Opponents of lynching often pled with mobs to 'let the law take its course.' This article examines the course followed by the law itself, as state actors moved between encouraging, accommodating, and in many instances averting mob violence.

Un destin laminé : Yakov Braun, socialiste-révolutionnaire et écrivain

Yakov Braun : a squashed destiny. This paper is an attempt to raise interest in a forgotten Russian­speaking Jewish Ukrainian writer, as talented as Isaak Babel or Gustav Meyrink, born in 1899 (or 1894 ) in Elisavetgrad. Socialist­revolutionary since his early youth, he was a prominent left­wing SR activist, constantly persecuted from 1921 till his execution in 1937. There are only three novels left of him and a number of literary essays. One of these novels, A Mob Law, was published in his lifetime, two others ­ found in the State Literary and Art archives ­ are typewritten manuscripts : together, they represent a vertiginous immersion into the Jewish provincial life under the Tsarist Empire and into the agitation and turmoil during the First World War, between the February and October Revolutions and during the Civil War. Yakov Braun’s life is emblematic of the Bolshevik treatment of the non­Marxist revolutionaries which aimed at erasing any trace of a writer who was close to Maïakovski, Essenine and Zamiatine, to name a few …

American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence by Debbie Lelekis

Reviewed by: American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence by Debbie Lelekis Maria Seger (bio) American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence, by Debbie Lelekis. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. x + 116 pp. Cloth, $70.00; Ebook, $69.99. In an era that has witnessed increased public attention to mass incarceration, police brutality, and state-sanctioned violence through such movements as Black Lives Matter, it is no wonder that American literature scholars have taken a renewed interest in investigating the nation’s history of racial violence and justice. In American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence, Debbie Lelekis explores how the spectator figure functions to “expose the central tension of American democracy,” the delicate balance between individual and collective rights (3). In doing so, she engages the rise of professional journalism, focusing on the reporter character as spectator and the role of the reporter-novelist. Through analyses of realist texts, including canonical and lesser-known short stories and poetry published in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Lelekis demonstrates how American literature commented on the power struggles that modernity generated—amplified by increased urbanization, diversity, and political representation—by depicting spectators witnessing lynching scenes. In employing spectatorship as a lens, Lelekis draws together critical work on the history of American vigilantism, the crowd in American literature, and journalism’s influence on American letters. Relying on the work of such scholars as Amy Louise Wood, Mary Ryan, and Jean Marie Lutes, she contends that her blended approach allows us to understand how the spectator became a “key figure for communicating and challenging” the American struggle to weigh the claims of the individual against those of the community (20). Highlighting the spectator’s position both within and apart from the crowd, Lelekis employs two definitions of the term spectatorship throughout the study: one from Dennis Kennedy, which emphasizes active participation, and one from Wood, which centers on one’s ability to bestow significance on an event by witnessing it. Spectators of lynch mobs, Lelekis importantly notes, differ from those composing other [End Page 102] types of crowds, such as strikes or rallies, because they reveal how collective action can pervert rather than strengthen democratic systems. American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd examines the short stories of former journalists Theodore Dreiser, Miriam Michelson, Irvin S. Cobb, and Paul Laurence Dunbar in two thematic parts that focus on the journalist as spectator (Chapters 2 and 3) and the impact of authors’ reporting careers on their fiction about spectators (Chapters 4 and 5). Following the critical introduction provided in Chapter 1, the second chapter reads Dreiser’s “Nigger Jeff” (1901), arguing that the story critiques lynching by transforming the reporter protagonist from “simple observer to active spectator,” inspiring readers within and outside of the story to actively question and confer meaning onto such events (40). But it is in Chapter 3 that Lelekis makes her most compelling contribution, building on the work of Lori Harrison-Kahan and Karen E. H. Skinazi in interpreting Michelson’s “Honors Are Easy” (1905). Suggesting that the story condemns the public consumption of lynching and implicates the crowd in the act itself, she also investigates its complex and conflicting gender implications, identifying the female reporter protagonist as both spectator and spectacle due to the tradition of immersion journalism historically popular with newspaperwomen. The following two chapters diverge from the previous two, focusing on other types of white professionals (a judge and a doctor) as spectators and examining the impact of authors’ journalism on their fiction’s content and style. The fourth chapter analyzes the realism of Cobb’s “The Mob from Massac” (1912) in light of a news story he published on an 1896 lynching in Kentucky. Here, Lelekis teases out the dynamics of southern borderlands, bourgeoning middle-class consciousness, and white supremacy, arguing that the story rejects lynching and inspires a call to action through its realist attributes, such as “rationalism and attention to detail” (86). Concluding her study with a chapter on Dunbar’s story “The Lynching of Jube Benson” (1904) and his poem “The Haunted Oak” (1903), she argues that the...

Dramaturgical Domination

The history of racial domination in the United States is multifaceted and therefore cannot be explained through simple reference to ideologies or institutional structures. At the microlevel, racial domination is reproduced through social interactions. In this article, I draw on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to social interaction to illuminate the development of the racialized interaction order whereby actors racialized as white impose a set of implicit rules and underlying assumptions onto interracial interactions. I examine archetypal instances of racialized social interactions in America’s history and present-day to reveal the role of social interactions in racially structuring social institutions and everyday lives. First, I discuss the development and racialization of chattel slavery and its routinization as an interaction order. Next, I explore the dramaturgical and symbolic significance of the postbellum emergence and spread of racial terrorism such as white lynch mobs. I then analyze the contemporary discursive and performative strategies of white racial dominance and aspects of the contemporary racialized interaction order such as the de facto racialization of spatial boundaries, mass media and the digital sphere, and police violence. I conclude by discussing the significance of interactional analysis for understanding the present racialized social system.

The Unrapeable Black Woman: How the Lack of Legal Protection Through the Centuries Promoted the Tradition of Unreported Sexual Assaults

“Rape, as racially constructed, is ‘something that only happen[s] to white women; what happens to black women is simply life.’” A legacy paved by the atrocities of slavery lingers today, reflected in the lack of rapes and sexual assaults reported by Black women. The lack of reported rapes among Black women is not a new phenomenon, but rather a learned reaction to slavery, lynch mobs, and the general disregard of Black lives. Horrific historical events, coupled with an anemic legal system, set a precedent in Black culture that “…white folks, [are] not to be trusted,” because Blacks rarely found protection or justice in the legal system. Inevitably, the rape culture in this country is tied to race. One of the most egregious remnants of slavery that persist today is the legal system’s failure to recognize the rape of Black women as crime...

The Potholed Path: Navigating the Contested Landscape of English Caravan Site Policy

The Travellers will find the land…Nobody wants it in their village — it's that NIMBYism kind of thing. And when you have a meeting to say: ‘Can we discuss this about this land being used for Gypsies?’ they turn up like it's a lynch mob. So that is the very difficult thing that we've got to cope with. And the council need to find land … We got space, we got money. … There's no political will to do it — I don't mind telling you! They have debated it for so long and so often and got nowhere. — Interview with Aunty.1

Judge Lynch Denied: Combating Mob Violence in the American South, 1877–1950

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [I]n the years from the end of Reconstruction through the mid twentieth century, threats of extra-legal retribution were commonplace, and mobs often formed and plans were laid for Judge Lynch to hold court. It is sobering that if only the gravest threats had been successful, the South would have experienced a 49 percent increase in actual lynching events. Anti-lynching cartoon, Start the Recall of judges with This One, by W. Crawford, Puck 71, February 21, 1913, Library of Congress. The rough dimensions of southern mob violence are well known: between 1877 and 1950 the American South witnessed over 3,100 incidents of lynching in which more than 3,800 southerners died through lynch mob violence. (1) The annual toll of lynching episodes grew until the mid 1890s and then began a general decline. The overwhelming majority of victims, 84 percent, were African Americans who met their fate at the hands of white lynchers. Men were vastly more likely to be the target of Judge Lynch's vengeance, with 3.1 percent of the victims being women of either race. Although all southern states experienced lynching, Georgia and Mississippi together accounted for over one third of the victims of southern mob violence during this period. In over half of the incidents, the victim had been removed from the custody of the authorities, sometimes by force and other times through acquiescence. Most victims were hanged from trees or telephone poles and riddled with bullets, under the cover of night by relatively small numbers of vigilantes. In some notable and horrific instances, however, victims were brutalized and tortured to death in front of hundreds of spectators in broad daylight. This story of the era of the southern lynch mob has been documented, analyzed, and theorized for over a hundred years. (2) Scholars and activists have long noted that while lynchers roamed the southern landscape, they weren't always successful in meting out their form of justice. Early in the twentieth century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Tuskegee Institute, Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching kept newspaper clipping files on reported mob violence and near-lynchings, but most of their archival efforts were aimed at documenting actual lynchings, and much of their work focused on the 1920s and 1930s in attempt to promote proposed federal anti-lynching legislation. (3) In his groundbreaking book Rope & Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), Walter White noted that since the end of World War I there had been shifting public opinion against mob violence and an apparent increase in lynchings averted. In 1933 James H. Chadbourn reported on the many means by which lynchings were foiled including the use of militia to frustrate mobs, or removing threatened suspects from the local area to a safer venue. Arthur Raper provided a list of threatened lynchings for the years 1930-1933 as part of his influential study of southern mob violence. (4) Some of those thwarted lynchings were widely reported and documented. Over a two-day period in mid July 1920, a mob of over 1,000 threatened to lynch three black men accused of attacking a married white woman in Alamance County, North Carolina. (5) Initially, Sheriff C. B. Story and his deputies stalled the mob as it moved toward the jail in Graham, the county seat, but recognizing the extreme danger of the situation Sheriff Story requested that Governor Thomas W. Bickett send troops to protect the prisoners and restore order. The troops arrived the next day, armed with rifles and machine guns, and were stationed around the jail. When a smaller mob of masked men attacked, the troops opened fire, driving off the attackers with at least one killed and several wounded. (6) Even better known was the plight of the Scottsboro Boys. In March 1931, nine black Alabama teenagers were being held in the Jackson County jail on a charge of raping two white women aboard a train that ran between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama. …

Outlawry: Ida B. Wells and Lynch Law

This essay demonstrates how Lynch Law suspended normative criminal law and undermined constitutional amendments made after the US Civil War. Focusing on the period between Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, the essay argues that “outlawry” provides the necessary juridical concept for understanding how a tradition of popular sovereignty worked together with evolving concepts of race to create the social conditions of possibility for antiblack mob violence, despite a legal system that could have prevented it. Close analysis of Ida B. Wells’s early antilynching pamphlets clarifies how the problem of democratizing citizenship and civil rights became saturated with the question of how to ensure the more radical right to life.

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

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.