African American Lynching Research Articles

The Migration of Lynch Victims' Families, 1880-1930.

We examine the relationship between the lynching of African Americans in the southern United States and subsequent county out-migration of the victims' surviving family members. Using U.S. census records and machine learning methods, we identify the place of residence for family members of Black individuals who were killed by lynch mobs between 1882 and 1929 in the U.S. South. Over the entire period, our analysis finds that lynch victims' family members experienced a 10-percentage-point increase in the probability of migrating to a different county by the next decennial census relative to their same-race neighbors. We also find that surviving family members had a 12-percentage-point increase in the probability of county out-migration compared with their neighbors when the household head was a lynch victim. The out-migration response of the families of lynch victims was most pronounced between 1910 and 1930, suggesting that lynch victims' family members may have been disproportionately represented in the first Great Migration.

Saving lives one bale at a time: cotton production’s connection to lynchings in the U.S. South during the early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT The extralegal lynching of innocent individuals from discriminated groups remains a dark, lasting mark on the United States’ history. Following the conclusion of the Civil War, former slaves and their descendants were frequent targets for this form of violence. A significant existing literature finds various contributing factors to the pattern of violence. However, the current paper is the first to document a relationship between the weather and the lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South during the early twentieth century. Within affected communities, we find heavy May rains reduced cotton yields which raises the probability of a lynching during the subsequent year.

The Processes of Dehumanization in the Encounter with the Other: An Exploratory Study During the Lynching of African Americans in the United States, 1882 – 1968

The dehumanization processes represent a failure in the attribution of thinking skills to other human beings. Based on ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and nationality, social prejudices are reinforced in basic neurocognitive structures. Still, their manifestation is conveyed by personal goals and normative beliefs, which develop in an environment of a dyadic relationship or intergroup contexts. Therefore, this paper aims to peruse the perspectives for a theory of dehumanization, supporting them with neuroscientific research on the neural basis, and exploring the forms of dehumanization that African Americans suffered when they were victims of lynching in the United States.

Preaching The Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays by Maisha S. Akbar

Reviewed by: Preaching The Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays by Maisha S. Akbar Judith Stephens-Lorenz PREACHING THE BLUES: BLACK FEMINIST PERFORMANCE IN LYNCHING PLAYS. By Maisha S. Akbar. Routledge Focus series. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020; pp. 138. In Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays, Maisha Akbar examines the intersections of lynching dramas, performance theory, and a Black feminist blueswoman tradition. Drawing on the work of journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) and Bessie Smith's (1894–1937) performance of "Preachin' the Blues," Akbar provides, in three chapters, a perspective through which readers can recognize the disruptive force of Black feminist/non-normative subjects and strategies in lynching plays. In our 1998 volume, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, Kathy Perkins and I called for the recognition of lynching drama as a distinctly American genre, offered a definition, documented more than a hundred plays in existence (at that time), and reviewed lynching's influence on other art forms. More recently, Koritha Mitchell's award-winning volume Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 provides a critical analysis of these plays as mechanisms through which African Americans survived mob violence while continuing to assert their right to full citizenship. Treva Lindsey's Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C. examines lynching plays as nontraditional sources of Black women's cultural production in Washington D.C. and highlights the important role of local playwright/poet Georgia Douglas Johnson's literary salon. In her introduction and chapter 1, Akbar's volume presents the genre as a Black feminist performance tradition and thus provides an additional framework through which to view these plays. She also posits "critical lynching studies" as an interdisciplinary critical cultural scholarship project for examining lynching plays as well as other forms of antilynching cultural production. Beginning with the work of anti-lynching pioneer Wells, Akbar guides her readers through an understanding of the plays as a Black feminist performance and/or discourse tradition comprised of specific (counter-hegemonic) communicative strategies and practices opposing lynching as white supremacist performance. As Akbar recognizes the foundational work of Wells in opposing what scholar Kirk Fuoss has termed "lynching performances" (that is, actual historical lynchings), she examines lynching plays for their disruptive (non-normative) constructions of race, gender, and sexuality as well as their antilynching themes. Akbar honors a Black feminist tradition of disrupting and challenging commonly held or established views and practices of white su premacy. In doing so, she foregrounds anti-lynching plays and activism as disruptive forces in opposition to the whiteness narrative of the traditional lynching story in which a fragile innocent white female victim needs to be protected/rescued by a gallant white male hero from rape by a villainous Black man. In this archetypal lynching story, which became familiar through novels such as Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905) and films like D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), Black women are absent. Employing Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms (1998), Hazel Carby's Cultures in Babylon: Black Briton and African America (1999), and Smith's composition "Preachin' the Blues" (1927), Akbar links the anti-lynching activism performance tradition to a blueswoman music tradition, specifically through the use of a blues-spiritual aesthetic in which an unexpected or disruptive combination (such as sacred/secular) occurs. Drawing on the lyrics from Smith's version of "Preachin' the Blues"—"Now one sister by the name of Sister Green jumped up and done a shimmy you ain't never seen"—Akbar perceives a vision of the Black church as a potentially disruptive space in which women can challenge traditional gender roles and express themselves more fully. Reflecting this same spirit, Angelina Grimke's Rachel (1916) is set in a Black home and presents a female protagonist as a "non-normative subject who is unwilling to replicate a white supremacist societal/family construct" (32). As the character of Rachel (after learning of her father's lynching and of the continual racial bullying of neighborhood children) rejects marriage and biological motherhood, she is refusing to take part in the...

Introduction: African Americans: Official and Unofficial Violence in America

In this essay the author introduces the emergence of the paddy rollers as control forces to contain the black population during the enslavement of Africans in the United States. Soon after the end of the Civil War the police forces took over the activities that had been the purvey of the paddy rollers: keeping black people in place and out of the way of white people. However, the resistance to abuse, torture, and murder was never far from the active imagination and reality of African Americans who maintained their own humanity. Tracing, in a limited fashion, how the biologically unscientific race became the premise for racism and the attacks on black people by police officers who often took their perceptions of blacks, especially black men, as negative and inferior from the systemic and institutional character of the society’s understanding of superior and inferior humans. This, according to the author, is at the base of hatred, discrimination, and lynching of African Americans in current and previous occasions. He illustrates this by discussing the case of Mary Turner who was killed in the early part of the 20th century for objecting to white mob attacks on her husband.

They Lynched Mexican-Americans Too: A Question of Anglo Colorism

The act of lynching in the United States was in fact a form of domestic terrorism perpetrated against darker-skinned Americans. Historians have been pressed to acknowledge the lynching of African-Americans particularly in the Bible-belt South in such states as Mississippi and Alabama. The history of Mexican-Americans lynched by Anglo mobs has been for the most part, ignored by Western historians. Said ignored transgressions occurred frequently in border-states including Texas. Approximately 40 years before the lynching of 14-year-old African-American Emmett Till was the lynching of 14-year-old Mexican-American Antonio Gómez. Both were boys accused of Anglo disrespect. Buried in historical archives, the lynching of Gómez was a Mexican-American manifestation of Anglo colorism. Once informed, social scientists and the U.S. society at-large must then readily admit they lynched Mexican-Americans too!

Race, Gender, and the Rape-Lynching Nexus in the U.S. South, 1881-1930

AbstractScholarship has long recognized the centrality of white racial sexual fears in the rhetoric and practice surrounding the lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South in the decades around 1900. The topic has not previously been taken up for systematic study beyond event-level analyses. This article presents theoretical and empirical evidence that whites’ intersecting racial and gender concerns converging in racial sexual fears were conducive to lynching related to interracial sex, but not to those unrelated to interracial sex, under certain conditions. The empirical findings, based on lynchings in 11 southern states from 1881–1930, demonstrate that lynchings related to interracial sex were more likely to occur in contexts characterized by higher levels of white female dependents residing with white male householders, higher levels of white female school attendance, and higher levels of adult black male literacy. These findings suggest that interracial sex-related lynching served to recover and retain white men’s racial and gender status, which postbellum developments had undermined, by oppressing not only African American men and women but disempowering white women as well. White racial sexual fears during the lynching era should, therefore, be seen as constituting a social force in their own right with long-term consequences for race and gender relations and inequalities.

Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching

The literature on ethnic fractionalization and conflict has yet to be extended to the American past. In particular, the empirical relationship between racial residential segregation and lynching is unknown. The existing economic, social, and political theories of lynching contain implicit hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, consistent with more general theories of social conflict. Because Southern lynching occurred in rural and urban areas, traditional urban measures of racial segregation cannot be used to estimate the relationship. Earlier analysis has analyzed the relationship between lynching and racial proportions, a poor proxy for racial segregation. We use a newly developed household-level measure of residential segregation (Logan and Parman 2017) that can distinguish between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given a particular racial composition to estimate the correlation between racial segregation and lynching in the southern counties of the United States. We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated counties were much more likely to experience lynchings. Consistent with the hypothesis that segregation is related to interracial violence, we find that segregation is highly correlated with African American lynching but uncorrelated with white lynching. These results extend the analysis of racial/ethnic conflict into the past and show that the effects of social interactions and interracial proximity in rural areas are as important as those in urban areas.

On the Outside Looking In: Distress and Sympathy for Ethnic Victims of Violence by Out-Group Members

Abstract It is well documented that individuals respond with negative emotions to racial and ethnic out-groups. Yet, it is unknown whether the responses are a measure of simple emotional reactivity or if they are also influenced by emotion regulation. Given the importance of emotions in out-group evaluation (see Intergroup Emotion Theory; Smith and Mackie, 2008), we investigated emotional reactivity and regulation in response to out-group victimization. Forty-one undergraduates completed the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and viewed three sets of images: lynching of African-Americans, torture of Abu Ghraib prison detainees, and iaps images depicting graphic violence. Participants rated 13 emotions before and after viewing the images. A factor analysis identified four emotional response categories: Distress, Sympathy, Arousal and Avoidance. Analyses at both the individual emotion level and factor level indicated that negative emotions (e.g., anger, disgust, and guilt) were greater in response to violence against ethnic groups relative to violence depicted in the iaps images. Emotional suppression predicted blunted distress and arousal to ethnic victimization. These findings highlight that emotional responses to out-group victimization are complex and tempered by emotional suppression. Individuals’ emotion regulation may provide further insight into responses to ethnic and racial out-groups.

Integrating Conversations About Equity in “Whose Knowledge Counts” into Science Teacher Education

Each day we are confronted with news stories detailing the landscape of privilege and bias built into the cultural institutions of our nation. The elected representatives of Flint denied its people access to clean water. The legal system fails to hold police officers who shoot unarmed Black men criminally responsible for their actions. The government of North Carolina is attempting to prevent transgender people from using the bathroom for the gender with which they identify. A flagship university in the Midwest took five days to respond to a hate crime in which two fans at a football game enacted a scene, reminiscent of the lynching of African Americans, of Trump tying a noose around Obama’s neck. Systemic inequity lies not in individual actions, but in how broader systems respond (or fail to respond) to those actions. These stories receive national attention, but there are other stories that make up the everyday lives of the oppressed in our society. Students on my campus created a Twitter hashtag #TheRealUW to expose the inequity they experience on a daily basis. And one Black student, frustrated by the culture of the university, painted the message “Racizm in the air. Don’t breathe. – God” on campus in spring 2016.

Lynchings, labour, and cotton in the US south: A reappraisal of Tolnay and Beck

I examine lynchings of African Americans in the US South from 1882 to 1930, more than twenty years after Tolnay and Beck’s (1995) seminal work. The authors claim that lynchings were due to economic competition between African American and white cotton workers. I confirm much of their original hypothesis with new data and techniques, and expand upon it, finding that another explanation, Williamson’s (1997) psychosexual one, might complement the economic one. I also discover that, in line with an economic competition framework, lynchings predict more black out-migration from 1920 to 1930, and higher state-level wages.

The lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South: A review of sociological and historical perspectives

AbstractResearch in sociology and history on the lynching of African Americans by White mobs in the U.S. South around 1900 has in recent decades grown and matured into a substantive research area in its own right. This article has four purposes. The first purpose is to review dominant sociological and historical approaches in the lynching literature. One key feature of this literature is its bifurcation into one strand of social scientific sociological lynching research and one strand of culturalist historical lynching research. As a consequence of this bifurcation, the study of lynching long lacked sustained interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and history. The second purpose of this article is to review recent sociological studies that attempt to bridge the disjuncture between sociological and historical approaches otherwise characterizing lynching scholarship. The third purpose of this article is to review other recent studies moving sociological lynching scholarship beyond dominant approaches and foci, including investigations of averted lynchings and investigations of the individual‐level characteristics that made African Americans more or less vulnerable to White lynch mobs. The last purpose is to suggest how the contributions of lynching research have implications for understanding present‐day racial injustices and inequalities.

Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920

“Life and Death on the Border” powerfully documented the persecution and resilience of ethnic Mexicans (Tejanos) on the Texas-Mexico border between 1910 and 1920. The most compelling stories in this exhibit are the kind whispered by family members to successive generations, not those usually told in a state's official history museum. Displayed on a balcony overlooking the museum rotunda, this exhibit provided a counternarrative to the valorous, mostly Anglo narratives below. The Bullock Texas State History Museum developed the exhibit in collaboration with the Web project Refusing to Forget (https://refusingtoforget.org/), which aims to develop public memory about Texas- and U.S.-sanctioned violence toward ethnic Mexicans. Although the exhibit was in place for less than three months, the American Association for State and Local History awarded the museum its prestigious 2016 Leadership in History Award for the display. The exhibit design conveyed a broader scope than the single decade of the title. The wall panels and stand-alone glass cases were arranged chronologically and contained documents and artifacts from more than one century before and after the 1910s. This ambitious design intended to contexualize the traumatic events of one decade by locating them in the panorama view from seventeenth-century Spanish colonialism to the resurgence of Tejano culture in the late twentieth century. Yet the heart of the exhibit remained the emotionally wrenching depiction of shameful state-sponsored violence, local vigilantism, and political cover-up during the focal decade. For viewers, this exhibit did for south Texas what portrayals of African American lynching have done for the U.S. South.

Final Thoughts on the State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship

All of the responses to my thoughts on the state of the field of lynching history raise important issues for scholars to consider as they shape the direction of their research on lynching. I second William D. Carrigan’s call for scholars to do more to examine the globalization of the language of lynching, and Terrence Finnegan’s advocacy of an expanded lynching database that might, for example, incorporate more information about lynching victims. Along these lines, Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay will soon publish what promises to be an important book using an enhanced database built from manuscript census data to reconstruct the lives of African American lynching victims and their susceptibility to white violence in the postbellum South. Margaret Vandiver’s emphasis on what can be learned by studying lynchings that were prevented is well taken; happily E. M. Beck (and, I hope, others) are already pursuing research along these lines.1 I agree with Michael Ayers Trotti that lynching scholars should continue to promote regional and local studies and that the West (and I would add, the Midwest and the Northeast) was significantly different than the South, as I have described at considerable length elsewhere. The key and the challenge are to identify regional particularity as well as the larger significance of local tendencies within a broader context. I also concur with Trotti that scholars should incorporate a wide scope in studying modes of racial terror, with the inclusion not only of lynching but also of violence that was sometimes legally implemented and sometimes performed by individuals rather than groups. I am confused, though, by Trotti’s discussion of lynching and the death penalty; he seems to be arguing first that historians should not study lynching in relation to law and the death penalty and later that they should do exactly this. I heartily agree with the latter view. Lynching and the death penalty had (and have) a significant, albeit complex, relationship, as I have discussed briefly in my state-of-the-field essay and at length elsewhere. Of course, capital punishment was already racialized and prominent in the nineteenth century, but lynching and the death penalty nonetheless developed in a profoundly interwoven discourse beginning with capital punishment reform and the emergence of the

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. Koritha Mitchell.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930. Koritha Mitchell.

The U.S. South and Europe: transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The U.S. South is a distinctive political and cultural force-not only in the eyes of Americans, but also in the estimation of many Europeans. The region played a distinctive role as a major agricultural center and the source of much of the wealth in early America, but it has also served as a catalyst for the nation's only civil war, and later, as a battleground in violent civil rights conflicts. Once considered isolated and benighted by the international community, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among popular audiences and academic observers on both sides of the Atlantic. In The U.S. South and Europe, editors Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg have assembled contributions that interpret a number of political, cultural, and religious aspects of the transatlantic relationship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors discuss a variety of subjects, including European colonization, travel accounts of southerners visiting Europe, and the experiences of German immigrants who settled in the South. The collection also examines slavery, foreign recognition of the Confederacy as a sovereign government, the lynching of African Americans and Italian immigrants, and transatlantic religious fundamentalism. Finally, it addresses international perceptions of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement as a framework for understanding race relations in the United Kingdom after World War II. Featuring contributions from leading scholars based in the United States and Europe, this illuminating volume explores the South from an international perspective and offers a new context from which to consider the region's history.

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 by Koritha Mitchell (review)

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 by Koritha Mitchell (review)

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930. By Koritha Mitchell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory. Edited by Evelyn M. Simien. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewLiving with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930. By Koritha Mitchell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory. Edited by Evelyn M. Simien. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.Sandy AlexandreSandy AlexandreMassachusetts Institute of Technology Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 38, Number 3Spring 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/668555 Views: 44Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. By Amy Louise Wood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009; 368 pp.; illustrations. $43.95 cloth, $26.95 paper, e-book available. Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930. By Koritha Mitchell. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011; 272 pp.; illustrations. $40.00 cloth, $28.00 paper

<i>Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940.</i> By Amy Louise Wood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009; 368 pp.; illustrations. $43.95 cloth, $26.95 paper, e-book available. <i>Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930.</i> By Koritha Mitchell. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011; 272 pp.; illustrations. $40.00 cloth, $28.00 paper

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 by Koritha Mitchell (review)

Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 by Koritha Mitchell (review)