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Lynching in the New South and The Roots of Rough Justice: From Southern Exceptionalism to a Transnational History of American Lynching

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2020

Manfred Berg
Manfred Berg*
Affiliation:
Heidelberg University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: manfred.berg@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de
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Abstract

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Keywords

lynchingNew Southtransnational historyAmerican exceptionalism
Type
Special Forum: Lynching in the New South A Quarter of a Century Later
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 136 - 142
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Pfeifer, Michael J., The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 See the reviews by Rable, George C., Journal of American History 81:4 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 1749; Dinnerstein, Leonard, Florida Historical Quarterly 73:2 (1994)Google Scholar: 251–52; Newby, I.A., Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 92:1 (1994)Google Scholar: 99–101; Ingalls, Robert P., American Historical Review 99:5 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 1758–59.

3 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 8.

4 Wright, George C., Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings Mob Rule, and ‘Legal Lynchings’ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990 Google Scholar); for individual case studies, see esp. McGovern, James R., Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Smead, Howard, Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

5 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 16.

6 See Berg, Manfred, The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 2005), 51–52 Google Scholar, 65–68, 124–25, 130; on the NAACP’s lobbying efforts, see Zangrando, Robert L., The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

7 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 209, 245; cf. the review by Michal R. Belknap, Law and History Review 13:1 (1995): 154–56.

8 I have developed my argument in the following publications: Berg, Manfred, “Das Ende der Lynchjustiz im amerikanischen Süden,” Historische Zeitschrift 283:3 (2006): 583–616 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Criminal Justice, Law Enforcement and the End of Lynching in the South” in Criminal Justice in the United States and Germany: History, Modernization and Reform, eds. Manfred Berg et al. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2006): 29–42; Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 144–64; “Lynching and the Ambivalence of Modernity” in Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times 1890s to 1940s, eds. Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff (München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012), 151–68.

9 For a forceful argument that “the state took over the role of the mob,” see Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 213, chapters 7 and 8; cf. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 256; Pfeifer, Michael J., Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 2–3 Google Scholar, 122–47, 149. Historians of lynching will be familiar with the controversy whether there is a statistical correlation between lynchings and the death penalty. Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E.M., A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 98–111 Google Scholar, claim there is none at all but then, oddly, concede that “it is still possible that the two types of lethal punishment were connected in the minds of the members of some southern lynch mobs” (111). Arguably, historians who have studied the discourse on lynching will agree that that the alleged weakness and leniency of the criminal justice was the most important defense of lynching both in the South and in the United States at large. Margaret Vandiver pays more attention to this discursive connection. As to the substitution hypothesis, she did not find consistent patterns; see Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 176.

10 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 3, 14; see also his “Introduction” in Under Sentence of Death. Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3–4.

11 Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 5–7; see also his more recent critique of regional parochialism, “Introduction,” in Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South, ed. Michael J. Pfeifer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 2–3.

12 See the review by Gonzales-Day, Ken, Journal of American History 98:3 (2011): 842 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 3.

14 Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 14 and passim.

15 Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 68–81; see also Pfeifer, Michael J.. “The Northern United States and the Genesis of Racial Lynching: The Lynching of African Americans in the Civil War Era,” Journal of American History 97:3 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 621–35.

16 Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 32–46; see the reviews by Waldrep, Christopher, The Historian 74:2 (2012 CrossRefGoogle Scholar): 367–68; and Wood, Amy, Pacific Historical Review 82:3 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: 446–47; Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 5–6. It should be noted that historians have by no means ignored the key importance of slavery for the history of lynching and mob violence; see, e.g., Grimsted, David, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, Part II, 85–178. Grimsted counts more than 400 slaves who were killed by mobs during insurrection scares, Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861, 135. This is a category that Pfeifer deliberately excluded from his list.

17 See the reviews by Baker, Bruce E., American Historical Review 116:5 (2011)Google Scholar: 1476–77; and Nation, Richard, Indiana Magazine of History 108:3 (2012)Google Scholar: 290–91.

18 Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 3–5, 89 and passim.

19 Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 39–44 (quote).

20 Cf. Amy Woods review of Roots of Rough Justice, Pacific Historical Review 82:3 (2013): 446–47; for a similar critique of Pfeifer’s call for national and international studies; see Michael Ayers Trotti, “The Multiple States and Fields of Lynching Scholarship,” Journal of American History 101:3 (2014): 852–53; Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., American Lynching (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, IX–XIII.

21 Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 5, 7–11, 111–12 fn. 22; see Berg, Popular Justice, X, 194–95 and passim.

22 Silkey, Sarah, Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism (Athens: Georgia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Carrigan, William D. and Webb, Clive. Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 4; Clive Webb, "The Lynching of Sicilian Immigrants in the American South, 1886–1910," American Nineteenth Century History 3:1 (2002): 45–76, esp. 63–68; Carrigan, William D. and Waldrep, Christopher, eds. Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013)Google Scholar; see also several contributions in Berg, Manfred and Wendt, Simon, eds., Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Pfeifer, Michael J., Global Lynching and Collective Violence: Asia, Africa, and the Middle East: Volume 1; The Americas and Europe: Volume 2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Evans, Ivan, Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 15–22; for a similar argument, see Christopher Saunders, “Lynching: The South African Case,” Berg and Wendt, Globalizing Lynching History, 87–100; Thurston, Robert, Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011)Google Scholar, esp. 3–11, 39–42, 405–407; Pfeifer, Introduction, Global Lynching and Collective Violence: Volume 1, 9–10, fn. 2.

25 See, e.g., Godoy, Angelina S., Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Godoy, “When ‘Justice’ Is Criminal: Lynchings in Contemporary Latin America,” Theory and Society 33:6 (2006): 621–51; Goldstein, Daniel M., The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Timothy Clark, “Lynching in Another America: Race, Class, and Gender in Brazil” in Globalizing Lynching History, 187–205.

26 Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 3.

27 See Pfeifer, Roots of Rough Justice, 4.