Literature Review

Data and Methods

In this article, I take a multi-modal historical sociological approach to illustrate how the politics of abolition guided Tuskegee Institute’s sociological program and empirical approach to studying U.S. lynchings. This approach is “multi-modal” in that it combines the methods of historical research with qualitative and quantitative analytical tools leveraged by contemporary sociologists to analyze biographical data, narratives, and archival data. This dynamic approach offers three clear benefits. First, analyzing biographical data enables one to understand how people and institutions become who they are to better evaluate the motivations behind their actions. Second, evaluating narratives is critical to discern the politics of problem definition and how we understand the processes individual or institutional actors use when making decisions about interventions to problems (Hacker et al., Reference Hacker, Hertel-Fernandez, Pierson and Thelen2022; Jacobs Reference Jacobs2006). Third, examining archival data not only provides an expansive view of the inner workings of institutions but also sheds light on the types of data leveraged to mobilize empirically informed policy interventions. As a sociologist trained in Black Studies, public policy, and numerous methodological approaches (including historical methods), I seek to apply the breadth and depth of my formal research training to enrich the overall analyses of the current investigation.Footnote ⁴

In recent years, several social scientists (and notable sociologists) have used similar approaches to advance empirical research on numerous topics that are germane to the present study. To advance the empirical study of lynching, researchers have scrutinized Tuskegee Institute’s archival data and incorporated data from other primary sources and newspapers to enumerate lynching records (Gonzales-Day Reference Gonzales-Day2006; Seguin and Rigby, Reference Seguin and Rigby2019; Tolnay and Beck, Reference Tolnay and Beck1995). Political scientist Megan Ming Francis (Reference Francis2014) evaluated the NAACP’s internal documents, biographies, government records, archival data, and external publications (e.g., legislative proposals) to document the comprehensive motivations and tactics sustaining decades of lobbying efforts to enact federal anti-lynching legislation in the United States. A handful of prominent sociologists have independently examined W. E. B. Du Bois’s known writings, publications, archival sources, and institutional records (among other sources) to unearth his underappreciated contributions to the discipline of sociology (Itzigsohn and Brown, Reference Itzigsohn and Brown2020; Jakubek and Wood, Reference Jakubek and Wood2018; Morris Reference Morris2015; Wright Reference Wright2016). Additionally, other historically trained sociologists have analyzed biographical data, narratives, and institutional records to shed light on the contributions of lesser-known Black scholars and HBCUs to sociology (see Brooks and Wright, Reference Brooks and Wright2020; Stanfield Reference Stanfield2016; Wright Reference Wright2020). The current study forwards this dynamic tradition of sociological and social scientific inquiry to investigate the following research question: What are the political and practical objectives that guided Tuskegee Institute’s sociological program and institutional interventions?

To answer this research question, I collected data for this article in three phases starting in June 2018. In the first, I consulted the Papers of Monroe N. Work at the Tuskegee University Archives in Alabama. This archival data collection includes drafts of major research studies, speeches, internal communications, external correspondences, newspaper clippings, and biographical sketches. These primary source documents were especially useful for explaining why Tuskegee’s Department of Research and Records was created (section 1), the practical objectives that motivated Tuskegee’s anti-lynching research activism (section 2), and the abolitionist interventions they fought for using a data-driven approach (section 3).

In the second phase, I wanted to understand how Tuskegee Institute represented its policy positions to the public. This interest led me to scrutinize narratives present in publications by the Institute and its affiliates. Institutional publications (e.g., volumes of The Negro Year Book) provided insights into Tuskegee’s commitment to the self-determination of Black people globally (section 1) and the abolition of lynching in the United States (section 2). Publications by early affiliates of Tuskegee (i.e., faculty) also confirmed the Institute’s commitments to Black economic liberation (section 1) and the abolition of lynching and practices of carceral punishment (section 3).

In the third phase, I employed a biographical approach using secondary sources to make sense of the key figures influencing Tuskegee’s institutional interventions and research practices. I emphasized evaluating elements of professional biographies that are under-discussed in existing research. As Tuskegee’s first university president, Booker T. Washington left an indelible mark on the culture of the institution and the functional purpose it sought to fulfill in Alabama and across the U.S. South. As the founding director of Tuskegee’s Department of Research and Records, Monroe N. Work was responsible for the leadership of all research activities and the global dissemination of institutional publications from 1908 until his retirement in 1938. Certainly, Washington and Work are not the only contributors who made Tuskegee Institute’s interventions and research practices possible. Yet, their positions as the inaugural employees in their respective institutional roles give them unique insights that are particularly relevant for answering the key research question guiding this study (sections 1–2).

Although individuals are extremely influential in shaping institutional priorities and practices, institutions embody the strategic decisions that individuals make and represent their policy positions in public. The policy positions of Tuskegee University today are not emblematic of the priorities of Tuskegee Institute in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, I also examined institutional biographies to capture Tuskegee Institute’s sustained interest in cultivating an anti-poverty program to catalyze the economic liberation of Black Americans in the aftermath of U.S. slavery (section 1). These institutional commitments led to not only the cultivation of public-facing outlets (i.e., practical educational platforms) but also to the development of novel areas of disciplinary study within the university.

To effectively navigate these disparate data sources, I grounded my fieldwork in the theoretical orientation that sociologist Marcus Hunter (Reference Hunter2018) calls “Black Logics, Black Methods.” This framework is ideal because it starts with the basic premise that Black people are human agents deserving of the right to respect, life, and freedom on their own terms. Moreover, as an analytical frame, it enables researchers to understand how the intuitions driving Black political thought (i.e., Black logics) are expressed through media or vernacular that are accessible to Black people (i.e., Black methods). Taking an inductive and interpretive approach of this nature is essential for the current study because the actors I am studying are no longer living (Hunter Reference Hunter2013; Vaughan Reference Vaughan2004). Likewise, using historical documents to illustrate Tuskegee’s commitments to interventionism and principles of abolition requires knowing how Tuskegee might talk about these subjects to Southern (or national) audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries using subtle and explicit language cues (Anderson et al., Reference Anderson, Austin, Holloway and Kulkarni2012; Geertz Reference Geertz1983). This led me to search for overt references to “abolition” and to triangulate covert references to logics of abolition (see Rocha Beardall et al., Reference Beardall, Theresa and Lewis2024; Clair and Woog, Reference Clair and Woog2022) with documented practices across the myriad biographical, narrative, and archival data sources consulted for this manuscript.

Additionally, a portion of the data sourced for this study were presented numerically in lists or tabular formats that followed early twentieth century research conventions. Thus, to make this data more intuitive for contemporary audiences, I used twenty-first century visualization techniques to re-render important quantitative information that Monroe Work represented in 1913 and 1915 about documented slave insurrections (section 1) and practices of carceral punishment (section 3). This methodological decision allowed me to demonstrate the influence of abolitionism on the Institute’s work and show how Monroe Work and Tuskegee sought to undermine racist arguments about Black criminality by marshaling the original empirical data they used to substantiate their arguments (see Conwell and Loughran, Reference Conwell and Loughran2024). Cumulatively, this careful multi-modal approach enabled me to highlight the political and practical reasons why Tuskegee Institute desired to (1) raise consciousness through research dissemination and place-based investment, (2) organize social and political elites to abolish lynching locally, and (3) marshal empirical evidence to abolish lynching and practices of carceral punishment.

The empirical findings of this study are organized into three distinct sections. The first section evaluates the professional formation of Monroe Work and the abolitionist values that he and Booker T. Washington used to inform Tuskegee Institute’s institutional interventions. Building on these insights, the second section illuminates how the transformative potential of abolition in the South anchored Tuskegee’s practical approach to anti-lynching research activism. Finally, the third section explicates the influence of abolitionism on Tuskegee Institute’s research and showcases how the Institute used a data-driven approach to dispel myths about Black criminality and advance explicitly abolitionist policy interventions.

Building Consciousness through Tuskegee’s Negro Year Book and Rural Sociology Program

In this section, I will demonstrate how Tuskegee Institute sought to build consciousness and expand access to communal vitality for Black people in the post-Emancipation U.S. South through the dissemination of The Negro Year Book and the establishment and the recurring activities of the Institute’s rural sociology program. These pioneering efforts were spearheaded under the institutional leadership of Booker T. Washington and research oversight of Monroe Work with critical support from Florence Work, Jessie Guzman, and their colleagues at Tuskegee.

Monroe N. Work was born August 15, 1866, in Iredell County, North Carolina, to parents who were formerly enslaved. He spent his childhood living in North Carolina until his family relocated to Cairo, IL, and he eventually enrolled in an integrated high school in Arkansas City, KS, to pursue formal education in his early twenties (Chandler and Ferguson, Reference Chandler and Ferguson2010).Footnote ⁵ As an adult, Monroe N. Work pursued advanced religious and sociological education—at Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, respectively—to discover solutions to some of the intractable social issues facing twentieth-century African Americans (McMurry Reference McMurry1980, Reference McMurry1985; Wright Reference Wright2009). Under the mentorship of sociologist William I. Thomas at the University of Chicago’s Department of Sociology, Work cultivated a global diasporic perspective about the Black community and developed a critical consciousness for how to combat racial prejudice in America using social scientific tools (McMurry Reference McMurry1985),Footnote ⁶ a passion that drew him to W. E. B. Du Bois and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory as a graduate student (McMurry Reference McMurry1980; Wright Reference Wright2009).

W. E. B. Du Bois was a pioneering sociologist and transdisciplinary mixed-methodologist whose organizing efforts and collaborations with numerous research-trained scientists and community-embedded researchers led to the creation of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (aka the “Atlanta School”)—“the first American school” and “Black school of sociology” (Wright Reference Wright2002, Reference Wright2016, Reference Wright2020). Work was fascinated by the work of Du Bois and the Atlanta School, and after graduating from the University of Chicago with his master’s degree in 1903, he moved to Georgia to take a job at Savannah State University and maintained involvement with the research program of the Atlanta School. According to Wright (Reference Wright2020), Work contributed to Atlanta School research through four publications, covering the Black church in Chicago, Black Americans’ involvement in the criminal legal system, and the importance of Black business ownership and patronage for addressing the material needs of Black people after WWI (Wright Reference Wright2009). In 1908, Work was poached by Booker T. Washington to help Tuskegee Institute build a sociologically informed research program that eventually filled the void of Black sociology following the departure of Du Bois in 1913 (Wright Reference Wright2020). As fellow faculty member James Preston recounts, Work infused at Tuskegee a pride in Africa and its achievements which, in turn, led to the development of Tuskegee and Booker T. Washington’s involvement in the African continent.Footnote ⁷ Despite its ambitious nature, establishing such a research program was part of Booker T. Washington’s vision for how to practically lead Black people “up from slavery” in a post-Emancipation U.S. South.

It is necessary to appreciate that Booker T. Washington’s praxis and entrepreneurial prowess were rooted in genuine desires to materially realize Black freedom and economic autonomy and improve race relations in the United States (Work Reference Work1933; Wright Reference Wright2020). Read another way, Washington was invested in identifying the root of historical inequities among Black Americans, addressing and reducing how they manifested in everyday life, and building a curriculum for collective community care-building that could thrive within—and beyond—the context of a White supremacist racial caste system in the United States. This motivation led him to develop an institution—Tuskegee Institute—dedicated to promoting Black social and economic mobility as a part of a more comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. Washington was astutely aware of how the material conditions of resource deprivation originating in slavery remained a permanent feature in the daily life of African Americans, most notably those imposed by the “color line” (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois2003). Yet, he remained confident that Black people would not—and did not have to submit—to these impositions if they had adequate resources to circumvent their circumstances. Booker T. Washington understood that mitigating cycles of intergenerational trauma within Southern Black communities post-Emancipation meant developing practical solutions to deal with the lingering consequences of slavery that people faced in everyday life: (including, but not limited to) agricultural scarcity, economic precarity via inadequate access to home or business ownership, pervasive unemployment, and lack of access to vocational or technical educational programs (Washington [1901] Reference Washington1995). Thus, the rural sociology program was cultivated at Tuskegee Institute to address these needs and mobilize Booker T. Washington’s anti-poverty strategy through the 1) applied rural sociology program; 2) Tuskegee Negro Farmers’ conference; and 3) Movable School interventions.Footnote ⁸

As sociologist Earl Wright argues, Tuskegee Institute was the home of the second prominent Black school of American sociology. It was the second HBCU to follow the example of Atlanta University to establish a sociology program “whereby its students were taught to use their sociological imagination to analyze, investigate, and understand the social, economic, and physical conditions impacting Blacks” (Wright Reference Wright2020, p. 77). However, the fundamental purpose of Tuskegee’s sociological program was different from that of its peers at the Atlanta or Chicago Schools. In the spirit of reducing inequities in everyday social life, Tuskegee Institute established the first applied program of rural sociology in the United States, meaning that Tuskegee “was the first academic entity to engage in an institutionalized and annual research inquiry on the social, economic, and physical condition of rural folk with the objective of developing solutions to address the problems discovered” (Wright Reference Wright2020, p. 95).

Within this emphasis, Booker T. Washington used Tuskegee’s institutional resources to lead the university in establishing a renowned annual conference series: the Tuskegee Negro Conference (aka Tuskegee Negro Farmers’ Conference). The conference’s purpose was to “show the masses of colored people how to lift themselves up in their industrial, educational, moral and religious life” by convening “the representatives of the common, hard-working farmers and mechanics—the bone and sinew of the Negro race—ministers and teachers” (Johnson Reference Johnson1896, p. 5). It also allowed for facilitating important discussions among attendees about how they might approach some of the most pernicious agricultural, economic, and health-related problems facing rural Black communities (Holsey Reference Holsey1922; Johnson Reference Johnson1896; Jones Reference Jones1991; Scott Reference Scott1904; Work Reference Work1933; Wright Reference Wright2020). Another core purpose of the Tuskegee Farmers’ Conference was to serve as “one (annual) day of practical sociology.” As Wright (Reference Wright2020) notes:

While the evidence marshaled to support the annual Tuskegee Negro Conferences was produced using rigorous social scientific methods, Tuskegee ensured that the educational materials and proceedings of the conferences were accessible to all attendees (or others who could not make the journey). This practice not only reflects Tuskegee’s innate commitment to creating communities of care but also reveals its interest in creating safe spaces for restorative care-building among socioeconomically diverse Black Americans. It was no secret that Washington and Work believed that Tuskegee Institute and its graduates should be of “so much service to the country that the President of the United States would one day come and see it” (Washington [1901] Reference Washington1995, p. 148).Footnote ⁹ Washington’s fervent commitment to having Tuskegee graduates use sociological tools to create practical social interventions to ameliorate resource inequities exceeded his commitment to merely using those tools to produce academic research on populations impacted by resource deprivation for its own sake (or to simply advance interests of higher education institutions more generally vs. the collective interests of Black Americans; Work Reference Work1933).

From launching the “one day of practical sociology” program, Booker T. Washington recognized there was a need for the information disseminated at annual conferences beyond the rural county where they were situated in Alabama. Thus, as demand for the Tuskegee Negro Conference grew around the U.S. South, Washington created a mobile university in 1906—aka the “Movable School”—for Black communities across the South to access the timely research, curriculum, and agricultural interventions being cultivated (Wright Reference Wright2020). Although the Movable School was an effective intervention for mobilizing the research generated by Tuskegee’s applied rural sociology program across the South, an opportunistic grant awarded by the Carnegie Foundation led Booker T. Washington and Monroe N. Work to consider how the institution could disseminate Tuskegee’s research beyond these three targeted interventions—the applied rural sociology program, Tuskegee Negro Farmers’ conference, and Movable School—to benefit Black people across international borders. They were determined to use their entrepreneurial prowess to extend the rich empirical research tradition of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory by procuring and disseminating “so many interesting facts” about Black populations across the diaspora. Washington and Work believed that this would allow “(people) to draw proper conclusions” about interventions needed to improve the social, economic, political, and cultural welfare of Black people in America and across the world in the twentieth century (Washington [1901] Reference Washington1995, p. 119).

Therefore, Tuskegee Institute went to great lengths in the early 1900s and 1910s to maintain a pro-Black sociological research agenda that was mindful of these political commitments through its dissemination of The Negro Year Book. Its topics ranged from the history of slavery in the U.S./European colonies to local elections in Southern counties to historical or contemporary electoral politics on the African continent to disparities in educational outcomes for Black Americans, making The Negro Year Book an extremely important publication. Not only was this publication known for the extraordinary richness of its content, but it was also known for the depth and breadth of its bibliography. While the first edition of The Negro Year Book in 1912 had a bibliographic reference list of 408 classified references, this list grew to 2875 classified references by 1925–1926.Footnote ¹⁰

It would be dishonest to say that Monroe Work, as the inaugural Director of Research and Records at Tuskegee Institute, was solely responsible for the success of The Negro Year Book. Biographical accounts mention that his wife, Florence Work (aka Florence Henderson), played an active role in all of his research projects and gave him space to do his work without interruption. As Jessie P. Guzman, a Black woman whom Work first employed as a research assistant in 1923 and who became Director in 1946, recalls that “(Florence always) helped him in all of his endeavors. In preparation of the manuscripts for the early editions of The Negro Year Book, she worked as steadily as he” (Guzman Reference Guzman1949, p. 459). Likewise, historian Linda McMurry notes that Florence often “aided his research by reading through various materials and marking what he needed to see. One colleague remembered frequently passing by the house at night and seeing both of them sitting under a lamp reading. In addition, Florence Work actively participated in the larger research projects…” (McMurry Reference McMurry1985, p. 58). Unfortunately, we know very little about Florence Work outside of second-hand accounts like these, which draw on correspondences between Monroe and his wife. While some primary source data on Jessie P. Guzman exist at the Tuskegee University archives, she also has received scant attention in biographical accounts about Monroe N. Work or the incredible research produced by Tuskegee Institute under his leadership (see Beck and Tolnay, Reference Beck and Tolnay1986; McMurry Reference McMurry1985; Wright Reference Wright2020). Nonetheless, the lack of attention Guzman has received does not distract from the incredible feats that Work was able to help Tuskegee reach with the support of these brilliant Black women while serving as the inaugural and longstanding editor of The Negro Year Book.

In addition to the aforementioned topics, Work used The Negro Year Book as a vehicle to 1) democratize information about the positive achievements and perennial challenges of Black communities globally, 2) spread awareness of the incidence and prevalence of lynchings across the United States to audiences within (and beyond) the South, and 3) contribute to Black freedom movements by disseminating information about global abolition and resistance movements led by diasporic Black populations against slavery or colonialism. Tuskegee’s sustained commitment to these three objectives reflects a sustained commitment to fundamental aims of abolitionism: creating sites of collective resistance among Black people across the African diaspora to protect them from historical and contemporary state-sanctioned violence. For instance, evidence from Tuskegee Institute’s detailed records suggest that Africans began revolting and resisting their newfound enslavement on America’s shores as early as 1526 in what is now South Carolina. Likewise, the Institute discovered that additional slave insurrections (see Table 1)—inclusive of rumored, failed, planned, and successful attempts—occurred in Virginia, New York, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, Louisiana, and West Virginia (Work Reference Work1915).

Table 1.

Slave Insurrections by U.S. State and Insurrection Type, 1526–1859

Source: Work (Reference Work1915, pp. 96-100)

Note: The data presented in this table is in alphabetical order by state and chronological order by type of slave insurrection. In the archival documents, Monroe Work documents these insurrections chronologically and details the names of specific counties or localities where they transpired.

Another characteristic of Tuskegee Institute that is discernible from its archival records is its interventionist inclinations. Tuskegee Institute desired to be an institution of higher education that could create liberatory Black futures with Black people in it. As an interventionist subscribing to this mission, Work took great care in creating “racial data storms” (Bell [1992] Reference Bell2018; Bobo Reference Bobo2006) that might inspire policymakers or concerned audiences to deploy progressive policy interventions to address perennial health and safety concerns of Black Americans. He understood that the predicate of eliminating the abject poverty facing Black Americans in rural and urban communities was abundance; it would be impossible to address the inequities facing resource-deprived Black populations across the United States without first investing resources in interventions that might fundamentally transform their social condition.

By championing and disseminating The Negro Year Book publication, Washington and Monroe N. Work sought to build on the legacy of the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory by becoming the authoritative source for objective, scientific data on Black Americans and populations across the African diaspora. With the support of his wife Florence Work, Monroe was able to fully commit himself to these objectives. Despite Washington and Work’s genuine interest in using The Negro Year Book publication to contribute to national and global Black freedom and resistance movements, they recognized that getting traction on these goals might require a more nuanced, local approach. They knew that it would take tremendous effort to move from the engrained resource deprivation facing Black communities across America to transform them into collectives of resource abundance. For them, the cultivation and perpetual maintenance of these resources would ensure that Black people would survive and thrive in the future. Both men were aware that Black Southerners were often unconsciously “enmeshed in an environment of systematic repression in the land of White supremacy” (McMurry Reference McMurry1985, p. 30) where lynching was a normalized and tolerated social practice. Thus, Monroe N. Work, Florence Work, Jessie Guzman, and their colleagues at Tuskegee Institute took it upon themselves to reach audiences that they believed were capable of changing the status quo.

Galvanizing Southern Whites and Political Elites to Abolish Lynching Locally

A threat to community safety, lynching was engrained in the American “status quo” (Cox Reference Cox1945) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the words of pioneering anti-lynching advocate and citizen sociologist Ida B. Wells-Barnett (Reference Wells-Barnett and Guy-Sheftall1995), lynching spread from the West to the South on a self-fulfilling quest to fabricate “…a reason to condone its own behavior, and when finding none, it operated extrajudicially through ‘shooting, drowning, hanging, and burning [its victims] alive’” (p. 71). Although lynching was actively contested since its inception, the strategic efforts of Black women and civic organizations across Black communities were instrumental in mobilizing Whites (White women in particular) to demand an end to lynching and rape in Southern society (Feimster Reference Feimster2009).

The singular organizing efforts of Ida B. Wells-Barnett to confront the atrocity of lynching are largely responsible for provoking the U.S. anti-lynching movement. As Wright (Reference Wright2020) notes, “Wells-Barnett knew the inroad to making substantive impacts on anti-lynching legislation rested first on the basic acknowledgement that a problem existed” (p. 110) through the presentation of “objective facts” produced by White reporters. She leveraged this empirical data to galvanize initial support for the anti-lynching movement (Francis Reference Francis2014; Giddings Reference Giddings2008). Following the example of Wells-Barnett, numerous university- and community-based researchers and civil rights organizations began compiling their own statistical records of U.S. lynchings—comparing data from White and Black-owned newspapers—to contribute to the elimination of lynching as a social practice (Lewis Reference Lewis2021). These anti-lynching advocates believed it was possible to appeal to the anti-lynching sensibilities of White Americans across the United States by highlighting “the absolute unreliability and recklessness of mobs” (Wells-Barnett ([1895] Reference Wells-Barnett2015, p. 37) to punish criminals for their social transgressions. These logics were carried forth by civil rights organizations and anti-lynching advocates in the twentieth century like the NAACP, which actively lobbied for federally sponsored anti-lynching legislation.

Black political organizations targeted federal legislative processes to build multiracial coalitions around the elimination of racial violence in the early to mid-twentieth century. Unfortunately, despite filing over 200 pieces of proposed anti-lynching legislation with the U.S. House of Representatives from 1909–1950, the NAACP was unsuccessful in passing federal anti-lynching legislation (Zangrando Reference Zangrando1980). However, the experiences it accumulated while pursuing these efforts led to an eventual recognition (by the NAACP and others): “Despite the federal government’s previous support of African American rights, the legislative process would no longer be the most productive venue to pursue an agenda focused on the protection of equal citizenship for African Americans” (Francis Reference Francis2014, p. 99). Thus, anti-lynching advocates like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, James Weldon Johnson, Jovita Idár, Mary Talbert, and Monroe N. Work re-dedicated themselves to promoting anti-lynching values through multifaceted public awareness campaigns targeting political elites and White Americans. From within this broader context of the U.S. anti-lynching movement, The Negro Year Book and Tuskegee’s empirical research on U.S. lynching was born, as Monroe Work and the institution sought to use the vehicle of research activism to galvanize conscious anti-lynching collectives at the local level.

Tuskegee Institute strategically targeted political elites and White Americans in the U.S. South with The Negro Year Book’s empirical research on U.S. lynchings to practically involve White audiences in divesting from lynching as a social practice. Because Tuskegee knew that most lynchings occurred in the South and targeted members of the Black community, it focused on mobilizing these audiences, who were familiar with the horrors of lynching. Despite the pressure that Tuskegee and Monroe N. Work consistently faced to adapt their definition of what constituted a “lynching” in the United States, they held to a strict definitionFootnote ¹¹ that was intelligible to Southern audiences in a comprehensive effort to “hold the South to the main issue, ‘the eradication of the lynching evil within its own borders.’”Footnote ¹² According to Monroe Work, Tuskegee’s lynching records brought awareness of objective facts about U.S. lynching to “[give] the opportunity for agitation concerning lynching to originate in the South.”Footnote ¹³ This was important to the anti-lynching movement because it facilitated “[giving] opportunity for organized efforts to originate and operate in the South for the eradication of the lynching evil” (emphasis added).Footnote ¹⁴

Therein, the purpose of the research agenda on U.S. lynchings in The Negro Year Book must be seen in concert with the expressed interventionist motivations of Tuskegee Institute and the 1) applied rural sociology program; 2) Tuskegee Negro Farmers’ conference; and 3) Movable School interventions. Tuskegee recognized that “the eradication of the lynching evil”—aka the abolition of lynching—had multiple benefits. Abolishing lynching would allow creating not only tangibly liberatory Black futures with Black people in it but also safe spaces for restorative care-building among socioeconomically diverse Americans—the same Americans who had been exposed to the mutually reinforcing traumas caused by White supremacist domestic terrorism, lynching, and resource deprivation across the United States.Footnote ¹⁵ To achieve these goals, Tuskegee sought to use its empirical research to inspire White Southerners and political elites to eliminate contemporary practices of lynching through debunking frequently cited myths that justified carceral punishment.

Exposing Crime Myths to Abolish Lynching and Practices of Carceral Punishment

The myths that Tuskegee aimed to disprove through its research on U.S. lynchings questioned the legitimacy of the twentieth-century U.S. prison-industrial complex. Ample social science research illuminates the foundational anti-Black logics of the U.S. criminal-legal system in its efforts to criminalize Black Americans (Alexander Reference Alexander2010; Haley Reference Haley2016; Hinton Reference Hinton2016; Hinton and Cook, Reference Hinton and Cook2021; Muhammad Reference Muhammad2010; Murakawa Reference Murakawa2014) and other racially minoritized populations (Lytle Hernández Reference Lytle Hernández2017; Martinez Reference Martinez2018; Ross Reference Ross1998). Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois ([1899] Reference Du Bois1996) acknowledged that allegations of criminality were monopolized in the nineteenth century, noting “(Black people) were arrested for less cause and given longer sentences than Whites. Great numbers of those arrested and committed for trial were never brought to trial so their guilt could not be proven or disproven” (p. 239). Although some might think of crime and criminality as matters concerning solely the contemporary U.S. criminal-legal system, they are also essential for understanding lynching as a historical social practice.

Crime is a salient issue for understanding histories of lynching in the United States because the mere allegation of “criminal behavior” often was sufficient grounds to lead a person to be 1) lynched or 2) incarcerated and subsequently lynched at the hands of a few (or many) accomplices. Despite the promulgation of false narratives about the incorrigible licentiousness and criminal tendencies of Black people (Black men in particular; Muhammad Reference Muhammad2010), these narratives were not empirically verifiable. Work and Tuskegee Institute were attuned to this discrepancy, so it became the foundation of their empirically driven research activism around lynching in the United States. Monroe Work astutely observed that the persistent phenomenon of “Black crime” in the South was actually non-existent prior to the civil war.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, while many people assumed that crime and the imprisonment of Black people occurred more frequently in the South than in the North, the reverse was true; as Work argued using data re-rendered in Figure 1, crime rates among African Americans in the North surpassed those in the South. Today, this evidence wouldn’t be evidence of crime, but evidence of imprisonment. But this was the best data Monroe Work had to dispel Black criminality in the early nineteenth century.

Figure 1.

Number of Black Prisoners in Northern and Southern States

Sources: Work, Monroe N. “Negro Criminality in the South.” TUA 97.001, Box 5 Folder 7. Papers of Monroe N. Work (1866–1943), Archives, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL, p. 2; Work (Reference Work1913, p. 75).

Note: No formal names associated with original data tables in source materials. The word “Black” was substituted for “Negroe” at the author’s discretion in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

This evidence reveals additional insights. Not only were Work and the Tuskegee Institute aware of how to differentiate the fallacious and substantive connections between crime, lynching, and incarceration, but they also knew that Black people were being exploited more than other groups that had close proximity to the criminal-legal system.

Generally, Black people in the North and South were known to commit more crimes than “Whites,” but disaggregating “White”—which allows for comparison of individual U.S. emigrant groups—produces a different result (Muhammad Reference Muhammad2010). Here, Work found that despite the higher number of African Americans in the U.S. population entering the criminal-legal system, Black people were allegedly being incarcerated less frequently than members of various U.S. emigrant groups (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Net Difference Between 1904 Imprisonment Rates (Per 1000) of Polish, Canadian, French, Austrian, Italian, and Mexican Emigrants Relative to Black Americans

Sources: Work, Monroe N. “Negro Criminality in the South.” TUA 97.001, Box 5 Folder 7. Papers of Monroe N. Work (1866–1943), Archives, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, AL, p. 3; Work (Reference Work1913, p. 77).

Note: Author’s tabulations. Net difference measured as difference between Non-Black and Black imprisonment rates per 1000 (for each individual group). The net difference for the incarcerated Polish population is 0 because their imprisonment rate is also 2.7 per 1000, and the net differences for other emigrant groups are positive because they are greater than the imprisonment rate of Black Americans.

Effectively, Work discovered in the early twentieth century that the proportions of Russians, Canadians, French, Austrians, Italians, and Mexicans who were incarcerated in the United States in 1904 were reportedly higher than that of African Americans, even though numerically more Black Americans were behind bars (23,698 to be exact) than all other populations across ethnic groups (9,808 in total). However, he adroitly attributed these racially unequal incarceration rates to the presence of the convict leasing system in the post-war South and the ability of prisons (particularly in the South) to leverage their able-bodied Black detainees to meet labor shortages. As Work (Reference Work1913)Footnote ¹⁷ articulates:

These findings are significant for two reasons. First, the excuse of pervasive “criminality” was given by White people as a justification of the practice of lynching used against Black Americans and other racially-minoritized populations across the United States. Monroe Work understood that the criminalization of Black Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was being actively exploited both by everyday citizens (via lynching) and state governments (via convict leasing and peonage) because it was profitable. These practices were tolerated because they furthered private economic and White supremacist interests (Bonacich Reference Bonacich1972). Today, scholars of the U.S. convict leasing system have compellingly highlighted specific mechanisms that were used to promote these interests at the state level (Muller and Scharge, Reference Muller and Schrage2021) and nationally (Muller Reference Muller2021),Footnote ¹⁸ over 100 years after Monroe Work and his contemporaries illuminated their existence (see also Du Bois Reference Du Bois1904). Second, this evidence empirically demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute’s data-driven approach to anti-lynching advocacy also led to its substantive questioning of the fundamental purpose of the criminal-legal system and the United States of America’s twentieth-century incarceration practices.

As Figures 1 and 2 show, Monroe Work created important associations between lynching and crime to delegitimize normative practices of carceral punishment in an effort to divest from these institutional practices. However, it is also possible to analyze Work’s empirical research to detect how multiracial coalitions had successfully utilized abolition to transform the material realities of communities where “racism continues to be embedded” (Davis Reference Davis2005, p. 29). In monitoring the abolition of the convict lease system across the United States, focusing on Southern states, Monroe N. Work (Reference Work1913) writes:

This short passage provides important epistemological clarity. It reinforces that the genuine motivation of Monroe N. Work and Tuskegee Institute’s research agenda was the material realization of freedom and economic autonomy for Black Americans and others subject to resource deprivation following slavery’s dissolution in the United States. Additionally, it extends conventional understandings of Tuskegee Institute’s role as a historically Black institution of higher education actively using research activism to further the aims and purposes of abolitionist freedom and resistance movements in the twentieth century. Although this excerpt does not specifically reference capital punishment in the same way as others might expect of actors espousing contemporary abolitionist politics (Davis Reference Davis2005), Work’s consciousness about the efforts of—and possibilities being created by—(presumably) multiracial organizing coalitions abolishing convict leasing in Southern states demonstrates an optimism about the feasibility of abolition more broadly (see Bell Reference Bell2019).

Said differently, Work believed in the political feasibility of abolition in the South because it was a practice that the South was already actively sustaining. As a practical method of process improvement, abolition was helping states steeped in legacies of White supremacist domestic terrorism to unite across traditional race and class boundaries to divest from harmful practices that prevented those same states from engaging in processes of restorative care-building. Since Black and White women in the South were central to dismantling the cis-heteropatriarchal forces actively suppressing women’s suffrage (Feimster Reference Feimster2009) and the South—along with the United States—was learning abolition through actively divesting from the institution of slavery (Du Bois [1935] Reference Du Bois2007), Monroe Work and Tuskegee Institute reasoned that the South could also lead in the abolition of lynching from within its own borders. Although relative perceptions of Black social mobility led White people to embrace racism, criminalization, and resource deprivation as active practices post-Emancipation (Bonacich Reference Bonacich1972; Blumer Reference Blumer1958; Du Bois [1935] Reference Du Bois2007; Haley Reference Haley2016), they also led Black people to openly resist the material consequences of these impositions (Cohen Reference Cohen2004; Kelley Reference Kelley1994). Recognizing this, Monroe Work and Tuskegee sought to galvanize White southerners to abolish lynching and carceral punishment practices locally because they believed no one was absolved from the violence caused by White supremacist domestic terrorism. However, if Southern states, steeped in ongoing legacies of White supremacist domestic terrorism, were able to fully divest from these harmful practices, Tuskegee believed that the processes of institutional divestment and restorative communal care-building might be replicated elsewhere across the United States.

Through a dynamic approach, Tuskegee Institute used the empirical research analyses embedded in the annual Negro Year Book and the publications of Monroe N. Work to challenge White (Southern) Americans—White women in particular—to imagine new possibilities for the social and cultural traditions upheld by all Americans. Beyond merely conceding to the will of Southern Whites, Tuskegee Institute used its abolition-oriented, interventionist approach to lynching to inspire the abolition (synonymous with eradication) of lynching and carceral punishment from the South. The Institute’s research and insider knowledge of the social and material realities facing the South—in addition to its knowledge of Black history inside and outside of the United States—led Work and the Institute to the intuitive understanding that abolition was not foreign to the South because it was a practice that the South was actively sustaining. They fundamentally believed in the capacity of abolition to create liberatory Black futures with Black people in it and to mitigate cycles of intergenerational trauma experienced by White people (among other audiences) exposed to the ongoing violence of White supremacist domestic terrorism and resource deprivation. Thus, Tuskegee Institute and Monroe Work used the vehicle of empirically driven research activism to contribute to the creation of safe spaces for restorative care-building among socioeconomically diverse Americans in rural and urban environments across the United States.