New Directions in Southern Studies

Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940

Amy Louise Wood

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807878118
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life. Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.

PART I SPECTACLE

1 THEY WANT TO SEE THE THING DONE

Public Executions

WHEN HENRY HODGES, his wife, and their three children were found brutally murdered in their home six miles outside Statesboro, Georgia, the white people of that town and surrounding Bulloch County were whipped into a frenzy of horror and fear.

On the evening of 27 July 1904, Hodges, a yeoman farmer of modest means whose wife had recently inherited a small amount of money, was knocked down and robbed in his yard. The culprits proceeded to murder each member of the family with an axe. They then piled the bodies in one room and set a torch to the entire house. Suspicion immediately fell on a black man, Paul Reed, a tenant on the land of Hodges's neighbor. When questioned, Reed's wife revealed that her husband had confessed the crime to her, saying that he had committed it with his friend, Will Cato, a laborer on another nearby farm.¹

By the Saturday after the murders, thousands of white citizens had gathered in Statesboro, anticipating a lynching. Hundreds more gathered at the burned remains of the Hodges house. There, according to the Statesboro (Ga.) News, “They were met by the sight of the most awful scene that we have ever been called upon to witness. The smoke was still issuing from the smouldering ruins and the scent of the burning of human flesh filled the air.”² Such a crime had never before occurred in Bulloch County, a relatively prosperous county in the Georgia pine barrens, populated largely by white yeoman cotton farmers and a growing middle class in the county seat of Statesboro. The county had grown considerably since 1889, when the railroad connected it to outside markets. Statesboro, which increased in population from 525 in 1890 to nearly 2,500 in 1904, boasted a new courthouse, new churches, electric lights, and new telephone and water systems at the time of the lynching. It was “distinctly a town of the New South,” observed Ray Stannard Baker, a northern journalist who investigated the lynching for McClure's magazine.³ African Americans made up over 40 percent of the population, working mostly as farm laborers or in the growing turpentine industry, a key source of wealth and development in the county. But white residents, searching to place blame for the Hodges murders, pointed their fingers at the turpentine industry, which, since it required transitory labor, brought what they considered shiftless and disruptive young black men into the county.⁴ Many of these men, like Cato and Reed, stayed on to work on local farms, and white residents believed they raised the level of vice and crime in the county. White residents were filled with terror that they might meet the fate of the Hodges family at the hands of black men who lived on or near their land. This was a “community of good farmers moving along the even tenor of their way,” reported the Statesboro News, awakened “to the fact that they were living in constant danger and that human vampires lived in their midst, only awaiting the opportunity to blot out their lives by murder and the torch.”⁵

Amid this climate of racial fear and outrage, a public meeting was called in the county courthouse to decide whether to lynch Reed and Cato before they were brought to trial. The few men who attempted to persuade against any unlawful vengeance, including the mayor and several ministers, were met with silence. Even the “best citizens of the county” reportedly showed “little sympathy for the effort to protect the set of red handed devils who had committed this, the blackest crime that ever blasted the good name of our county and state.”⁶ No lynching was attempted at this point, however, largely because people became convinced that more blacks were involved in the crime and that Cato and Reed could provide essential testimony. The prisoners were removed to Savannah for safekeeping and brought back to Statesboro for their trial under guard from the state militia. Special trains were chartered from Savannah to bring in out of towners, and hundreds crowded the courthouse to witness the trial, which lasted one day. Rumors that Reed and Cato were members of a secret organization of blacks called the Before Day Club, which was conspiring to murder white farmers and their families, only amplified the sense of alarm throughout the county and intensified public interest in the trial. Reports quickly surfaced that such clubs existed across the state and the wider South.⁷

Before the trial had even started, most white citizens had already deemed the accused men guilty beyond all doubt. They wanted to see Reed and Cato convicted and punished swiftly and openly. In fact, more than a week before the trial began, the Statesboro (Ga.) News had printed an editorial calling for a public execution of the “bloody devils who did the terrible crime” on the grounds that “the people not only are anxious to know that these murderers are hanged high and hanged until they kick out their bloody and criminal existence between heaven and earth, but they want to see the thing done.” Although it conceded that such an execution would not “restore one of the unfortunate victims again,” the paper purported that “it will be at least some satisfaction to an outraged people, to see the thing happen.” Indeed, once Cato and Reed were convicted and sentenced to hang, the crowd in the courtroom almost immediately demanded that the presiding judge, Judge Daly, declare a public execution. Although Daly insisted that he lacked the power to authorize a public hanging, he assured the crowd that, as compensation, Cato and Reed would be held in Statesboro to await their sentence, keeping power in the hands of local authorities. But once it was rumored that the militia was arranging to send the prisoners back to Savannah, a mob of 75 to 100 men, aided by several local bailiffs, snatched Cato and Reed from the guards, whose weapons were reportedly unloaded. Almost 2,000 people watched as the mob led the two black men back to the site of the crime, the remains of the Hodges home. Overcome with the August heat, the mob stopped at a clearing in the woods two miles from town, chained the men to a tree stump, drenched them with kerosene, and lit them on fire.⁸

By burning them to death, the lynchers, in effect, reenacted the crime Cato and Reed had allegedly committed against the Hodgeses, performing a literal retaliatory vengeance on them. When some members of the mob had proposed hanging the men, the crowd had protested and demanded a burning, reportedly yelling, “They burned the Hodges and gave them no choice: burn the niggers!”⁹ The mob thus re-created the scene of “smouldering ruins” filled with the “stench of burning flesh” that witnesses had experienced at the Hodges house. They could now see the death that haunted their imaginations projected onto the two black men, an event that eased their worst fears by making them visible. The event could, for this reason, be celebrated without restraint. A local photographer snapped pictures, and afterward, the spectators scrambled for souvenirs. The chains that held the men were broken and distributed, as were pieces of the burned tree stump and charred bones. In an especially assertive act of defiance against the state, one young man brought remnants of bone back to town as an offering for Daly, who reacted with disgust.¹⁰

The excitement surrounding the lynching lasted for weeks, in some mea surebecause the rumors about the Before Day Club continued to fester. Posses of white men charged through the county threatening and whipping suspects and even lynching three other black men.¹¹ Many white citizens sympathetic to the lynching of Cato and Reed thought this spate of vigilantism excessive, but many others saw it as an unfortunate but necessary tactic to rid the county of undesirable black men and to ensure the safety of whites. The violence subsided only when county farmers began to note that many black laborers were fleeing the county just before the cotton harvest.¹²

Soon after the lynching of Reed and Cato, a court of inquiry was held, partly because of the national exposure the violence had brought to States-boro and partly because of the mob's obvious defiance of Daly's courtroom and the state militia. There, witnesses identified nine men who were directly involved in the lynching, but none were ever indicted. Three were farmers and neighbors of the Hodgeses: George Deal, a well-off farmer, who testified at the trial and was seen in the mob on the courthouse lawn, and Ben Mallard and Henry Mock, who served as bailiffs at the trial and helped the mob inside the courtroom. The other bailiff, John G. Mitchell, was a blacksmith who lived in Statesboro. The other alleged members of the mob were men in their thirties who also lived in Statesboro and worked as skilled laborers or in white-collar occupations: a brickmason, a bookkeeper, an auditor for the railroad, and a manager at the local ice company.¹³ Except for Mallard and Deal, these were not men who had a close connection to the Hodges family or even knew them. Neither were they particularly poor or likely to have felt economically squeezed or displaced by black labor. Except for Mallard, who was struggling in tenancy on a rented farm with his mother and four siblings, all these men owned their own land or homes. Cotton prices had dropped slightly in 1904, but farmers still considered them reasonable, and people in Statesboro were generally optimistic about their economic future.¹⁴

The men who committed the lynching of Reed and Cato—whether they included these nine men or not—did so because they shared a vested interest in seeing the crime against the Hodgeses avenged. They were willing and eager to exact punitive justice themselves, as if the crime were a personal attack on them, not only as fellow residents of the county but as potential victims of what they saw as widespread, savage black criminality. As white men, they would have believed they had both a responsibility and a right to avenge such a terrible offense against their race. Many local residents also considered the law inadequate to punish such a crime, assuming that it would not give Reed and Cato what so many white citizens thought they deserved. As the Atlanta Journal wrote in defense of the lynching, “It is said by many that burning at the stake is barbarous, cruel and inhuman. Measured by the standards of law and morality, it is true, and yet there are crimes which go far beyond the law and punishments which the law is utterly incapable of administering adequately. Such a case is the murder of the Hodges family at Statesboro.”¹⁵

Still, as enraged and as fearful as they were, the people of Statesboro ac quiesced to the state's authority until the last moment. They initially held off from lynching the men and submitted to a trial. Presumably, had the judge authorized a public execution and assured the crowd that the prisoners would stay in Statesboro, the lynching would not have occurred.¹⁶ The men who burned Will Cato and Paul Reed to death did so because they believed, with outraged indignation, that the state was denying them their right to witness justice enacted, to see the “murderers are hanged high and hanged until they kick out their bloody and criminal existence between heaven and earth.” In fact, by defying the judge's orders, they were able to punish the men with a cruelty and vengeance that the state could not.

The demand for a public execution as late as 1904 was not as astonishing as it might appear. In many places in the South at the turn of the century, executions were still public affairs, drawing crowds of hundreds, if not thousands, of spectators. Legal executions had been made private in other areas of the country in the mid- to late nineteenth century as a means to impose efficiency, order, and the semblance of respectability on them. Southern states, however, tended to lag behind the North. Even when southern judges and sheriffs, concerned about the demoralizing effect of public hangings and the potential disorder of the crowd, did attempt to hold executions in private, enclosing gallows behind fences and walls, citizens often actively resisted by bribing sheriffs, climbing rooftops, and breaking down enclosures. Not incidentally, at the same time, lynchings were becoming more public, more ritualized, and more spectacular. Just as they resisted when local and state authorities prevented them from attending executions, white southerners resorted to lynching to guarantee their active involvement in and witnessing of criminal punishment, to satisfy their outrage and desire for vengeance by, as the Statesboro (Ga.) News put it, “see[ing] the thing done.” Of course, Americans in other parts of the country had similarly protested the move to private executions, and yet they did not as frequently resort to public lynchings. There were clearly other reasons that white southerners felt compelled to torture and lynch black men publicly. But their frustration that the state was interfering with their right to witness punitive justice and to participate in the retribution of a crime was undoubtedly a significant factor. As in Statesboro, lynching was commonly performed in active resistance to the encroaching power of the modern state.

In this way, although lynching was often reinforced through the use of modern technology and media, it was, as spectacle and ritual, firmly rooted in the traditional social performance of public executions. At public executions, white southerners learned what hanging a person looked like and that watching such a spectacle was socially acceptable. Lynch mobs even appropriated many rituals of public executions—the declarations of guilt, the confessions, the taking of souvenirs and photographs—to confer legitimacy on their extralegal violence. They saw themselves not as criminals or defilers of the law, as their critics saw them, but as honorable vindicators of justice and popular sovereignty, fulfilling their rights as citizens to punish crimes against their communities.¹⁷ When lynch mobs staged rituals of public executions, however, they did so in exaggerated and distorted forms, with a degree of sadism that far exceeded the most boisterous hanging-day crowd. Once mobs had wrested the power to punish from the state, they did so with a ferocious vengeance that the state could not grant.

Although the excessive brutality of many lynchings distinguished them from executions, their performative and symbolic value drew from the execution-day spectacle. To understand the significance of public executions in the South is to make sense of not only that excessive brutality but also the pleasure that so many white southerners derived from seeing it. In both executions and lynchings, spectators were central to the rituals of retributive justice that were performed. The crowds of people who gathered for execution day were present not simply as onlookers but as witnesses to the state's punishment on their behalf. Because the spectacle of hanging was meant to deter crime, it required a somber and fearful crowd of potential criminals who would identify with the condemned and tremble at his fate. But witnesses also gathered as united citizens to sanction the execution's rituals of repentance and retribution, through which the criminal was expunged and community order was restored. For these reasons, spectators at executions themselves became the objects of intense scrutiny and observation—the composition, the attitude, and the behavior of the crowd all mattered greatly.¹⁸ News accounts and legal authorities regularly expressed concern over the comportment of the crowd: Were they properly solemn? Were they too boisterous or rowdy? Were they paying attention to the condemned's final words or prayers? Spectators at lynchings held a comparable importance, especially as those witnesses came to stand as a unified community lending credence to the lynching ritual.

As with the lynching-day crowd, conceptions of the execution-day crowd were inextricable from white supremacy and its racially bound notions of moral superiority and social justice. African Americans were, as today, more likely to be sentenced to death for their crimes and, it appears, more likely to be hanged publicly for their crimes. Moreover, many southern states considered rape a capital crime well into the twentieth century, and at least two southern states specifically authorized public hangings in cases of rape. The overwhelming majority of those sentenced to die in rape cases were African American men convicted of raping white women.¹⁹ When white southerners attended an execution of a black criminal, they would have differentiated themselves both from the condemned and from any African American witnesses present, whom they saw as most needing deterrence. These white spectators would have believed they were witnessing not so much the terrible consequences of crime but an inherently savage black criminality justly punished by white authorities. As protected and guiltless witnesses—as literal extensions of the state—they could feel a communal sense of white virtue and strength, particularly in contradistinction to the moral depravity of the condemned. These narratives of black culpability and white innocence learned and witnessed at executions were carried into the practice and witnessing of lynching.

LIKE THE CITIZENS of Statesboro, Georgia, countless southern defenders of lynching saw the violence as an inevitable and justifiable substitution for capital punishment, in particular because the legal system bestowed too many rights on black criminals and offered too little respect for white victims. Certainly the state provided little recourse for black criminals in the South—they were often inadequately defended, convicted, and sentenced by all-white juries in exceptionally hasty trials, and they were more likely to be sentenced to death than were white criminals. Nevertheless, white southerners who justified lynching regularly expressed frustration with the slow, bureaucratic wheels of justice. White citizens in Statesboro, for instance, expressed distrust that the courts could satisfactorily avenge the Hodgeses’ murders, arguing that “the lawyers would get them off” or that “the case would be appealed and they would go free.” These southerners believed they could more adequately serve justice and vindicate white supremacy than could the state, which was bound by its theoretical impartiality and color blindness. Even in a criminal justice system overwhelmingly slanted to the advantage of southern whites, the modern state imposed restrictions and limits that lynch mobs certainly did not.²⁰

In the early twentieth century, many scholars and critics of lynching hoped that as the South continued to modernize its legal and social institutions and as its citizens developed greater deference toward the legal authority of the state to oversee cr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Lynching and Spectacle
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I SPECTACLE
• PART II WITNESSING
• PART III BEARING WITNESS
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX