Addressing Lynching in The US with The HistoryMakers
In addition to its many crimes against African-Americans, the United States has a unique tradition in the practice of racial lynchings. In the American South, notorious for its visceral violence against Black, people often committed ritualized murders of black men, women, and children in the wake of the Civil War. These killings at their core are senseless and, for many, dumbfounding. This post explores the ideology and practices of the American lynching, elucidated by the testimonies of HistoryMakers.
The lynching ritual in the United States has profound roots in evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christianity's traditions and doctrines were frequently utilized to rationalize and glorify lynchings. Lynching was viewed as God's vengeance by white southern evangelicals. Anti-lynching activists were able to draw parallels between the lynching of unarmed black males and Jesus Christ's crucifixion. The mob, on the other hand, who saw themselves as an extension of God's will, was more likely to relate the Last Judgment to the Bible. In this sense, the mob mentality validated both black people's inherent crime and demonic nature, as well as their own intrinsic purity and sainthood. This logic, however, did not apply solely to race. To buttress the premise that secularism is at odds with the Church, racially and gendered terminology was frequently used. The moral panic over secularism fueled the flames, with preachers utilizing secular language and cultural touchstones to reach out to the people. Vernon Jarrett, a newspaper columnist, television broadcaster, and radio host, was one of the country's most renowned critics of race relations and African American history. Jarrett contributed to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Defender, among other publications. He remarks on the ideological thought behind lynchings when he says, “Lynching became synonymous with pure Americanism. When you would go back and put on your World War One uniform to participate in the lynching, you were saying, ‘This is a patriotic symbolism of how I feel about our country.’ …Being oppressive against black people was a part of your religious responsibility as a Christian.” This brutal theory would go on to take numerous lives, and its justification would lead to the commodification of the murders.
The way these deaths were photographed reveals a lot about the mindset and genuine nature of lynching. Lynching photographs show that white people were filled with excitement, pride, and joyful spirits in the aftermath of lynchings. This contradicted the philosophy that Southern whites employed to explain the killings. This is particularly evident in the demeaning manner in which black individuals were lynched. It's also demonstrated by white onlookers' eagerness to stop and pose for photos, sometimes requiring the execution to be paused. Finally, the desire for white people to relive rather than commemorate the murder is evidenced by the requirement for so many of these photographs to feature a fully intact and semi-recognizable bodily form. This is supported by the fact that the body was frequently mutilated and tortured after the photograph was taken. Vernon Jarret remarks in an interview about the brutality, saying, “When I say lynching, we're not talking about somebody getting strung up stealing a horse like in a cowboy picture. I mean some brutal, sick, nasty neurotic crap, and maybe erotic, too. Stuff that they would do when they would lynch a black person; like cutting off your toes for souvenirs, the digits on your fingers. And I've heard in some instances where your genitals were preserved just to show off in some white barbershop or pool hall.” These photographs and their dissemination were intended to demonstrate white superiority over black inferiority.
However, these murders did not happen without significant pushback. The anti-lynching efforts of organizations such as the NAACP helped push the narrative of lynching to one of barbarism in the 1930s. By the conclusion of the first World War, anti-lynching sentiment had wrought national attention. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist E. R Shipp talks about her grandfather’s connection to this activism. In her HistoryMaker interview she says,
“I learned from a young man who's doing research in Atlanta [Georgia] now that my grandfather was nearly lynched at some point in early '30's . There was an incident where he supposedly was accused of being a little too friendly with white women. And he, he was set upon by a number of white males and was incarcerated for a little while for his own protection, they said…His story became one of those cases that the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] took upon itself, as it was campaigning against some of the conditions blacks were living under. For a while, one of the big causes that the NAACP was pushing was an anti-lynching bill, anti-lynching bill. And his case was somehow one of those that they were citing as a reason that the federal government needed to protect blacks.”
Southern whites hurried to adopt anti-lynching sentiment in the wake of the negative national attention. This allowed them to keep their white nationalist beliefs and activities while avoiding prosecution. By the 1930s, anti-lynching sentiment had gained political clout, and the tendency had reversed. Lynchings, on the other hand, remained a persistent source of fear and reality for African-Americans. Organizations like the NAACP exploited the already sensationalized images and films of lynching to arouse outrage in a public that might otherwise prefer to believe that lynching was a thing of the past. The national media, on the other hand, took pains to portray lynching as a moral issue for those who participated in it, rather than a racial one.
Still, The NAACP continued to advocate for anti-lynching legislation through 1952. Newspaper editor Melvin Miller was directly involved in 1952. He says, “ the NAACP’s goal when it was founded up until 1952 was to try to make lynching a federal offense because once state law was applied to the lynching, it was--an acquittal was relatively easy… the last effort I think was in 1952. I was in Washington D.C. for that…” The beleaguered efforts of black leadership wouldn’t find relief until 2022. The Emmet Till Antilynching Act went became public law in March of 2022, federally outlawing lynching in the United States.
Works Cited
Congress.gov. "H.R.55 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Emmett Till Antilynching Act." March 29, 2022. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/55.
Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. New Directions in Southern Studies. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009.
