"I Thought Things Would Be Different There": Lynching and the Black Community in Southern West Virginia, 1880-1933

West Virginia's place on the nation's map of race relations is in many respects a middle ground. Although never a major slaveholding region and without a substantial African American population, it nevertheless followed many southern racial customs. It is consequently an interesting location in which to explore race relations, particularly as manifested in its most vicious form—lynching. The case of West Virginia offers a much-needed corrective to scholarship about the Appalachian region. Over the past thirty years, scholarship has debunked the myth of Appalachia's racial homogeneity. Scholars like John Inscoe, Ronald Lewis, and Joe Trotter, to name but a few, more than adequately illustrate the diversity of a region long perceived as racially homogeneous.¹ Similarly, recent scholarship on lynching and racial violence within Appalachia has concluded that little separated the Mountain South from the Deep South; indeed one scholar most succinctly declared, "Lynching in Appalachia was simply and fundamentally . . . southern."²

While acknowledging the horrors of lynching in Appalachia, scholarship on racial violence largely overlooks the practice within West Virginia. As recently as 2002, Philip Dray concluded that "lynchings were more prevalent in the low-lying agricultural lands than in the hills; indeed they were rare among the mountain folk in Kentucky and West Virginia."³ Much of the historiography of lynching comes from sociologists, and frequently their focus has been causation: Lynching and the Law by Chadbourn, The Tragedy of Lynching by Raper, and more recently A Festival of Violence by Tolnay and Beck. Historical research has fallen into regional examinations; W. Fitzhugh Brundage's research concentrates on the New South and more localized research like Jacqueline Dowd-Hall's concentrates on specific states like Texas. Even Robert Zangrando's work The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950, although purporting to examine the national campaign, looks most closely at the southern half of the United States.⁴ Although the research has come from different perspectives, the common thread is quantity. The number of lynching victims has heretofore determined the merit of lynching research. Not coincidentally, the greatest number of lynchings took place in the southern half of the nation. That is not to say that lynchings occurred nowhere else, sociologists are quick to argue. However, that sense of place, which appears with lynching and the tendency to quantify lynching research, leaves some holes in the scholarship. Although West Virginia's total number of lynchings pales in comparison to states in the South, the Mountain State felt the qualitative and quantitative impact of the lynch mob.

The fact is that West Virginia is at once both a microcosm of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and an anomaly in the study of lynching in America. The state was at the intersection of regional geography, North and South, East and West. Increasing industrialization within the state also placed it at the crossroads of urban industry and rural agriculture. West Virginia defies the popular and scholarly ideals of states prone to lynching and the resultant measures used to combat it. The absence of Jim Crow legislation, greater access to the ballot, and increased economic opportunity within the state contradicted the demographics of a state prone to lynching activity. In 1921, West Virginia passed an anti-lynching law designed to curb the practice within its borders, while at the same time offering financial compensation for the families of lynching victims. West Virginia was ahead of the curve when the state legislature passed the Capehart Anti-Lynching Law in 1921. Although the threat of lynching loomed as large in West Virginia as it did anywhere in the United States, social conditions as a whole within the state differed markedly from those of other states. Increased social, economic, and political opportunities allowed the state's black communities to respond to the lynching crisis in ways not possible anywhere else. As Ronald Lewis states, "In southern West Virginia, blacks came closer to finding economic equality than in any other coalfield, and perhaps anywhere else, in America."⁵

In 1896, southern Redeemers solidified...