"A Benediction to the Skies": New Works on American Lynching

"And then upon the mangled frameThey piled the wood, the oil, the flame...And they raised a Sabbath song,The echo sounded wild and strong,A benediction to the skiesThat crowned the human sacrifice"

—Walter Everette Hawkins, "A Festival of Christendom" (1920)

Midway through his powerful and poetic book on lynching and the African American religious experience, black liberation theologian James H. Cone offers an eloquent reflection on Walter Everette Hawkins' poem "A Festival of Christendom." Like Hawkins, Cone captures the irony embedded in what he calls the "terror moment" of lynching and the religious meaning imposed on these rituals of violence. How could such cruelty—such "contemptible nastiness," to quote W. E. B. Du Bois—also amount to a solemn "benediction"? Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which I believe is one of the most important works on religion and race to be published in many years, explores the paradoxical connection between ritual suffering and redemption theology in American thought. He breaks new ground in the burgeoning field of lynching studies, taking readers into the heart of darkness that is lynching more poignantly than any other recent work on the subject.¹

The cottage industry of lynching studies continues to grow by leaps and bounds, as historians, psychologists, literary and social critics of one temper or another, and what are now called performance studies specialists, keep producing intricate analyses of racial violence and its impact and import in American history. In reviewing the scores of books, articles, and websites now devoted to the subject of lynching, I am reminded of Henry Adams' observation that "one sees what one brings."

Michael J. Pfeifer and Koritha Mitchell are two such scholars who take widely divergent approaches to the study of lynching. Pfeifer, a prize-winning historian and author of the much-acclaimed Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947 (2004), turns his gaze to the origins of lynching and adopts a legal and constitutional framework. He is interested in regional patterns and practices over time and with the relationship between extralegal violence and legal culture. Koritha Mitchell is a professor of African American Literature and Theater Studies who focuses more narrowly on a cluster of early twentieth-century stage dramas dealing with lynching and how African American playwrights sought to come to terms with lynching's impact on the black community in America. Of the two works at hand, in language, tone, and sensibility, Mitchell's is the more political, or politicized work, although Pfeifer is implicitly concerned with political repercussions. Both books are published by the University of Illinois Press, long established as a leading publisher of lynching scholarship.²

As its title suggests, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching is something of a prequel to Pfeifer's earlier book, Rough Justice. The careful reader will discern a series of interconnections or overlapping interests between the two studies. As in his earlier work, Pfeifer continues to refine his regional perspective on lynching and racial violence, and the phenomenon of extralegal punishment in American history. Less preoccupied with the changing patterns of crime and punishment, he is directly concerned with the social and legal context of debates over capital punishment, whether by due process or at the hands of a mob. Pfeifer identifies the tension between due process and the formal administration of justice, on the one hand, and, on the other, popular justice beyond the purview of the courts as one of the most important aspects of nineteenth-century legal culture. Therefore, "the practice [of lynching] . . . can best be understood as a specific cultural response to the ambiguities of legal change, especially concerns over the efficacy of formal criminal justice, in particular times and places" (p. 4...