Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida by Tameka Bradley Hobbs (review)

Time and again the American public has been moved less by moral appeals and the plight of the disempowered and more by political expediency. In the Jim Crow era, the families of lynching victims understood the difficulty of reaching the nation’s conscience, as did antilynching activists who spent decades unsuccessfully lobbying Congress to pass federal antilynching legislation. On the cusp of World War II, however, the scales of public opinion tilted, and calls to condemn lynching and prosecute lynchers finally issued from the White House, the national press, and even the editorial pages of southern newspapers.

In Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida, Tameka Bradley Hobbs argues that the geopolitical context of World War II accounts for not only the shift in public opinion on lynching but also the decline in the number of lynchings. As the United States waged a war abroad ostensibly to defeat fascism and protect democracy, more Americans came to see lynching as an embarrassing anachronism that undermined the democratic values of the United States as well as the war effort. Hobbs traces this shifting political landscape through the lynchings of four African American men and boys in Florida, all killed between 1941 and 1945: Arthur C. Williams, Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Jesse James Payne. Even in wartime, well-worn lynching tropes cropped up again—false accusations of rape, the need to keep African Americans in their “place,” and claims that the courts were too lenient on black criminals. However, with reports that Japanese and Nazi propagandists were using lynchings to expose the hypocrisy of American democracy, Florida governors grudgingly gave in to national pressure to investigate lynchings in the state. Communities where lynchings took place went through the motions of investigations, grand juries, and trials, but white juries and local residents continued to insulate negligent sheriffs and suspected lynchers from serious punishments. Rather than eliminating racialized violence against African Americans, this outside pressure drove lynching deeper into the secretive realm of private mobs and gave rise to “legal lynchings” of African Americans (p. 203).

Hobbs also provides valuable insights into the devastating impact of lynching on African American families and communities over the past seventy-five years. With so much of the literature on lynching focused on white southerners, her interviews with African American survivors provide a poignant and, at times, gut-wrenching glimpse into the intergenerational trauma of lynching. These interviews also give expression to a countermemory of lynching that challenges the tendency of white southerners to silence this history.

Hobbs’s work on Florida largely confirms what W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Jonathan Rosenberg, and others have argued regarding the domestic and foreign policy factors that caused lynching to decline after the 1920s. However, Hobbs makes these arguments without delving into what it means for a nation, founded on the principles of liberty, equality, and justice, to be guided by political expediency instead of those principles. When white shame and embarrassment rather than a commitment to justice animate social change, the underlying ideology of white supremacy remains intact. Moreover, this historical moment between 1941 and 1945 remains particularly prescient today. As the United States struggles over a spate of highly publicized police shootings involving African American victims, the unheeded lessons of the past return to haunt us, for this nation will never escape this progression from one mechanism of racial oppression to another until collectively the value of black lives and racial justice propel social change.